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xlecommerce, Author at XLE - FFL ECommerce, Firearms Ecommerce, FFL Cart, Automated Distributor, Dropshipping

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Get Visual

If you are producing content for your company site or social networks, note that you need to be producing more than just well-written articles. Generally speaking, you have less than thirty seconds (sometimes much less) to wow a first-time visitor into staying on your site. While they might just be eager to glean information on your business, especially if you have a brick and mortar location, you need to add visual content and other appealing things to get them to stay on your site.

Recent studies have shown that people are less and less likely to read the information on your site and more likely to click on a photo or video that explains the same information in a visual manner. Even better, using images or videos will get your site a better share rate. People are more likely to repost about your page if they can pin an image on Pinterest or share the image on Facebook or Twitter.

Don’t be intimidated by the idea of having to shoot photos or videos, as there is plenty of editing software that makes it easy for someone with basic computer skills to have nicely crafted visuals on their site. If you are unsure of what sort of visual content you should be creating, look at the sites of similar companies to glean ideas. If you are a retailer, it is easy to make information videos about product and current events that are industry specific. Instructional videos are also popular and will get you higher rankings. Google loves content that is user-friendly, so think of content that would be useful or interesting to your average clientele.

Google+ Hangouts: Why you Need Them.

While most people have a basic understanding of social media — many of those choosing to use the dominating power — Facebook, the word of Google+ is slowly but surely spreading through the masses. Google+ offers users an all-encompassing experience that seems seamless and omniscient.  The interface is simple, sleek and efficient. While it appears that Google+ is only denting the traffic of Facebook users (only measuring to about 13% of the number of users compare to Facebook), it is now seeing the kind of results one would expect from a Google product.

One of the main reasons why Google+ will soon capture a wide audience is the hangout feature. This tool allows you to have video conferences with people in your circles, providing a service that many users adore. Families can convene online from coast to coast with ease. Shop owners can give presentations to customers outside of store hours, increasing brand loyalty and doing so in a way that doesn’t conflict with their busy schedules. Hangouts even allow users to share documents with Google Docs right within the confines of the chat.

If you have not yet developed a Google+ page for your business or even for yourself personally, you’re going to want to. Integrate this feature with your website and utilize the tools to build a brand image with Google. You can also integrate it fluidly with any other Google features that you are currently using. Google Places has even earned a spot, now being referred to as Google+ Local. It will be a way of sharing complete information about your company to the public, allowing them to share, review, rate and interact on a personal level with their networks.

Father’s Day: Opportunity for Online Growth

Get your business ready for  Father’s Day spending.

With over 70 million dads in America, there are plenty of reasons to boost your site this Father’s Day and offer promotions that your customers won’t be able to resist. It is projected this year that more families will be spending money on Father’s Day as it has taken a hit these past few years during the economic recession. For those of you who are not the best at creating specials or haven’t given thought to a sales campaign for this Father’s Day, here are five fun ways to get your customer’s involved this Father’s Day:

  1. Have people upload pictures of themselves with their dads to your Facebook or Twitter page to get a discount at your online store. Customers will be interacting with your social media pages and shopping your retail site.
  2. Bundle a few different packages on your eCommerce site to make shopping easy. Give a discount when customers buy the bundle and give them great, fun names. You could have one with a firearm, ammo and a holster and call it the “For When your Daughter Starts Dating” package.
  3. Do a free giveaway with a gift card purchase. Find an item that is overstocked and use it as a purchase with purchase when anyone gets a gift card for dad. More importantly, most of the time people will find something more expensive than their gift card and your sales will be even higher.
  4. Create a new look for the special, giving customers a fresh outlook on your site. This can be done by uploading new pictures to your homepage or creating a new banner. Through image association, you can train your customers to know when there is a sale and build a sense of urgency – they need to buy now because there is a sale.
  5. Pair up with another local business, maybe a restaurant or a movie theater, and build a package that could be “Dad’s Night Out.” This is something that sites like Groupon and Living Social will be doing, so you can get ahead of the curve by doing a local event or even partnering with a similar website.

How to Tell if Your Content is Appropriate.

It is always difficult to establish what content is appropriate for your audience when you are posting on a company page. As times progress, censorship has evolved and many businesses struggle to identify what should be shared with customers and what needs to be flagged as “inappropriate.” While there are definitely some things that should stay far away from the office, there is also a great trend in businesses getting personal. Pictures of staff members that aren’t stuffy headshots are a big hit with customers — just check out our employee profiles. It lets customers relate to the people on the other end of the phone and develop a stronger bond – this will ultimately lead to customer loyalty and increased use of your products/services.

