shrinkingviolet

I love design. I love the sauciness and audacity of new media artists. Keep watching these ones; it’s worth it.

The folks at Giant Ant Media develop some of the coolest advertising and informational design products I have had the pleasure to watch on TV, and their website does not disappoint. This website communicates the philosophy and production values of Giant Ant Media in such a design appropriate environment; a real pleasure to surf and navigate, and all of the videos are stellar. (Also, I love the little detail of the off-kilter electrical outlet at the bottom left.)

You can learn a lot from what cutting edge new media artists are doing these days. I learned that video can be concise and informative while still being entertaining, which is saying something. Thanks for the inspiration, Giant Ant!

Keeping Online Customer Interactions Customer Friendly

6 Apr

Understanding how your online interactions with customers appear from a customer point of view is integral to operating a business online. As a business grows, it is easy to get lost in the minutia of the daily operations of your business, and to seek solutions that make the delivery of goods to your customers easier for you. Often what this means is that processes become more automated, and the businesses become less connected with the day-to-day interactions with paying customers. This can lead to snafus like the one I experienced the other day.

I purchased an e-book the other day in the interest of having the book immediately, so that I would have the book to read over the weekend. Internet shopping has become a major part of how we purchase small consumer goods in our household, and I can confidently say that I can generally navigate various payment gateways and e-commerce platforms without batting an eye. Sadly, this interaction did not work out quite the way I had hoped.

The book was available in multiple formats on Peachpit.com – I decided to order the book as a digital download. I have ordered e-books from various services including Amazon and Kobo in the past, and on the whole I would say I was pleased with how the purchase process went, and the ease of access to my downloaded materials. Not so with Peachpit. After being required to create an account to complete the transaction, I received and email confirmation from Peachpit Press, from a peachpit.com email address. So far so good. I processed my order using Paypal as my payment option, because of the buyers protection that they offer.

Now here’s where the transaction went off the rails. Upon being forwarded to Paypal, I was informed the I was about to process a transaction with Pearson Education, or pearsoned.com. ‘Huh’ I said to myself. ‘I guess PeachPit and Pearson are affiliated in some way. I better check that out to make sure I am not being scammed.’ I opened a new window in my browser, and went to the Peachpit website, and then to the about section. ‘Cool – it looks like Peachpit is owned by Pearson. Right-o. Carry on.’ So I continued with the transaction.

I received the payment confirmation from Paypal. And then I waited. I answered some emails. I ate some dinner. I emailed the email address on the payment confirmation for pearsoned.com, and got no response from it.

I searched my email for the title of the the book, and low and behold, after my order was processed by Pearsoned.com using Paypal, another email had arrived from Informit.com with the subject line: ‘Thank You For Your Order’, which I had not seen hidden among all of my other emails, as I was looking for an email from Peachpit.com or Pearsoned.com

This email included a download link; I thought ‘Geez, well that was annoying. Interactions on a single order from 3 different websites. Glad to be downloading it now though.’ And then I went to open the downloaded file. Now before I had purchased the downloaded the file, I had read the information under About Adobe DRM Books, which you can read here:

Requires the free Adobe® Reader® software.

Download after purchase.

Before downloading this DRM-encrypted Adobe® Reader® PDF file, be sure to:

• Install Adobe Reader 6.x, 7.x, or the free Adobe Digital Editions software on your machine. Adobe Reader and Adobe Digital Editions software only works for Macintosh and Windows. The Linux and Unix versions of Adobe Reader do not have the plug-ins required to decrypt the eBook.
• Activate the DRM through the Adobe Reader software or at Adobe’s DRM Activator site.
• Follow the procedures as specified by Adobe.

Visit our eBook FAQ page for more information.

I have Adobe Reader installed, so I thought ‘Great, I already have that sofware. And since the download is a PDF, I will be able to transfer it to my iPhone and use the PDF reader I have installed there.’  I was unpleasantly surprised by the following:

• The format of the download was not a PDF, but rather an ACSM file, which I hadn’t come across before.
• I could not open the file using Adobe Reader 7, in spite of what it said.

I went back to the Peachpit site, and using the Contact Us form, I submitted an inquiry about the file. I waited. I found them on Twitter. I tweeted them, and they asked me to direct message them with my email address so that they could help me.

