The new site is called ChiliFries.com and it was created to help you become an expert at Internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and e-commerce!

Our new website is updated regularly with fresh content and will teach you:

• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Social media marketing
• E-Commerce strategy
• On-site merchandising
• Public relations
• Conversion optimization

… and lots of other tips, tricks, strategies and ideas which you can use to either start a new e-commerce business or grow your existing e-commerce business faster than you thought possible.

View the press release here

P.S. Really important – make sure you like ChiliFries on Facebook and follow ChiliFries on Twitter so you don’t miss a post!

P.P.S. Become part of the ChiliFries community by leaving comments on a few posts you like. It’s fast, easy and is a great way to meet like-minded business owners.

We already run regular webinars that teach the basics of e-commerce and BigCommerce, but today I’m happy to announce that we’re adding a third series to our already popular webinars.

Lead by certified BigCommerce design partner and e-commerce experts Madwire Media, How to Use Facebook, eBay, SEO and Free Tools to Skyrocket Your Traffic is our latest webinar series and the first webinar kicks off at 1pm CDT on Thursday, June 9th (see this in your time zone).

So, what will you learn during this free webinar? Here’s a taste:

• Easy SEO strategies to dominate your competition on Google
• How to use Facebook to drive traffic and sales
• How to generate and submit your sitemap to Google
• How to push your products to eBay as auction or BIN
• How to drive huge traffic using Google Product feeds
• How to improve your SERPs using Google and Bing webmaster tools
• How to track your marketing using Google Analytics
• Tools to increase your search engine ranking and traffic

Click here to register (limited spots available)

The webinar was presented by JB Kellogg from BigCommerce certified design partner Madwire Media. There was a great Q&A session at the end of the webinar and JB came up with a list of those questions along with the answers that were shared on the webinar. I’ve included them below just in case you don’t have time to watch the webinar or simply prefer text to video.

I get good traffic, but how do you recommend I get more product reviews?

We recommend you contact previous customers by phone, email, or feedback survey to capture their product review and evaluation. Encourage them to post reviews on your store or ask for permission to post their review for them. Provide incentives for them to post reviews such as 10% savings for example.

Is the tab product page layout better then the non-tab for SEO or does it matter?

It does not matter. Search engines like Google can crawl the tabbed and non-tabbed layouts just the same. Therefore, the importance is in the content, not the layout. Go with whatever you feel looks best.

Does it make a difference to SEO if I use blog.storename.com for my blog or storename.com/blog for the URL?

There are arguments both ways for what is best. We have used both options for many websites we actively search engine optimize and have not seen that one way is better than the other. We’ve seen rankings increase with blog.storename.com and storename.com/blog. The important thing is building good, unique, consistent, content. Search engines will credit you for that content and links whether you use a sub-domain or sub-directory. With BigCommerce you can use the built-in “news” feature as your blog to keep it as a sub-directory, or install WordPress and host it separately on a sub-domain. Both ways work well for SEO.

Do image heavy designs hurt you for conversions and SEO?

No. That fact that a design is image heavy does not matter. What is more important is what the images are and if good call-to-actions are on the images. The Images need to “export dreams” to the viewer. They should reduce your bounce rate and increase your click-through rate. If your bounce rate is high, you need to change your images and try some different call-to-actions. Keep in mind, you’ll need some text content on your site for SEO. It does not need to be much, but should include your best keywords.

That Google ecommerce tracking is great, how can I set that up on my store?

It is not difficult, but there are some more steps involved then when you setup the standard Google analytics code. Here are some directions.

What was that address you recommended to check keyword traffic you gave?

Google Traffic Estimator

How can I watch the webinar again, will I be able to replay it?

You can re-watch it as much as you’d like here.

What was that webinar reference page link again?

It was this page.

Is Emedramps.com a custom store?

Yes. Although it’s not extensively custom designed. The product page layout is the most customized layout on that store. To see more custom store designs you can browse our portfolio.

How do I add promotional banners to my store like Emed has?

Here is a video that talks about adding banners to your store.

What is a good conversion rate percentage?

Anything over 3% would be considered very good. Average is around 1-2%.

Can I have a store on BigCommerce that has downloadable products?

Yes. Here is a BigCommerce support page about that.

What is the most important thing for conversions?

Driving the right kind of traffic and store design. The design has to include the important things we’re talking about today (such as trust and credibility) at minimum in order for you to be truly successful.

How do I get an SSL on my site?

Here is a support page that covers topics about SSL and BigCommerce.

Who do I call for a free design mockup to see what can help me get better conversions?

Call anybody here at Madwire Media on 888-872-3734.

Does it make a big difference how I use H1, H2, H3, etc. on my site for SEO?