The important thing to know is how to maintain your professional identity while seeping your personal life into your branding. This question of brand identity has many different answers and it mainly depends on how you interact with your audience and what you expect out of this newly redefined relationship. For some companies it is an easy decision to become more personal and to bring in that humanization and humor to the workplace – mostly these are companies that can develop a personality without damaging professional relationships.

One company that completely embraces this and has since its inception in 1992 is Moosejaw. Just check out the Madness tab on their site. It includes such features as, “Crying Tomatoes,” and,”Your Weird Dreams.” Moosejaw has a lively character that it shares splendidly with customers through humor, and this has built the brand a very strong and loyal base.

However, Moosejaw is a clothing retailer and distributor that has a lot of freedom in their marketing and branding. What about the companies that have to present themselves in a professional manner, such as a financial planning organization or a law firm? These places are generally seen in a professional light and could lose credibility in their professions by sharing too much personality.

Thankfully there is a way to find balance within extremely professional environments. A great example of a professional company that also offers personality to their clients is the Slalom Consulting Group. Take a look at their About Us page. Look how they incorporate photos of their staff that make their staff seem approachable, friendly and knowledgeable. They offer up faces and bios that we can relate to and that make us trust more readily than pictures of suits and board rooms.

Websites for Beginners: Planting the Seed

Lately, we’ve been blogging about subjects that are for businesses that already have developed a website and a web presence, but today we want to reach out to those who may not have a website for their business and are looking for tips on how to get started. Realistically, if you want to be successful in this day and age, you need to have a website. This is common knowledge for a lot of people, but there are those who may not be tech savvy and don’t understand the vital importance of having a strong web presence.

The internet is daunting to people who haven’t been immersed in it since they were in grade school. It has this dark side that people assume is scary and full of spam and a lot of times it can intimidate people. While there is a lot of time and effort that goes into developing software and websites, and there are certainly measures that need to be taken to make your website safe, don’t shy away from the idea if you are interested in starting a website for your business. Here are three quick tips to getting started on a website for your business:

  1. Think about what you need your website to do for you. Are you looking to sell products on your site or do you just need an information page? What different sections and pages do you want on your site? Some people prefer to have different pages with information about the business; others have testimonials or pages about specific services. These are all things you need to keep in mind when you start developing a plan for your new website.
  2. Think about the content that will be on your site. Who is going to be writing the content for your site? Are you going to do it yourself or hire a professional? Do you want to put pictures on your site? If your answer is yes, you should plan out what you want to put on the site, how often you’ll be updating that content, etc. It’s vital to keep your website current so make sure you have a plan of attack that you can fall back on when scheduling content updates. What sales do you want to run? Are you going to promote special events?
  3. Dedicate the time necessary to run the site. If you are serious about having an eCommerce site, it is vital to set aside the time you are going to need in order to update the site and monitor your orders. Once the shell of your site is built, you have to add to it. Look at a website as a virtual garden. It needs some sun, water and Scott’s Turf Builder every now and then. Rabbits (spam) will try to eat your vegetables. You need to protect your website from the dangers while maintaining relevant content. If you don’t have time to do all of this and more, don’t worry! That is what companies like us are for.

Building a Social Media Following

One of the biggest problems that many small businesses have with social media is gaining the loyalty of fans. “How do I get more likes on Facebook?” That’s a question we hear on a daily basis. There are plenty of intense conversations on the relationships built on social media networks and how people interact with businesses through them, but creating a fan base is easily done. We are going to break it up into two strategies: the conventional method and the unconventional method.

There are obviously tried and tested tricks that companies use every day to get themselves more friends.  Here are three basics that most people use when first trying to gain a bigger following:

  1. Put buttons on your website that link directly to your Facebook, Twitter, etc. pages. These will help guide customers who are already visiting your webpage to your social media pages. This is also an industry standard that most successful businesses are already utilizing, so you want to do this to keep yourself current.
  2. Another great tool is putting these buttons right into the signature on your e-mail, especially if your job title includes anything like the phrases “marketing” or “public relations.” This will give a direct link to people who you are in touch with on a regular basis, including current and prospective clients.
  3.  There is one tactic that is so simple, if you aren’t already using it you probably don’t even have a Facebook page. Get everyone in your office and five of their friends to like your page. It’s called a social network for a reason! This is a digital word-of-mouth that can result in business and financial growth. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who could benefit from using your products and/or services.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, here are some outside-the-box tips for the creative company that isn’t afraid to use new tactics to score new followers. We want to profile three tips that you can accomplish easily, not ways to go on extensive social media campaigns. These ideas are simple to implement but you’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t use them:

