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What To Know Before Setting Up WooCommerce

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In my last blog post, I went over how to use the popular ecommerce platform Shopify. Today, we’ll focus on another popular ecommerce tool used by millions of online stores: WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin used to power a large portion of the ecommerce industry. It can be easily applied to any WordPress website.

Why Should I Use WooCommerce?

One thing that sets WooCommerce apart from platforms like Shopify is that it’s completely open source. This means that you have as much control over the site as you please. In this case, with great freedom comes great opportunity — you can design your site any way you think would best appeal to your customers. Apart from web design, you also have control over most of the ecommerce process, from the kind of products you sell to shipping, and then to payment and checkout. This allows for a good amount of optimization on your part.

How To Create a WooCommerce Store

In order to take your first step on your ecommerce journey, you have to download and install the WooCommerce plugin. You should be able to do this from your WordPress dashboard. Then, run the WooCommerce Setup Wizard, which will help you build the basic framework of your site.

From this point forward, it’s up to you to manage your site’s settings. You have power over things from your default currency to the logistics of your checkout page. You can also choose from WooCommerce’s huge selection of themes for your site in order to build an attractive store for your future customers.

WooCommerce’s Product Options

With some ecommerce platforms, you’re only able to sell physical goods. This isn’t the case with WooCommerce. With this plugin, you can sell anything you put your mind to. Things like downloads, access codes and services can all be distributed through WooCommerce, on top of good old physical products. This is another example of what makes this plugin so open-ended. No matter what your specialty is, WooCommerce will help you take it online!

Once you choose what to sell, you must then make sure that the product pages are as helpful and informative as possible. The more product information you give customers, the more likely they’ll be sure whether or not they want to make a purchase. More information also makes your store look more credible.

Adding Additional Content

Like any other website, it’s always a good idea to provide your users with rich content when it comes to ecommerce. Things like product reviews, case studies, blog posts and more all help to enhance the user experience for your online store. After all, 82% of consumers have a more positive view of a brand after reading its custom content. From an SEO perspective, it will also increase your search engine visibility, therefore bringing in more potential customers.

Best WooCommerce Plugins To Start With

For those of you who have less experience with web design, WooCommerce’s freedom may be frightening. Never fear! There are plenty of plugins available that make setup manageable for anybody regardless of experience.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
This plugin helps the user find exactly what they are looking for with a handy search bar at the top of the page. Reducing the time it takes for the customer to find what they want leads to more sales!

WooCommerce Checkout Manager
Checkout Manager allows you to play around with the layout of your Checkout page. Having a Checkout page that is as easy as possible to maneuver will reflect well on your conversion numbers.

Stripe Payment Gateway
Stripe is another way to streamline your checkout page. It does so by allowing users to pay on your site instead of being redirected to a different one, e.g PayPal. You’d be surprised how finicky users can be, and keeping them on your site throughout the payment process will make it more likely that they stay focused on making a purchase.

Dynamic Pricing and Discounts by ELEX
This plugin will allow you more creativity with the pricing of your items. Discounts based on many different factors are enabled by this plugin, which will help you increase your sales. You’re also able to implement Buy One, Get One Free deals.

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Many of the ecommerce stores you have visited probably had some sort of wishlist feature. This is a great thing to implement in your own store. It gives people who don’t want to make purchases immediately a reason to come back once they’ve made up their mind. With the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, they can also share this list with family and friends for holidays or birthdays.

WooCommerce Currency Switcher
If you plan on selling your products globally, the WooCommerce Currency Switcher is a must-have plugin for your site. It allows your international customers to easily switch between currencies. It even calculates the conversion rate so they know exactly what they’re spending.

WooMarketing Bundle
In ecommerce, marketing is one of the most important areas you have to consider if you want to make sales. The Woomarketing Bundle is a plugin developed by the WooCommerce team that gives you control over things like email marketing and remarketing.

