Shopster's Dropshippers, eCommerce, and Selling Online Blog

10 Tips to Increase Sales via Twitter

Over the years, social networks have evolved from being a personal communication platform to a business tool. These have helped companies reach an untapped global market. The key to a successful social media marketing campaign is knowing how to use it properly.

In this blog post, we will be exploring the use of Twitter to help you increase sales. Here are our top 10 tips:

1. Use it to share useful content everyday. The character limitation -- in this case a max of 140 -- will teach you the art of saying more with less. Stick with what’s relevant to your market and be direct to the point about what you want to say to them.
2. Participate in conversations about your brand. With social media, managing your brand/product’s reputation online has become infinitely easier. Use the search functionality to find your brand name and see what people are saying about it. Be proactive and thank those that promote your brand. This is also a good venue to hear and interact with your detractors as well.
3. Conduct live Q&A sessions. Take the interaction further by scheduling tweet sessions to answer any questions your followers may have.  Creating buzz about the scheduled event beforehand is an additional way to get your brand noticed. 
4. Link your Twitter profile from your contact page. Twitter is a great way to communicate with a market that no longer believes in opt-in email newsletters. Give them other options by providing updates via twitter.
5. Post exclusive promos and special deals via Twitter. Give your followers a reason to continue following you. Having some unique tweets will encourage more people to keep checking back on your profile. “Exclusive” is the keyword for this tactic.
6. Reuse and repurpose testimonials on Twitter. Getting lots of love from customers lately? Give it more mileage by re-tweeting it on your profile. You could also ask permission from the owner to use it on your site’s testimonial page.
7. Announce your Facebook page. The fun part about social media marketing is synergy. Create an integrated approach to online advertising by linking and cross-marketing your social media profiles with each other. Tweet about your new Facebook page and tell people about your Twitter profile in Facebook.
8. Let the world know about your new products. There are no rules about direct advertising on Twitter. We don’t mean you should spam your followers on a daily basis, rather, use this tool to announce anything new about your company – including new products.
9. Use the direct messages function for a proper introduction. You can set up your account such that you receive an email every time you have a new follower. Engage them right away by sending a direct message that tells them who you, what your business is about and encouraging them to visit your website for more information.
10. Add a dash of personal touch. Let’s face it, being all about business can get boring. Post twitpics and make your tweets more engaging. This doesn’t only keep your followers interested, it also humanizes your brand.

That’s it folks. For more tips and tricks for increasing sales and advertising online, please stay tuned to ShopTalk.

Creating an effective eBay Listing with Shopster's Listing Manager for eBay

Hi everyone, today's blog is going to be a bit different. Previously we've talked about building your online store and some things you can do to get it going. But once your online store is firing on all cylinders, you may want to consider getting into dropshipping and selling on eBay.

Listing on eBay is a very lucrative revenue stream for those that are selling online. If you already have a presence in an online store and want to expand your sales through dropshipping, eBay is the perfect place to go. Although there are several advantages to listing onto eBay, one of the biggest ones, in my opinion, is that eBay already has the traffic and market penetration you're after. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to eBay daily to see if they can score a deal on an item they've been looking for. But how can you catch their eye?

The first important piece is the price. I know that when I go to eBay and take a look at products, I'm usually sorting by the price. When using the Listing Manager for eBay in your Shopster account you can set your starting price of your auction to whatever you want it to be. To play on the safe side though you should set your starting price at the Network Price of the product - this is what you'll be paying the supplying merchant for the product. This way any bid that you receive on the item is profit. Once you have your pricing set, you need to make sure your listing's title is clear and attractive enough to catch your customer's eye.

Having an effective title that catches your customer's eye and lets them know what you're selling will make their job as a buyer a lot easier. There are a number of things that you can do to make sure that your eBay listing title is descriptive enough to catch your customer's eye. Here are just a few things that eBay recommends you do:

• Include the item's brand name
• State the condition of them item - New? Used? Reconditioned?
• Include any specific attributes of the item - color, size, etc.

Once you have an effective title for your eBay listing and your customer's clicked to view the auction, they'll want to read over the description. Another advantage of using Shopster' Listing Manager for eBay is that this already included in your listing when you make it! That's right, whatever is in the description for the product you're listing is already included, no work needed on your end. eBay has a full help page on how to write a good title and description and includes some examples of a good title and description. Click here. Make sure to read that over as well. Once you've drawn the customer in with your listing, they'll make their bid and you're on your way to a sale.