Not huge no. But ideally you’d use your best keywords in a H1 or H2 heading, followed by H3, H4, and so on. The most important thing is to have relevant and unique content on your website. Don’t spam or stuff keywords.

My website does not have very much content on the homepage, just images, should I had content for SEO?

Yes. It does not need to be much, just a short paragraph is fine, but make sure it has your best keywords.

I like what you said about title tags, I need to do that but am wondering what keywords to use, can you help?

Yes we can. We can do a free SEO/keyword report for you. Visit our website to learn more.

Do you know how to do a competitor analysis to see what keywords they are using?

Yes we do. We can do a free competitive analysis report for you. Visit our website to learn more.

Can you tell what my competitor’s conversion rate is?

Based on our completive analysis we can give you a pretty good estimate.

What is considered a good bounce rate?

Typically below 30-40% is good. It sometimes depends on the target market however.

Can you tell me if my store passes the 2.5 second rule?

Sure. We can review your store and provide feedback.

Is BigCommerce the best shopping cart to use to do everything you’re talking about here?

Yes. We are about the most credible source you can ask. As a large design, development and eCommerce marketing company we’ve used many different e-commerce platforms and BigCommerce is by far the best. In fact, it’s not only our number one solution now, it’s our only solution. Watch our BigCommerce customer story video here.

How often should I blog to build content and what should I blog about?

Blog as much as you can. Make sure to blog about what your store specialized in selling. Research your competitors and see how much they are blogging…try to outdo them! Try to write well for your customers and the search engines.

Does product video help increase conversions significantly?

Yes it does. Product videos are very effective. We see a 30-400% increase in conversions with products that have professional product videos. The product video is basically your 24/7 sales person giving your product’s best sales pitch and showing the best images. Here are some product videos we’ve created recently (see the top of the page).

What are the best kinds of product videos for conversions?

Short (30 seconds or less), to the point, highlighting the best product features and images/video with a great voice over talent giving your best 30 second sales pitch!

I’m in Japan/London/Sydney/etc, should I do something different for SEO?

It depends, do you want to target a US market or the Japanese/London/Sydney market – or both. Depending on what market you want to target the strategy would need to be different. Feel free to ask us (Madwire Media) for advice.

How do I offer different languages for products in my BigCommerce store?

We suggest using the Google translator tool for basic translations. Go here to learn more:.

A few weeks ago I announced that Madwire Media, one of our certified design partners, would be working with us to launch a new webinar series called “eCommerce Tips for Displaying Trust, Effective Store Design and Better SEO”. Well, the first webinar took place last Wednesday and was a massive success – over 600 people attended the webinar!

For those of you who couldn’t make the live broadcast, we’ve created an archived version of the webinar which you can watch whenever you like. Just click the image at the top of this post to watch it – and make sure you share the webinar on Facebook or Twitter because it contains a lot of FANTASTIC information to help you drive more traffic and get more sales from your BigCommerce store.

Overview:

We already run regular webinars that teach the basics of e-commerce and BigCommerce, but today I’m happy to announce that we’re adding a second series to our already popular webinars.

Lead by certified BigCommerce design partner and e-commerce experts Madwire Media, eCommerce Tips for Displaying Trust, Effective Store Design and Better SEO is our latest webinar series and the first webinar kicks off at 1pm CST on April 27th (see this in your time zone).

I’ve been lucky enough to watch a test-run of this webinar and the content is excellent, so this is definitely one webinar you don’t want to miss. We were very selective in choosing the right partner to run our new webinars, and JB and his team at Madwire have done a phenomenal job of organizing the webinar based around their real world experience and customer case studies.

So, what will you learn? Here’s a taste:

• Easy SEO strategies to dominate your competition on Google
• How and why to display trust and credibility indicators
• Effective store design and layout principles and examples
• How to choose an effective domain name that increases sales
• The effects a professional logo can have on your conversion rate
• The importance of product reviews and how they factor into the sales process
• How to design an effective home page layout for maximum conversions
• Real world strategies to lower your visitor bounce rate
• Tools to increase your search engine ranking and traffic

Click here to register (limited spots available)

Your BigCommerce store may be converting very well, but then again, it could be better. How can you test what’s working and what’s not? You can do the well known A/B split testing and multivariate testing with Google Website Optimizer for free. Split testing in this way is built right into BigCommerce for all product pages, single VS multi-page checkout, etc.

However, just like configuring an analytics program to track every detail you want, it takes time and a little effort. If you’re short on time and have just a bit of cash, you can let one or more of the website usability applications below do the testing for you.

When it comes to purchasing products and services, customers will often display different decision-making behaviors that you won’t understand until you test. In addition, since social networks are providing a discussion platform for customers, you’ll want to know what aspects of your site and your social activity are influencing customers’ purchase decisions.