  1. Make an aesthetic presence with your social media pages. Use graphic design to create beautiful pages on Tiwtter, Facebook, YouTube etc. that match your brand and give fans something cool to look at. Update your cover photo on your Facebook timeline so that it is creative, interesting and will inspire people who visit your page to like it. This is a great way to be visually stimulating for your audience, and when your page looks unique, you have a better chance of capturing the attention of your clientele. Check out these creative timeline covers and these Twitter pages.
  2. Interact with people by having a contest or poll. Ask your followers questions and give them a forum to share a little bit of themselves. There is nothing more exciting for fans than the ability to have their 15 minutes of fame with one of their favorite brands.Look at the way Realtree Outdoors® uses their Facebook page and brand identity to excite fans and build a stronger following.
  3. Add a touch of personality to your pages by posting photos and videos of the staff or company events. It’s always a great way to increase your following and followers love when there is a way for them to directly relate to your brand. It also shows that you are interacting on a personal level, building the trust that a consumer will feel with your brand. We recently had a day when we brought our dogs to the office and we posted pictures that got a good response from our fans.

Employee Profile: Michael Sell

Yes, that is his real name. Michael Sell, or Mike as he’s referred to around the office, is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Outdoor Business Network, using his knowledge of the outdoor industry to better serve our customers. Chances are, if an outdoor sport involves a helmet, a flotation device or protective earmuffs, Mike has tried it at one time or another.

Including snowboarding, mountain biking and crossfit training, Mike has begun shooting in tournaments for the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA). After working for the security industry at the Fermi II Nuclear Power Station, he decided to do IDPA to keep his perishable shooting skills fresh. He placed 5th out of 12 in the first IDPA tournament he competed in. Mike last competed on May 6th at the Brooklyn Sportsman Club in Brooklyn, MI where he placed 7th out of 17.

More than competing or indulging in outdoor sports, Mike enjoys spending time with his 7-year-old daughter, Aubrie, who is just finishing up the first grade. Aubrie and Mike go sailing and fishing together, but her favorite thing to do with her dad is watch cartoons. Fortunately, though, Aubrie loves all of the outdoor sports that Mike does and is eager to try them all, too. She wants her very own pink cricket, which couldn’t make Mike happier. “I started shooting when I was seven or eight,” Mike said, “and I was hunting by myself when I was nine, toting around a shotgun in the woods.”

Mike smiled as he grabbed his phone to show a series of photos and videos of Aubrie. There are some of them together, making silly faces at the camera, while others show Aubrie passed out on the couch after a long day of playing outside or sailing with her dad. The best were of Aubrie and her pet snake, a nine foot red tail boa named Beautiful. “Of course she named the snake herself,” Mike laughed as he flipped through more photos.

Although Mike has a strong love for almost every outdoor activity and is excited to share those activities with his daughter, his career has been built on a dedication and passion for sales. With 10 years experience directly in sales, Mike has finally found a way to fuse his hobbies and his career. “I love working with numbers,” said Mike, “seeing where there is room for improvement. I like to visualize my goals through numbers and push myself to meet and exceed those goals.”

While Mike does participate in many extreme sporting events, he does have a soft side. Guitar is one of his only indoor hobbies, though he would describe himself as a hack at best. Mike is also an expert on a sewing machine and even makes his own Halloween costumes nearly every year, although it’s hard to picture him at the task. He has a good sense of humor, always ready to laugh with others and at times, at himself. This year, he will be going as Mr. Clean for Halloween.

Social Media Schedule

By now, most of you have (hopefully) developed social media pages for your site — whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Keep yourself from falling into the dark abyss of businesses that develop social media pages and then forget to post, leaving a bleak and dismal page that makes it look like you have no friends, no followers and no hope.

Post on those pages!

There is nothing worse than a growing company, trying to form a following that completely gives up on itself before it’s had a chance to develop lasting relationships with those people who are genuinely interested in their company. The fans that you make on Facebook, those eager for content that follow you on Twitter and scroll through your updates on their smartphones every morning – those are the people that are going to use your products and give you return visits on your webpage.  It’s not only sloppy, but unprofessional to create pages and not post content. These are free tools for you to use when reaching out to your audience. If you don’t have time to post or are having trouble thinking of what to say, hire someone to do it for you!

If you are plan to do your own posts and videos, the best way to ensure that you don’t fall asleep behind the social media wheel is to develop a schedule and stick to it. Maybe you post every morning at 10am after you get into the office and get settled in for the day or perhaps you want to post something newsworthy on Mondays and something entertaining on Fridays. Whatever your posting schedule is, make sure that you have mapped out a plan that will give you a support system for managing these pages.

Something else to consider is creating a vault for your posts, writing them in advance and having them at your fingertips when you want to post them. This is helpful for a lot of busy small business owners who can use their free time to plan ahead so that they aren’t tied down during the work week with content development.