Conclusion

In closing, WooCommerce is a great way to sell your products and services online no matter who you are. It grants you the freedom to go in whichever direction you want with your online store and can be finely tuned to get the best conversion rates possible. With a quality product and a quality site, you’ll be making money in no time!

If you have further questions about WooCommerce or need help developing your ecommerce store, contact us or leave a comment below!

The 5 Questions Everybody’s Asking About Shopify

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Increased internet access means one thing for your business: it’s easier than ever to make money online. A variety of ecommerce platforms are now available to connect merchants with potential customers. Popular choices include WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and X-Cart, but which one is the best for you?

The most popular ecommerce platform on the Internet is Shopify. Shopify is great if you’re just starting out in ecommerce. The platform makes setting up your online store simple and painless. With Shopify, anybody can become successful selling products online. Here you can find the answers to some of the most common questions people have about Shopify.

Shopify

How Shopify Works

Unlike other retailers, the Shopify merchant (you) doesn’t need to have their own inventory. Instead, you’re able to buy a product from another retailer after the customer places an order for it. This is a model called drop-shipping. This is great if you are starting out with little in terms of money or products. The retailer ships the products to the customer without you ever coming in contact with them. Shopify then pays you the difference.

What if you already have an existing line of products you want to sell? Great! Shopify can still work for you. Also, if you’re worrying whether or not the platform is secure, worry no longer. Shopify uses the most advanced security features in the industry, meaning yours and your customers’ money is safe. Shopify is a fantastic platform for getting a website up and running to give your business an online presence.

What To Sell On Shopify

The most important decision you will make for your Shopify store is picking a product to sell online. If you already have products, you can use what you know about your business and transfer it to ecommerce. If you’re going with the drop-shipping model, we recommend choosing a specific niche. For example, sell men’s golf clothing instead of all kinds of men’s clothing. This will keep your store from being buried under all the others selling broad categories of products.

How To Make Money On Shopify

You need to take the different products and prices of your competitors into account when running your ecommerce store. You should also put your best foot forward in terms of marketing. This is in order to attract enough clicks and impressions to keep your sales numbers up. Social media, SEO and Google Ads are all good ideas in terms of marketing since competition in ecommerce is high.

Make Money on Shopify

How To Set Up A Shopify Store

The Shopify platform makes it very easy and intuitive to start building your store. After creating your Shopify admin account, the first thing you need to do is start adding products. You add a product by going to the Products page, clicking “Add Product,” and entering a title and description.

Once all your products are added, you then need to pick a theme for your site. Pick a theme that you think best represents what you’re selling. For example, you don’t want to use a black-on-black theme to sell flower seeds. Finally, you must choose a URL that your customers can reach your store from.

DaBrian Marketing recommends that you use words in your URL that are relevant to what you are selling. If you want to sell flower seeds you should include either “flower” or “seeds” in your URL. This is so customers who click on a link to your site know what they’re getting into. There are detailed instructions on all of these steps on the Shopify website.

From this point, it’s all about organizing your ecommerce store for the customer. You should make your site as easy to use as possible so customers can find exactly what they’re looking for. This is an extremely important aspect of your online store. You’ll miss out on a ton of sales if the customer can’t find what they’re looking for.

You also have to think about making your website mobile responsive. A mobile-friendly design is extremely important in today’s market. Nowadays more people surf the Internet on their phones than on a desktop! Making your site the best it can be requires knowledge of web development and design. You can find free tips and resources for these areas in other DaBrian blog posts such as our recent articles on WordPress and Content Management Systems.

How To Find Shopify Stores

For the potential customers reading this, there are countless stores on the Shopify platform that sell a variety of products. You can find anything from clothing, watches, and eyewear to teas and electronics — and that’s just for starters. There are plenty of blog posts and resources available to help you find the perfect store for your needs. If you want to open your own store, it’s also a good idea to check out others that are successful. Shopify even gives out awards for the stores it considers the best in specific categories.

In conclusion, Shopify is a great option for people new to ecommerce. It’s simple, effective, and popular with people looking to shop online. With good marketing and strategy, you too can become an ecommerce success story!