It is not possible to direct message (DM) someone on twitter who is not following you; I let them know this and waited, and they did eventually follow me so that I could DM them my email address and get the matter resolved. All in all, it took 2 days to figure it all out, but what I did discover is:

• Adobe DRM files require Adobe Digital Editions, a completely separate program from Adobe Reader.
• Adobe DRM files are not currently usable on iPhones or any device other than your computer
• I should have bought the hard copy. From someone else.

I hope that Peachpit/Pearson/Informit/Whoever the heck they are clean up their customer experience for future users. They just lost a potential repeat customer, not because they didn’t respond, but because:

• The product did not work as expected. I expected a PDF that I could read with Adobe Reader, and I didn’t get that.
• Their messages to me were confused because they were coming from 3 different companies, rather than a single, recognizable brand.
• I was given the chance to become frustrated, and was not able to immediately find an answer to my problem, as the information they provided before the purchase was incorrect.

So how could this have been improved?

• The content on the product page about how the product works should have been accurate.
• The communications from the company I was purchasing from (Peachpit, originally,) could have been from URLs that I would recognize immediately as Peachpit.
• The Paypal account that I interacted with should have been a Peachpit account, not a Pearsoned.com account.
• The twitter manager could have been better trained to understand how twitter works.

Any aspect of your business that requires your customers to interact with automated systems should be tested by you on a regular basis to make sure that the systems are working as intended, and that the process flow is both logical and intuitive, otherwise no matter how hard you fight to win your customers, you could be loosing them one transaction at a time.

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• Categories Ecommerce
• Author Chelsea

Twitter Ups Its Focus On Businesses

31 Mar

 

I was going to write a step by step on twitter, and lo and behold, the social media powerhouse has released its own user friendly twitter guide for business, with a case study of a very major company that is using Twitter as a customer service and interaction tool. Thanks for that, Twitter; that lessens the amount of writing I have to do for the day!

One thing to note is that they have not focused much on the small business aspects, and are in fact very general, (which they would need to be, their audience being so large). I am more interested in the small business success stories; the large brands already have a name out there, and there are things we can learn from them, but how do we grow our brands rather than support our existing successful brands?

It comes down to personality for small businesses, in my opinion. Here is a quick list of tips for small business tweeters:

Do

• Be authentic – even if you are scheduling tweets, be sincere
• Interact with others – thank people who retweet your links
• Retweet content that supports your values – if you are a Vegetarian restaurant, follow vegan and veggie publications, and retweet pertinent info.
• Follow those that interact with you – they will appreciate it
• Syndicate your tweets to Facebook using Hootsuite or the Twitter application in Facebook
• Direct Message people who follow you to thank them (you can use SocialOomph to set this up automatically)
• Report spammers to Twitter
• Customize your Twitter profile with a description and a picture, and even a custom background if you like
• Search for things that interest you regularly on Twitter – things change fast

Don’t

• Ignore comments from customers, even negative ones
• Forget to check your mentions (when someone mentions your twitter profile in your tweet)
• Follow everyone that follows you – you are saying you are interested in what that profile has to say if you follow them, and there are many profiles out there that may not work with your values
• Make nonconstructive negative tweets
• Get defensive
• Retweet the same content over and over again (boring!)
• Tweet because you think you have to – that makes for some very dull, unenthusiastic tweets

I would love to hear any advice that you have as small business users using twitter. How do you apply it to your business? What value does it bring to you? Have you found new ways to incorporate it into your business?

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• Comments 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
• Categories Blogging, Guides, Social Media, Social Networks
• Author Chelsea

 

More About Shrinking Violet

30 Mar

shrink·ing violet
n. Informal
A shy or retiring person.

wall·flow·er
n. Informal
One who does not participate in the activity at a social event because of shyness or unpopularity.

After 20 years working with software and internet technology doing a variety of different jobs, I have unwittingly become the go-to girl in my social circle for information and instruction on computers, software, and various internet technologies. I have always had a knack for finding alternate processes and solutions that made my jobs more streamlined, and that were repeatable by others.

I started Shrinking Violet in an effort to help business users experiment, learn, and develop your own toolkit of internet skills by exploring my experiences in technology with you. Hopefully I can impart some of my enthusiasm about technology in general, and social media in particular, and ease the disparity between business users and their technical development people by helping business users to step away from the wall of misunderstanding and get on the internet dance floor.

You have a lot to add to the conversation. You know your company, your products, and yourself infinitely better than billions of other people.  If your organization has been around for more than a few minutes, people may already be talking about you. Your thoughts, knowledge, opinions, and ideas are needed and wanted by your customers, your prospective customers, your community organizations, your government, and maybe even your kids.