Finally, make your smartphone your personal portal to posting. There are plenty of apps out there designed to make updating content a mobile venture. If you have to travel, post from your phone so that you can be on the move and not miss your posting schedule. Keep at it, stick to your schedule and there will be content there for fans when they find you.

Building a Strong Brand

It seems whenever you search for SEO or SEM, there are those key phrases that pop up like “brand identity” and “brand loyalty,” but what do those phrases actually mean? How can you take your business to the next level by developing that strong brand and utilizing it in internet marketing? Here are three tips to help get you started on your re-branding project or your first branding attempt:

Find your target audience

Don’t think in terms of, “My target audience is everyone! Everyone will love my product and I want to advertise to the general public.” It’s great to have goals for yourself and to strive to become the next amazon.com or Coca-Cola, but another part of being a business owner is basing your goals in reality. If you want your audience to be the entire world, you can get in line behind every other business who wants a household name but maybe hasn’t put enough thought into what target audience they are going to market to. Your target audience should be people who are going to buy your product and will be receptive your re-branding campaign. This will also help later on because you will be able to develop keywords specifically for your niche audience, as opposed to fighting for high bid keywords that are expensive and flooded with competition.

Think to yourself, “Who would read a blog about my products?,” or “Who would want a shirt with my logo on it?” Developing a strong brand encompasses all of these things because it creates a cohesive force that your intended public can get behind. For small businesses, it is important to develop a target audience that is realistic and well-planned. This is crucial to building up your brand image.

Set visual goals and boundaries

Set a clear path for your brand image visually. You want to focus your energy on a strong sense of color coordination and imagery, as opposed to having too many ideas and too many different themes. Budding businesses can either get too crazy with their design or they stay so conservative that they end up looking plain and generic. Do some research on what similar sites are doing and pick another color group or theme that will make you stand out.

Once you have developed your color story and design work, stick with it! There’s nothing worse that you can do for your young business than build an amazing visual brand and lose consistency with it. Give people something they can recognize and relate to when they are visiting your site. Remember that you can and should hire a design expert. We can all whip up a logo in Photoshop, but there is a reason people get paid to do design work. They are the pros and can do the work much more effectively and quickly than if you tried to do it by yourself. It can be the difference between a brand-worthy logo and clip art.

Be well-rounded

You’ve got your target audience and a strong visual presence, now it’s time to build a well-rounded campaign. Does your brand use SEO? Are you building links or using PPC to back up this new identity you’ve created for yourself? Develop a strategy for getting your brand from your website to the people who will shop with you. Create a Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch with your fan-base. Maybe you have viral videos that will add to your brand by giving it a face and humanizing it. People love to relate to their favorite brands, so give them someone or something to relate to. A well-rounded brand will tackle this by conveying one message across different mediums. Create a blog space for yourself; give the customer content that they will find relevant. When they can trust you for good content, they will revisit your site again and again.

Mobile Sites: Breaking out of the Computer Box

Getting your business onto the internet is old news. We all know that it is important to have  brand representation online with social media, full functioning websites and plenty of user-friendly content. However, internet forecasting shows that in addition to your website, you need to be putting time and energy into a mobile site as well. Statistics show that smartphones are the number one source for all Facebook users, instead of computers. If Facebook, the largest social network on the face of the earth, is experiencing a trend in mobile usage, the rest of the internet is soon to follow.

The main problem with Facebook mobile is that the app does not include any of the ads that the full site does. So your business had better have a page if they want to be seen by smartphone Facebook users. And wouldn’t it be great if someone on their smartphone was looking at your Facebook page and there was a link to your site and it was mobile? You could streamline the experience for the user in a way that would encourage them to visit your site more frequently and spend more time there when they do visit.

Before you start a mobile site, there are some things you should consider:

1. What’s the point?

Your mobile site should have a focus and an objective. Are you trying to make the customer experience better when people try to purchase from your site? Do you want to streamline the ordering process so it is accessible from a smartphone? Think of some of the things you want to achieve by having a set plan. Here is an example of how ticketsnow.com used a mobile site to their advantage.

2. Who is your audience?

Is the mobile site for your customer? Is it for someone who is already loyal to the company, or are you creating something that will help attract new business? Developing a target audience for your site is crucial. Does your target demographic use smartphones? Keep all of these things in mind when designing and implementing the site. Remember, you want it to be easy to use.

3. How can you make it fresh?

An important thing to remember when creating your mobile site is that it should reflect the branding properties of your existing site. The mobile site is an extension of the internet image that you have already created for yourself. However, mobile sites should give a fresh, simple adaptation, showing your versatility to customers who already are familiar with your brand. Make it something that is easily identifiable as being related to your site, but also take that branding to the next level by creating a cohesive subsidiary to your pre-existing image. Google offers some insights and best practices here.