Still have questions about Shopify or ecommerce as a whole? Contact us today or leave a comment below!

DaBrian Marketing Visits South Mountain YMCA

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The DaBrian Marketing team recently had the privilege of visiting South Mountain YMCA for a day of team-building activities. Operating as an independent YMCA Camp and Conference Center since 1983, The South Mountain YMCA Camps have been providing youth recreational and educational programs for over 60 years.

South Mountain YMCA Reinholds PA

The YMCA serves over 8,500 individuals annually with participants predominantly from the local area and surrounding communities. Their mission is to provide a camping experience as well as educational and other programs that build personal leadership, character and life skills while developing caring, honesty, respect and responsibility in young people, families and communities.

The beautiful 600 acre landscape of the South Mountain YMCA delivered a picturesque setting for a day of team building activities. Typical team building programs include a high ropes course, climbing tower, zip-line, and a low ropes course. Traditional programs can be expanded around a team-building goal.

Most of our staff conquered the climbing tower and enjoyed the zip-line trip back to ground-zero. But for those scared of heights another adventure awaited: Paintball. Because what better way to show your coworkers you appreciate them than to shoot them with a paintball!? Thankfully, South Mountain Adventures provide modified versions of paintball guns which pack a lesser punch; making this a safe and enjoyable time for all.

After a quick training session on the equipment, we split into two teams and developed our strategies. The red team was victorious almost every match, largely because the blue team was saddled with agency owner, Danny Laws.

South Mountain YMCA Reinholds PA

There are so many valuable reasons for a business to hold team building events or activities. Not only do they give your staff a break from the usual grind, but team building events can have serious business and personal impacts. If you’re looking for something special to do with your team the South Mountain YMCA is an excellent choice. Whether your team would enjoy paintball like DaBrian Marketing, the rock climbing wall, or a leisurely hike, there is something for everyone at South Mountain.

South Mountain will work with you to plan an event that your whole team can participate in and will remember for years. For more information contact Greg McCrohan at 610-670-2267, ext. 250, or by emailing gmccrohan@smymca.org.

3 Web Design Essentials for Business Owners

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A good web design is essential to the success of any business. Business Owners and executives have many choices but limited information to make the best decision. The average lifespan of a website is about 3-5 years so you’ll be making this decision often. Here are 3 ways to break down your next web design project:

Invest in Your Web Design based on Needs & Goals

The initial investment for a new website will range from an estimated $3,000 to $20,000.  It’s just a matter of getting the features and functionality that you need for your business.  The list of options for your web design project included:

  • Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Web Design: WIX & Squarespace are famous examples of a DIY website.  It will cost you about $15 per month for a domain and access to easy to use software to build the website yourself.  It will require your time to create and launch the website.
  • Customize Web Design: A custom web design project usually requires that you hire a freelancer or ad agency with the expertise to make recommendations as well as differentiate your business from the competition. They are often compensated based on design skills, technical skills, time, and cost. WordPress & Magento are popular platforms for custom web development with an hourly rate ranging from $50-$250.
  • Ecommerce Web Design:  Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, and Shopify are a few popular examples of customizable ecommerce platforms.  The cost of the platform start as low as $9 per month and some of the ecommerce platforms take a transaction fee (1-3%).  Additional functionality sometimes requires the purchase of apps.

Most of these options include responsive websites and support mobile-friendly websites. Consider your businesses users and covers all devices, views, and resolutions that are most common.  Don’t confuse a responsive site with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is built on top of existing web technologies to enable blazing-fast page rendering and content delivery.  The implementation of AMP often requires customization and additional time for programming which will impact the cost of your web design project.

web design essentials reading pa

Limit Security Risks with Good Website Hosting Services  

Building your new website in the best environment and protecting is many cases is an afterthought. You need the necessary storage and security to support your website features, functionality, and volume of users on the website.  It’s not a one size fit all scenarios. There are 3 common types of hosting environments:

  • Shared Website Hosting: Your website is located on the same server as hundreds of other websites.  You can have it for as cheap as $2/month with the average cost in the $5-$10/month range.
  • Private Website Hosting: A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is still a shared environment and is usually limited to 10-20 websites per server. Price ranges from $25-$250 per monthly
  • Dedicated Hosting: You have a server all for yourself.  Prices start at $50/month and go all the way up to $500+/month.