So put on your dancing shoes, and let’s boogie; it’s time for the wallflowers to join the party.

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• Comments 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
• Categories General
• Author Chelsea

Lifestyle Brand or Social Media Savant? A Drink with The Drink Toque

22 Mar

Let me start by saying that I personally own 6 different Drink Toques. I use them to identify my drinks at BBQs, protect my iPhone while biking, as a Flip Video cozy, a coffee sleeve, and as mittens on cold camping trips (I kid you not.) Conversations abound around my Drink Toques when my friends see them, so I thought I would ask Chris Rudden at The Drink Toque about the conversations that he is creating in the social media arena.

Chelsea (sipping a hot cup of joe, adorned in my favorite Drink Toque ):

Hey Byron, how’s the beverage sleeve business treating you?

Chris (enjoying a frosty canned beverage wearing a Stag Party Drink Toque ):

Can’t complain. We have been having some good response to some of our promotions, and word is getting out there…

Chelsea:

That’s great to hear. I have enjoyed some of the links that you posted recently on The Drink Toque’s Facebook Fan Page.  Which social media platforms do you use most, and why have you chosen to use those platforms?

Chris:

Facebook is now the number one site used in the US. That is amazing. Everyone is on it, practically. While I would like more features, or the ability to interact with your fans more the way you can with a personal account, this social network is far too big to ignore. Great for posting links to your blog posts, and other links that speak to your ‘story’. It is a really great place to easily discuss topics with your fans, and for them to share your links. Ultimately, it makes your business more accessible, and that’s what you want.

Twitter is like a hyper Facebook. Tweeting small thoughts, links, articles, ideas, sale details, short rants, and so on. You talk about and share other people’s links, you can follow and unfollow as many people you like. In the Twitter world, people expect noise, so your links can easily be retweeted.

I would prefer Vimeo to YouTube to be honest, better quality I think, and the best option if you work in a more artistic community than others; but YouTube simply reaches more people, and you need exposure to their numbers. Videos are honestly one of the best ways to communicate your ‘story’. A picture is worth a thousand words right? Well, a video, says a lot. Make a video, blog about it, link if to Facebook and Twitter, and boom, you got your social media network going.

Chelsea:

I know what you mean. Vimeo is really only for creatives though – artists, filmmakers and so on – their terms of use excludes commercial videos. YouTube does the job, though I agree it would be better if HD video handling was more streamlined. YouTube embeds really easily in blog posts too, especially Blogger, since YouTube and Blogger are both owned by Google.

Chris:

Blogger is the platform for my main blog for The Drink Toque. I use Wordpress for another blog I write for, socialsquared.com, but Blogger seemed to be more easily integrated with our main website. While I think Wordpress has more features, Blogger is easier to get up and going, and to use in general. My Blogger blog looks better and is more easily changed than the Wordpress one. For us Wallflowers, that’s important.

I also like Flickr for sharing photos of people using their Drinktoques – it’s really easy to use.

You can get great exposure from StumbleUpon, which is a cool social bookmarking utility. We received thousands of visits in a short amount of time via StumbleUpon. So, it gives you an opportunity to obtain a rapid advance in page views. However, StumbleUpon is like hyper internet surfing. These people aren’t necessarily sticking around for long, because they can easily hit the ‘Stumble’ button to get to the next site. So, great because you need visits to make sales, but not always your most attentive viewers.

Digg hasn’t worked for us very much. Not sure why as StumbleUpon has been decent. But, if you can get it going, it is great for the same reasons StumbleUpon is.

Others I should be using … perhaps Tumblr or Posterous …Am I missing any? I love to try new avenues, what do you recommend?

Chelsea:

I like services like Posterous and Tumblr, and that they integrate so easily with Facebook Pages and Blogger, so you don’t have to manually re-enter content all over the blogosphere. You have to be super on top of making sure you have links in your content that make it easy for folks to get to a relevant call to action page though. You can use basic HTML in posts that you email to Posterous too, which helps with creating embedded links.

Digg has many very loyal followers, but I have to say that the content that gets lots of Diggs tends to be technology or marketing related, rather than lifestyle centric.

What about Social Media Utilities? Which are you using these days, and why?

Chris:

Hootsuite’s great for Twittering for individuals or companies (although I think CoTweet might win the latter). You can schedule tweets, it has some analytics, and it syncs great with my iPhone Hootsuite App.