Tools to Improve Your Website Traffic and Conversion Rate

Here are 13 tools I’ve researched to help you test your website navigation, design, sales funnel or path, or use them to test your Facebook fan page as well. There are more tools out there, but for this review, if they didn’t list their pricing, I omitted them – but the major players are here.

1. Feedback Army – $15 for 10 responses. Built on Amazon Mechanical Turk. One of the easiest and most affordable ways to do a quick test of your site.
2. Five Second Test – has a free community option where you earn points by participating and can use those when you need testing. Otherwise, starts at $20/mo for 100 responses.
3. Concept Feedback – also takes a community approach and starts at $99, but I didn’t find out what that entails.
4. Uservoice – does feedback for your site and also helpdesk work. Pricing starts at $19/mo for feedback and some full service options.
5. Usertesting – cuts right to the chase with their website tagline “the fastest, cheapest way to find out why users leave your website.” For $39, you get feedback, but the sweet part is it comes as a video (and written report, too) with the user talking you through what they are doing on your site.
6. Userfly – has a free plan that lets you take the system for a real test drive. You see videos of real users navigating your site, every click, every mouse movement. Great customer testimonials and endorsements. Paid plans start at $10/mo.
7. Feng-gui – has a unique payment model — pay per image. They assume you know what you want to test and so have a low-cost attention analysis approach. Offers an easy way to test an ad or a particular section of your site. Pricing starts at $25, which is $5 for 5 images.
8. Crazyegg – is one of the so-called 800 pound gorillas in this space. They are best known for their eye-tracking heatmaps so you can see where your visitors are looking, then clicking. Very sophisticated and plans starting at $9/mo.
9. Clicktale – offers a limited free plan, then jumps to $99/mo, but don’t rule them out yet. They offer a very sophisticated tool set and it might be a perfect fit for your store and email efforts. They have heatmaps and conversion funnels to help your sales.
10. Gazehawk – is another eyetracking, heatmap technology. It keeps track of where your users look on your website which allows you to test landing pages, registration/checkout flows, homepages. Starts at $495 for a 10-participant study.
11. ReQtest – is more for software developers testing their user interface and experience. It helps users to do web-based testing and bug reporting on the cloud. Free to $30 per user.
12. Unbounce – lets you create, publish and optimize landing pages for testing purposes. Starts at $25 and has a free 30-day trial.
13. Optimizely – allows users to improve their website through A/B testing. Starts at $19. Think of it as a more sophisticated Google Website Optimizer.

With affordable and easy tools like these to test almost every aspect of a customer’s experience with your website, there’s no reason not to give them a try. I’ve used several of these and will continue to leverage them. You need every advantage in keeping a customer’s attention in today’s hyper-connected busy, busy world. Start testing and start attracting more visitors, more sales, and greater profits!

A Few Follow Up Notes

I don’t include Amazon Mechanical Turk in this list above, but it’s a good tool if you want to crowdsource your feedback and manage it all yourself. It takes a bit more effort, though. Feedback Army is built on Turk and is very affordable, so I’d recommend it.

We completed a project for Sales Rescue Team last year and it’s a beautiful way to get feedback, in near real time, from a few people to hundreds. However, managing it manually is a real hassle so I would recommend you use Smartsheet – an online project management tool – to manage Turk because they have a sweet spreadsheet interface that’s easy to use.

One last thing about design and testing. In general, whatever you want to be clicked should be put it in the upper left corner. You can put it elsewhere, but so much research data, heatmaps, user studies, etc show people read in an F pattern and they scan the top two horizontal lines of the letter F first, then go down the left side. BUT, they start in the upper left corner. Hardly anyone puts their form or call to action right there. Depending on your design, another location might work, but if you’re using any traditional layouts, then I would test the upper left quadrant.

I’m not a fan of the so-called squeeze page, where you give users/readers no choice but the back button to click out, but simplifying your copy and design to make it really clear is the main goal of what I’m trying share here.

So in a nutshell, use the services above to figure out what visitors are doing and do more to keep them happy. Common sense isn’t always common, so do these simple things and you’ll increase traffic to your site because people will have a good experience and tell others. Simple, but true.

Well, the holiday season is almost upon us. As a way to say “thank you” for reading our blog (which now has over 50,000 readers a month – woohoo!) I wanted to give you a 27 page ebook that’s been 6 months in the making.

In Guerilla Marketing With Social Media I share the 7 social media strategies we’ve used to grow our business by 480% in the last 3 years (proof). And because these are all guerilla marketing strategies, you’ll learn how to reach a huge number of people for a very, very low cost.