Hosting environments may include the cost of daily backups, SSL certificate, Content Delivery Network (CDN), staging or testing environment, free migration,  and more. Based on your business needs, some of these features are more important than others so consider the quality and limitations such as visitors per month or bandwidth of the additional features associated with your hosting service.

Plan for Website Maintenance: Hourly vs. Plans

The website maintenance can be separate from hosting services and after the website has been launched to the public.  Your website will no doubt need to be updated, change graphics, photos, text, and the code. There are 2 standard approaches to website maintenance:

  • Hourly Rate (“Pay as You Go”): the maintenance is charged at an hourly rate and can range from $100-$300.  We charge only per quota (capped every 15 minutes), but this is not the case for every web design agency. Pay as You Go website maintenance clients generally are less of a priority than fixed cost website maintenance plan clients.
  • Web Support Plans (Fixed Cost Plans):  are usually more economical because they are for a prepaid block of hours.  The fixed cost web support plans are often discounted by 5-20% off the hourly rate. There is usually a service level agreement that states the how long it will take to implement your requested changes (48 hours).

When evaluating your website maintenance options, consider what’s included in the web support plan vs. pay as you go.  Some web maintenance and support plans are limited to content, images, etc. while hourly rate changes usually apply to a longer range of these such as landing page creation, email subscription implementation, etc.

Don’t think your business is covering the 3 web design essentials, give us a call for a free consultation. 

What to Look for in Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

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In the age of digital marketing, it’s hard to know where to begin or even the different avenues you can take to market your business online. In most cases, digital marketing requires businesses to hire specialists in all areas of digital marketing including PPC, SEO, Social Media, Graphic Design, and Programming, just to name a few. This process can not only be time-consuming for you but costly. By selecting the right digital marketing agency, you can not only cut down on in-house costs of hiring and maintaining staff, but you will be working with experts who stay up to date on the latest developments in the digital world.

So you’re ready to start looking into agencies, but not quite sure what to look for. Here are a couple tips in order to help you select the right one for your business.

Selecting the Right Digital Marketing Agency for You:

You might think that hiring the right agency will strictly depend on performance-based work and the culture of the company doesn’t matter, right? Wrong! Before selecting the right agency, it is important to meet with them and get a feel for their company’s culture. Make sure that it aligns with yours. Ask to meet or speak with the team members that will be working on your account to get a sense of their background and that their vision aligns with what you want. They must take your company’s culture, values and mission seriously.

Figure Out What Kind of Client You Are

A good digital marketing agency will understand each client is different and has different approaches to their marketing and goals. An agency will tailor a marketing campaign that is catered towards your business but first, figure out what kind of client you are and want to be.

“Do It All” Client– Once you have chosen the right agency, your motto is, “Just get it done”. You want all the work done by your agency with little input.

“Do It My Way” Client– These clients have a definite vision of what they want and are hiring an agency to deliver those visions. They are less interested in feedback or collaborating.

Collaborators– These clients want an agency that will sit down with them and strategize the best approach to reach their marketing goals and conversions. The agency and your business will go back and forth to collaborate the best strategy for your business.

Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

Do Your Homework!

If you have never worked with a digital marketing agency, you will want to make sure you do your homework and learn a few things about them. There are many digital marketing agencies out there that will promise their clients the world, and deliver lackluster results. While most businesses are not like this, there are some things to be cautious of when researching a potential agency. To make sure you are hiring the most reliable agency, there are a couple things you can do:

  • Be cautious of hiring overseas agencies
  • Hiring the cheapest agency isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes the cheapest equates to low-quality services
  • Look up agencies on the Better Business Bureau
  • Reach out to clients in a potential agency’s portfolio and ask questions about their service
  • Check their credibility: Do they work with similar industries as yours? Do they have an eye-catching website?
  • Request case studies: Ask to see specific examples of how they have helped their current or past clients achieve success. What did they do to help their clients reach their goals? What steps did they take? What were the results?