Disqus is simply the best available commenting system, allowing users to easily comment upon, and share your content across the web. You want people to comment on your content. You want them to share it. Disqus promotes that in a professional package that is free to use.

Chelsea:

Disqus is also cool in that you can choose to post your comment to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter directly too. Used in combination with a share utility like AddThis, it can really help get the word out, and keep people involved in the conversation.

Chris:

The AddThis button is super easy to add to your blog posts or product pages to allow for easy mutliplatform sharing of your content. Essential. TweetMeme is another share button that focuses on retweets and is perhaps the quickest and most obvious way for your users to share your content. Then there’s Facebook Share – like TweetMeme, but shares across the user’s Facebook profiles. A must have.

Manually posting all your links, across all your platforms, can be time consuming. You need some help. Twitterfeed automatically tweets the title of your blog posts via your RSS feed.

Feedburner allows people to Subscribe to your blog, thereby consenting to having your content sent to them directly each time your create new content. While it is a must have, I don’t think this has been a big success for us. But that depends on what type of organization you are. It is essential for podcasters, for example. Nonetheless, for us, we are more likely to have people become our fans through Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, if you have an eCommerce store, it is a lot more important to communicate and retain the customers you already have. So, hopefully your eCommerce solution has an appropriate marketing solution for that angle.

Am I missing any? Probably several.

Chelsea:

Any tool that makes managing all of the posting, replying, and tweeting easier is a godsend. Feedburner can be setup to email your posts to people who subscribe to them too, and you can use cool e-newsletter applications like Constant Contact or Sendloop (my personal favorite).

Why is Social Media such a big part of your marketing efforts?

Chris:

Social media is too big of a force to ignore. There is too much potential to interact and gain analysis on your consumers to pass it by. In fact, for many, social media provides a far more potent marketing avenue than otherwise available. It gives you more of a chance to control, develop, and transmit your message. It is hard work, takes some experimentation, experience, and a focused brand message or ‘story’; but the potential benefits are great.

To make it simple, we increase our website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by blogging. That means we have more links to our website than we would otherwise, meaning the more we blog, the more chance we have of people coming to our website. We Facebook and Twitter to try and reach out to, and interact, with Fans of our products; and to try and reach out to other potential customers through Direct Messaging. For example, you might want to try and approach other bloggers, trying to get them to talk about you a bit, perhaps running a competition of some sort with that blogger that benefits everyone involved. In one instance I just saw scroll across my HootSuite/Twitter screen, a local skate and snowboard shop gave a blogger some free product to give away, so that blogger will talk about their sample sale on the weekend. The retailer gets the exposure, increases potential for their sale, and they saw an immediate increase in their Facebook/Twitter followers. The blogger got free things for their followers, making them a conduit for good deals, which means more people will want them to follow them. Again, you have to get out there and mix it up a bit.

Chelsea:

Have your social media interactions led to sales or PR opportunities?

Chris:

Yes. We have had numerous sales positive social media interactions. As well, we have had people interested in representing our product simply by coming across us on StumbleUpon. Social media is an opportunity to interact with people we simply would not have met otherwise. The sales have tended to be smaller custom runs and individuals buying from drinktoque.com. Not a ‘gold mine’ per say, but definitely positive interactions.

I would caution about trying to measure your social media interactions precisely in terms of sales, and especially immediate sales. Whether on the web, or you have a physical presence, sales don’t work like that. Sales take time to develop. Just because you build it, does not mean they will come. If you give them a reason to come, if you give them a reason to care, if you have developed something that resonates, they eventually will.

Chelsea:

It sounds like you have most of your social media platforms and utilities covered; it would be cool to see you develop a content plan too.

Do you have any advice to share with newcomers to Social Media space?

Chris:

You can spend all sorts of money blanketing the airwaves, print, and even web pages with your ads; or you can create content that can be willingly shared and recommend through networks of friends, bloggers, and people you don’t yet know. And, you can do this mainly for free. Spending less money to try and connect with real people in real ways. The best way to give customers what they want is to talk to them, get to know them.

Shrinking Violet’s motto of ‘Business in Bloom’ is the perfect synopsis for the opportunity that social media presents. Social media allows you to reach out to consumers in a way that was previously unavailable. As with traditional marketing avenues, social media still has low conversion rates, but offers the true benefit of significant increased interaction and viral advantages.

Don’t be afraid to try new social media platforms or utilities. Some will work for your specific needs, some will produce results, some will not.

