The BigCommerce Blog

Presentation: Bootstrapping to Seven Figures by BigCommerce Co-Founder Mitchell Harper

Published on August 19th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m big on educating people. A few weeks back I put together a presentation called “Bootstrapping to Seven Figures” which took me about a week to create.

Basically it contains the core ideas and strategies we’ve used to build our company to over 50,000 clients and high seven figures in yearly revenue. I shared my presentation with around 3,000 people on a webinar I did recently for one of our design partners and was blown away by the response – I even managed to score two marriage proposals before I was done!

Anyway, I wanted to share the exact same presentation with you, our loyal clients. If you’ve just started your business and you’re looking for a way to grow your sales to $1,000,000 within 12 months then this is it.

I’ve broken my presentation up into four videos, each of which is embedded below – the entire presentation runs for around 40 minutes. It contains absolutely no sales pitch (I HATE pitches) – just good, honest advice based on my experiences building Interspire (the parent company of BigCommerce) to what it is today with co-founder Eddie Machaalani and our awesome team.

The presentation I used in the video is also embedded at the bottom of this blog post.

Part 1 of 4:

Part 2 of 4:

Part 3 of 4:

Part 4 of 4:

The Presentation I Refer To In The Videos Above

Download it here

Get up to $100 in Google AdWords credit when you sign up for BigCommerce

Published on March 1st, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

bc-adwords-plans

Hi everyone. Over the last few weeks we’ve been working closely with Google to put together a special offer for all new and existing BigCommerce merchants. Starting today, anyone who signs up for a BigCommerce paid plan will receive up to $100 in Google AdWords credit.

Google AdWords ads promote your business alongside relevant search results on Google, right where potential customers are searching for the products you sell. There are literally millions of ecommerce stores which use Google AdWords as their online form of marketing with great success.

All existing customers will also receive an email later today containing instructions on how to redeem their Google AdWords credit as well.

So, how much Google AdWords credit will you receive?

  • Bronze merchants receive $50 Google AdWords credit
  • Silver merchants receive $50 Google AdWords credit
  • Gold merchants receive $75 Google AdWords credit
  • Platinum merchants receive $100 Google AdWords credit
  • Diamond merchants receive $100 Google AdWords credit

To learn more about Google AdWords please see this page on our web site. We’ve also updated our pricing and plans page to include details on the Google AdWords credit as well.

This is just one of the many partnerships we’ve got lined up over the coming months to help you get the most out of BigCommerce. We’ll be making some further announcement in the coming weeks. If you have any questions feel free to leave them below and I’ll be happy to help.

[Video] How to Double the Conversion Rate of Your Google AdWords Ads

Published on September 13th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

All online marketing budgets should include a significant budget for Google AdWords. If you understand how to create effective ads that attract the right audience and a high click-thru rate, you can easily generate a 100% or more return on investment for every dollar you spend. In this video I’ll share with you a formula you can use to create highly effective Google AdWords ads.

Don’t let the simplicity of the formula fool you, however. The formula has been proven by thousands of successful online marketers and works extremely well in the B2C space, so if you sell products such as t-shirts, makeup or computers primarily to non-business users from your online store then you should be able to use this formula to generate a great ROI from Google AdWords.

In the video I mention that you don’t need an SEM (Search Engine Marketing) company charging you thousands of dollars a month to create or man your Google AdWords campaigns. You can do it yourself, especially if you’re just starting out. It’s not hard, and once you learn the basics you’ll have everything you need to get started. The key is to ALWAYS monitor your ads and split test no more than two different versions of your ad at once.

You can then take the best performing ad, tweak it and test those tweaks. This way you can slowly but surely increase your conversion rate over the period of a few short months. It’s worked for us countless times and I know it will work for you, so give it a try.

This video is the third of many which we’ll be publishing on our new YouTube guru channel, BigCommerceDotCom. Check it out and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss future videos.