This has been one of the most successful guides we’ve ever produced – it’s already been downloaded well over 5,000 times by people on our email list (sorry, they got it first!) so I’m confident you’ll love it.

Whether you want to increase sales, attract thousands of Facebook followers, launch a contest, partner with the big wigs in your industry or turn one-time customers into raving fans, it’s all here in this 27 page ebook.

Click here to download our free guide: Guerilla Marketing With Social Media

BigCommerce client La Grande Dame featured in The New York Times today

The New York Times is running a before-and-after case study for La Grande Dame, which is a BigCommerce store owned by Catherine Wood Hill selling plus-sized clothing for women. The article shares some interesting before-and-after details about Catherine’s online store, including:

• She switched from a custom-built solution to BigCommerce
• Page load times dropped from 2.7 seconds to just a few milliseconds
• Traffic has more than doubled from 300 to 626 unique visits per day
• Loves BigCommerce’s SuperZoom photo zoom feature
• Sales of $16,000 in September without using Google AdWords
• Predicting $20,000 in sales for December

The stand out piece from the article is definitely the greater than 100% increase in traffic since switching to BigCommerce:

While it’s too early to assess the new site’s impact on sales, traffic has increased sharply. From Oct.  1 to Nov. 1, Ms. Hill said, La Grande Dame averaged 300 unique visitors and 370 total visitors a day. In the first six days following the redesign, she reports a daily average of 626 unique visitors and 689 total visitors.

As we all know, traffic can make or break an online store. Although we can’t promise switching to BigCommerce will give you a 100% increase in traffic, there are so many testimonials saying the same thing, so it’s definitely something to consider if you’re not happy with your current shopping cart software.

Here’s the full article if you’d like to read it.

1. Presentation: Bootstrapping to Seven Figures – This is a presentation I gave just once to about 3,000 business owners via webinar. In the presentation I run through the guerilla marketing and positioning strategies we’ve used to grow our e-commerce platform, BigCommerce, to just under 10,000 clients without any funding or debt in just over a year.
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2. How to: Promote Your Business on TV In Front of Thousands of Potential Customers for $100 With Google TV Ads – This post is even more relevant now that Google TVs are starting to hit the market. Right from your Google AdWords account you can create a TV advertising campaign for around $100 and start reaching potential customers in under 24 hours. This post explains how.
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3. [Video] How to Spy on Your Competitors Keywords, Traffic & Visitor Demographics -  In this video I show you how you can use two free tools to see how much traffic your competitors get, which keywords they rank for on Google and also the age, income, location, etc of their visitors. You can then use this information in your SEO, SEM and marketing campaigns.
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4. Innovation in the Cloud – 10 Game Changing SaaS Applications – In this post I talk about 10 innovative software applications which are making the move from desktop to cloud easier and faster for consumers and businesses.
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5. How to Write a Profitable Returns Policy – In this post I look at a few things which should be included in your returns policy. Returns policies are extremely important when selling online. If you sell expensive products or if you’re a new store looking to build up your customer base quickly, the best thing you can offer new customers is a lenient returns policy.
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6. Would You Spend 10 Cents to Almost Guarantee Repeat Customers? – By thinking outside the box it’s easy to impress the hell out of new customers. In this post I share one real world example that a crafty Australian tea company is using to get the word out about their brand – at weekend markets of all places.
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7. Head to Head: Product Page Design From Top Online Retailers – In this post I share, compare and discuss screenshots of product pages from sixteen of the top online retailers. You will of course notice a lot of similarities on their product pages, but I’m sure you’ll also notice a lot of small differences. All of the best practices implemented by these top online retailers can be found in BigCommerce.
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8. [Video] 6 Tips for Designing a Beautiful Online Store – In this video I share six tips to help you design a beautiful online store which will attract customers and increase your conversion rate. If you’re not a designer but are thinking about hiring an ecommerce website designer then this video will help you make the decision.
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9. [Video] How to Build a Loyal Fan Base Who Buy From You on Facebook – In this video I explain why setting up a Facebook fan page for your business is so important. I show you the steps involved and discuss how Facebook’s viral effect can attract thousands of people to your business for no cost at all. I also discuss SocialShop, our free Facebook application.
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10. How to Track Visitors and Sales From Facebook and Twitter Using Google Analytics – Using Google Analytics to track visitors can be tricky. In this post I teach you how to track visitors from Facebook and Twitter in a simple, step-by-step fashion, complete with screenshots.

Our blog is now one of the 10 most popular e-commerce blogs in the world, so thank you to everyone who keeps coming back and also to everyone who takes the time to leave a comment. 927 comments were posted on the blog in 2010! If you’re new to the blog then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, fan us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss a post!

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