You might get down because no one is commenting on a particular feed, or no one is retweeting your content. It could mean it lacks content, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, and certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that no one is reading it. Take a site like Mashable.com. The first time I went to their site, I got all bummed out because each one of their posts are shared 2000 times. The thing is, Mashable has 2.3 million fans. 2.3 million!!! So, if you do the math, that means that only 0.00087% of their fans are retweeted any one particular post. In other words, they are only getting 8.7 retweets for every 10,000 fans. That really put things into perspective for me. So, if you only have 100 fans, you probably shouldn’t expect to see a lot of retweets. But, again, that doesn’t mean your content is never read or never shared.

Ultimately, I believe social media is essential to any business, especially small businesses with little to no ‘marketing’ dollars. Blog. Post. Communicate. Share your links. Share other’s links! Reach out. Interact. Grow your base. Grow your opportunities. Social media is not a magic solution. It is hard work. But, keep with it, don’t sweat the small stuff, create content, and grow.

Chelsea:

Cheers! Thanks so much for sharing about your adventures in social media Chris! The next round is on me.

You can connect with The Drink Toque at:

http://www.drinktoque.com

http://www.facebook.com/thedrinktoque

http://twitter.com/thedrinktoque

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• Comments 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
• Categories Interviews, Social Media
• Author Chelsea

An Editorial Schedule Is a Good Thing To Have

15 Mar

I keep an Editorial Calendar for Shrinking Violet, and I thought I would let you in on how and why I do that. For those of you who don’t know, an editorial calendar is a schedule of articles and content that need to be written and published. Without such a calendar, it can be very easy to let your blog posts and other content to die a slow and forgotten death, with no fellow posts to keep them company. It can also be very easy to let content generation slide until the next big product launch, or the next catastrophe.

My preference is for a less stringent schedule that allows for some flexibility and creativity. When I am on a roll, a 600 word post could takes 20 minutes to write, but on the days when I am less inspired, or the topic requires research and feedback from outside sources, the process can take hours. This is part of why I create a schedule; if I know I am planning on writing a post on comparative technical resources for instance, I will generally ask for outside thoughts and assistance from my better half or some of my other tech friends at least a week in advance of writing the article. This means that the opinions that I will refer to are in my possession days, or sometimes even weeks before I begin composing a post.

I have an ongoing list of topics that I would like to write about, and I add them to an open ended to-do list as inspiration strikes. I have a personal goal of writing a minimum of 3 posts per week for Shrinking Violet, and 2 posts per week for SleepySheep Bedding, our online wool and natural bedding store. It is from this list that I generally pull my topics for the week, unless there is a very compelling topic that I feel the need to cover immediately.

I am currently writing an ebook called ‘Social Media for Wallflowers’ which is scheduled to be released on March 20th, 2010, so any of the time not taken up by the demands of our e-commerce business or the editorial schedule below is eaten up by that.

Here is my editorial schedule for this week:

Monday (4 hours in total):

• Pick and research 3 topics from my list for Shrinking Violet
• Pick and research 2 topics from my list for SleepySheep Bedding
• Email any experts or associates with questions

The 3 topics that I have chosen to focus on this week at Shrinking Violet are:

1. The Lost and Found Art of Customer Service – A Social Media Perspective
2. Know Your Needs Before You Hire A Website Developer – outline
3. Review – New 37signals book entitled ‘Rework’ – outline

The 2 editorial pieces that I am focusing on this week at SleepySheep Bedding are:

1. Pick the product you want to see on sale contest
2. March Newsletter announcing the outcome of the sale contest, and winner of the contest

Today I will:

• DRAFT, REVIEW and POST SleepySheep Product Picking Contest
• REVIEW and POST about Editorial Schedules

The rest of Monday will be spent on setting up interviews with social media business users.

Tuesday (4 hours in total):

• DRAFT The Lost and Found Art of Customer Service – A Social Media Perspective
• DRAFT Know Your Needs Before You Hire A Website Developer
• DRAFT, REVIEW and POST – Review of new 37signals book entitled ‘Rework’
• DRAFT March Newsletter announcing the outcome of the SleepySheep contest

Wednesday (2 hours in total):

• REVIEW and POST The Lost and Found Art of Customer Service – A Social Media Perspective
• DRAFT Companion download for: Know Your Needs Before You Hire A Website Developer

Thursday (2 hours in total):

• REVIEW and POST Companion download for: Know Your Needs Before You Hire A Website Developer
• 2nd DRAFT and SCHEDULE FOR FRIDAY SleepySheep Newsletter

Friday (1 hour in total):

• REVIEW and POST Know Your Needs Before You Hire A Website Developer

I do add to my schedule as the week progresses, and sometimes topics do get shifted around, but this is the general outline for my week, which helps me to stay focused, and ensures that I am writing about different things throughout the week to keep me on the ball. This corresponds with my to-do list as well.