Happy Selling!

Search engine optimize your online store (Part 3 of 3)

Anybody who has done any SEO work will know that link building can be painfully time consuming and at times very unrewarding. Links are the foundation to any search engine optimization strategy. If you don’t have them, you don’t stand a chance getting your website to appear in most search results. However if you are consistent with building links, it will eventually pay off with free traffic and sales.

There’s a laundry list of different things you can do to get links back to your website, however for the purposes of this post I’ll go through some of my favorites. If you’re in search of more ideas there is a fabulous post on seobook.com that goes through 101 do’s and don’t of link building. You can read the post here: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml.

The first thing I always like to do when starting an SEO project is to do a simple Google search on the keywords I am targeting. You’ll often find a handful of websites that offer information and links about your topic. Dig into these websites and see if there is somewhere you can request a link, and if there isn’t, you may want to contact the webmaster and request a link through an email. The goal is to get your website on as many relevant websites as possible so don’t be shy.

Secondly, get listed in free directories. You’ll need to sift through a few directories that claim to be free and are not, but it’s worth the time. To get started try dmoz.org – they are free and a relatively powerful link but be warned you may not always get on. Whatever you do, try and avoid paying for any directory listings unless you know they are relevant and can drive quality traffic.

Find out where your competitors are getting their links and copy them. Anyone doing SEO work should know and use the following technique, it will help you find a lot of links over time. To do a reverse link look-up in Yahoo or Google just enter the following code in the search box of that search engine:

For Yahoo
linkdomain:www.anysite.com

For Google
link:www.anysite.com

Go through all the sites that have links to your competitor’s website and search for ways to get your website listed too. There are several free backward link checking tools out there, so be sure to take advantage of them.

Start a blog and create good content. Depending on the person this tactic can either be the easiest or most difficult to do. If you’re passionate about your products and like to write, then a blog is the right thing for you. Write about your products, share what you know, and then share your blog with others. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can get links and more importantly traffic to your site with a few good articles. 

My last tip for you is to think local! If you have a business, then there are several directories and community websites out there that help to promote their local businesses. Spend some time to find these sites and get your business listed. Not only will this help build links, you may get a few customers out of it too.

Remember that the most important part of link building is to be consistent. Always try new things and look for ways to get links back to your website. If you do the work and put in the time, then you’ll soon be rewarded with a solid foundation for an online business.

Happy Selling!

Search engine optimize your online store (Part 2 of 3)

Now that you have chosen some keywords for your online store, let’s discuss some of the tools Shopster provides to help you in your search engine optimization efforts. It’s important to remember that SEO is a combination of picking the right keywords, good content, placing your content in the right areas, and links from the right sites. These tools will help you on your way but they are just a piece of the SEO puzzle. Let’s get started.

I’m sure many of you have heard the term meta tags before. Meta tags have been around for a very long time, and they are used to help search engines determine what keywords to look out for. Even though they do not have the authority they used to, you should use unique meta tags whenever possible in your pages.

If you are optimizing your Shopster store, you should start by adding meta content on your store pages. Each page you create has the option for you to enter your own unique meta content, which includes both meta keywords and a meta description. To see how to add meta content on a store page, follow this example:

1. Click the “Store” tab
2. Click the “Store Pages” link
3. Click on the “Edit Homepage” link
4. Click the “Customizations” tab which appears in the body of the page
5. Click the “Customize this setting” box under the Meta Tags header on this page

Once the grey boxes appear white you will be able to add your meta content. For keywords you will need to separate each phrase with a comma, where as the description should be a paragraph of content.

A powerful feature of Shopster is that unique meta tags can be set for every page of your online store. I recommend that you start by targeting the top level pages and then working your way down to each individual product page. Here’s where you can go to customize meta content on category and product pages:

Category pages:

1. Click on the “Inventory” tab
2. Click on “Categories”
3. Add or edit a category
4. Click the “Customizations” tab

Product pages:

1. Click on the “Inventory” tab
2. Click on “Manage” link
3. Click on the name of the product to edit
4. Click on the far right tab labeled “Customizations”

Within each page where you add meta content, you’ll notice an area below it to add a “Title”. This is where you can customize the title for each page of your site. Strategically include SEO keywords into the title of each page, this will help with your rankings on search results. If you’re unsure of where the title is displayed on your webpage, it is what appears on the top of the browser. For example if you use Internet Explorer you will see the title on the top blue bar. Give it a try.