Make a List of What You Want

Every client wants something different out of their marketing agency. make a list of must-haves when hiring an agency and follow some of these guidelines when doing your research. There are many different tools a company needs to be successful, but online marketing is definitely the most effective.

To learn more about what DaBrian Marketing can do for your business, schedule an appointment today with our marketing consultant!

Increase Your Business’ Brand Awareness With SEO

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You have a great business that does fantastic work and offers quality products or services. So, why don’t more people know about you? Why isn’t your phone ringing off the hook and your email full? You have a website, that’s enough, right (it’s not)?

In order to increase your business’ brand awareness online, you need to be investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to a study by MarketingDive, 82% of participating marketers see SEO becoming more effective and 42% of this group stated its effectiveness is increasing significantly. This means that other businesses will be devoting more efforts towards SEO, which only stiffens the competition.

Build your business’ brand awareness and outperform your competitors online by utilizing the SEO tactics listed below.

1. Get In Front Of Your Audience With the Right Content

Unless you’re a large national brand, like Walmart® (if so, why are you reading this?), most people aren’t searching directly for your brand. Rather, they are typing in product/service related keywords.

To ensure your business pops up front and center amongst your competitors, you need to optimize your content to include the keywords and verbiage that your target audience and industry uses.

In addition to including the most relevant, trending, and traffic driving keywords, you also need to be cognizant of the forms of content you’re producing. Is your audience more susceptible to read blogs, articles, and white papers? Or, are they a younger, more visual audience who prefer videos and infographics?

By creating the appropriate content in the form most suited for your audience, users will be more likely to find and share your content. Thus, increasing the digital exposure your business receives.

2. Dominate the Local Market With Local SEO

For over a decade, Google and other major search engines have been placing a heavy emphasis on the importance of locality. Like your business, search engines also have a product and service, and their goal is to provide the most relevant and useful information to their users. While there are hundreds of factors that influence their results, the location has a massive impact, especially in regards to business-related searches.

To enhance your business’ local performance, there are a few tactics you’ll need to pursue:

Optimizing Your Site Locally

  • Have your name, address, & phone number (NAP) consistent throughout the site.
  • Embed Google Maps on your contact page.
  • Develop localized content.
  • Link to local partnerships, memberships, and affiliations.

Being Listed, Active, and Optimized on Popular Local Platforms

Many of these platforms (like Google, Facebook, and Yelp) have a review functionality. Meaning, customers can leave reviews about your business directly on their platform for the public to see. By owning these accounts, you are able to clearly see what people are saying. This allows you to get in front of any potential negative situations that may occur.

By being on top of things, you have the opportunity to improve your business based upon feedback, and resolve the situation. Showing that you’re listening to your consumers and taking action will actually help improve your brand’s online public perception.

According to a study by Moz, online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions. Being uninformed of your online reputation can potentially spell disaster for your business.

3. Build Links Through Local Influencers

Link building, or link earning, is the process of obtaining backlinks from other websites that lead back to your website. While many owners may not see the value or understand fully the impact link building has, it is a hugely important component of a local seo strategy.

To improve your business’ brand awareness in your local market, you should target the following sites in terms of link acquisition:

  • Local Business Directories
  • Local Chambers
  • Local Businesses
  • Local News Stations
  • Local Bloggers/Social Influencers

Being listed on these sites will send local signals to search engines and place your website in front of your local audience.

Build Your Brand Organically

Increasing your brand awareness through SEO can take some time, but it’s well worth it. By following all of the steps and tactics mentioned above, you’ll set the foundation for your business to flourish digitally within your target market.

Ready to improve your brand awareness online through SEO? Schedule a FREE consultation today!

By: David McDowell