Changing the “URL Name” is the final step in this week’s post. The url name is the url that a page is hosted on, and much like the page title and meta content, by including keywords into your url it can help with your search engine rankings.

When you are creating a url name there are a couple things to keep in mind, the first is to keep it relatively short, and the second is to not change your url too often. The reason you want to keep the url relatively static is in the case where a page is getting traffic from a search engine and you suddenly change the url. Anyone clicking on that link will be driven to a non-existent webpage and you instantly lose all that traffic until the search engine re-crawls your website. My recommendation is to change your urls early in the process of optimizing your site, but once you have changed them do your best to avoid changing them again.

Changing your url names can be done in the same general area as where you would add your meta content. The only difference is that you will need to switch out of the “customizations” tab to the “general” tab. You should see an area labeled “URL Name”.

Happy selling!

Search engine optimize your online store (Part 1 of 3)

With the New Year now upon us and the holiday madness behind us, this is a great time to start thinking about how to drive more traffic to your store. So for the next 3 weeks I will be posting some tips on how you can help drive more traffic to your store by optimizing your site for natural search engine traffic. We’ll start by discussing how to find the right keywords and fitting them into your site. In the following weeks we will detail using the Shopster tools for SEO and link building strategies.

Choosing the right keywords for search engine optimization is critical to any successful online business. If you pick keywords that customers don’t use, then it will likely result in little traffic. On the flip side, if you choose keywords which are too broad and highly competitive, your website may never appear in search results, thus resulting in little traffic. So when you are choosing your keywords, be sure to spend the time to do your research and to create a strategy before doing any optimization. It will save you a lot of time and grief in the long run.

If you’re just starting off with your SEO efforts for your online store, picking keywords may seem like a daunting task but it’s really not that bad. Here are some tips to help you get going:

Create a list with the following:

1. Your top selling products 
2. The categories of the different products you sell (eg. Electronics, fragrances)
3. Other keywords that may be associated to your products (eg. Wii accessories, anything pink, rock music, Davidoff perfume store)

Take your list and insert them into a keyword research tool for additional keyword ideas. I like using Google’s tool but there are several free ones out there.

1. Google’s keyword research tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. This tool will provide you with search volume and the amount of competition for that keyword. Assume that if the “advertiser competition” is high then the natural search competition will be high as well.

Now you should have a long list of keywords to choose from. So the next step is to decide on what keywords to focus on. I normally recommend that you start by focusing on 3-5 keywords that you will optimize for your ENTIRE site. You should also have 10 additional keywords that you optimize for intermittently on different pages. As an example, if I had a laptop store here’s a possible list of keywords:

Top 5 keywords

1. cheap laptops online
2. laptop parts and accessories
3. buy laptops online
4. laptop deals
5. cool laptop bags

10 additional keywords

1. Asus laptop deals
2. Acer laptop deals
3. Laptop store California
4. Ladies laptop bags
5. Laptop backpacks
6. Discount laptops
7. 17 inch laptop bags
8. notebook computer deals
9. cheapest laptops
10. 15 inch Samsung laptop

When you review the list above you’ll notice that the top 5 keywords I chose are relatively broad but they are keyword phrases that could have a significant amount of traffic. My list of 10 other keywords is much more specific and even though they may not have the search volume as my top 5, in return they will likely be easier to get my store to appear in search results.

Once you have finalized your list it’s time to start optimizing your site with your keywords. With your top 5 keywords you want to ensure that they are in as many pages as possible. The other key is to get those keywords into “header tags” whenever possible, as this will indicate to the search engine that the keyword is truly relevant.

With your 10 additional keywords, focus these keywords in a few pages within your site. Here’s a hint; a great place to insert content is within your product descriptions and titles, however be careful to avoid spamming and distorting your core message.

I won’t go into a lot of detail on SEO copywriting since there are hundreds of sites out there with great articles and tips. It’s highly recommended that you understand the fundamentals but more importantly just give it a try and you may realize that it’s really not that hard. Check out some of my favorite SEO reference webites:

1. http://searchenginewatch.com/
2. http://www.webmasterworld.com/  
3. http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/category/search-engine-optimization/

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for part 2 where we will discuss the different Shopster search engine optimization tools for your online store.