You will notice that I stack up Monday with a fair amount of research and organization. I find that Monday is the best day for me to do this, and that I am at my best from an energy standpoint this early in the week, so I try to pack as much in a possible. The editorial workload gets significantly lighter for me as the week progresses, and other responsibilities must be attended to. I do not schedule writing on the weekends; I consider it time for my family, and to recharge my creative juices.

A broader look at my editorial schedule will show that I have a specific number of posts on related topics I published over a 1, 3, or 6 month period. This allows me to build up to larger topics, and experiment with content in an ongoing fashion, helping my readers and myself increase our knowledge base on that particular topic.

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• Comments 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
• Categories Blogging
• Author Chelsea

Affiliate Marketing Primer

13 Mar

I have set up numerous affiliate programs for very different companies, with varied marketing budgets, using a few very different online Performance Marketing Networks. I realized when I was trying to explain what I was doing to a friend of mine that it was not common knowledge as to what they are, what they are for, and who would care about them to begin with. Here’s my take:

What is a Performance Marketing Network?
Glad you asked. A Performance Marketing Network is an online network that manages the relationships and payment between merchants (people selling things) and affiliates (websites with ad space, or e-newsletters that are interested in advertising your product for you).

(more…)

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• Comments 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
• Categories Affiliate Marketing, Ecommerce
• Author Chelsea

eCommerce For The Masses

12 Mar

Let me start off by saying that I have spent many hours using many e-commerce platforms, including Zen Cart, EZ-Cart, Volusion, Sentias Commerce, MS Commerce, Drupal, Yahoo! Stores, and Shopify. Each of these applications has their pluses minuses, but today I thought I would focus on the solution that I have found to be the easiest to use when operating a day-to-day hard goods eCommerce storefront.

Our family business needed an eCommerce solution that was economical, had a simple user interface for processing orders and updating products, an active community of users with a variety of skill levels, and that integrated with our merchant services account so that we could accept online payments. It also needed to be relatively easy for us to develop our own custom site design, support the ability for us to use our domain name, and to have an active support staff in case anything went wrong with the system.

We picked Shopify by Jaded Pixel, which starts at $24 per month, and includes its own hosting and security certificate (a must for online transactions). Shopify is what is known as an SAAS (“Software As A Service”), and is fully hosted on a  complex and professional web host with multiple redundancies (which means that if a server dies, another takes its place without too much time passing, and your store stays up!). For you geeks out there, Shopify is a Ruby on Rails Development, and the creator of Liquid (a very cool development language,) Tobias Lütke runs the show.

Shopify is very simple to use, and you can set up a fully functional e-commerce shop using either a stylish template, or you can hire a designer and a developer to set up a custom template for you. We created our own custom template for our bedding company SleepySheep, and have gone on to build custom templates for DrinkToque and ecocessories by Jessica Reiss, because Shopify does easily what many other eCommerce platforms fail at: it is easy to use for ordinary, non-technical people to manage products and inventory, and to process orders. Since the expansion of Shopify to include the Shopify Platform, there have also been many interesting and useful applications developed by other companies that are easy to add to your shop, and can tie your shop in with Facebook Pages and other useful utilities, including an application that allows you to sell digital files.

You can even set up a shop, and have a designer and a developer come in later to make changes or apply an entirely new design to your store; your inventory can remain the same. They also make it easy to switch between themes, which is convenient for different shopping seasons such as Christmas and Valentines. I especially appreciate the way that Shopify integrates payment gateways, which on many platforms can be an absolute nightmare.

One of the recent changes to the administrative interface allows you to edit your product descriptions and page content with a great little WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editor, which operates a lot like your word processor or your email editor, and is a lovely addition to Shopify.

The active user community makes a huge difference too; the creative solutions that folks come up with for their business challenges using Shopify are truly amazing, and Jaded Pixel is very responsive to that community.

• Comments View Comments
• Categories Ecommerce, Shopify
• Author Chelsea

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Our reasoning behind choosing Shopify for our eCommerce needs.

Composing Blog Posts For Business

11 Mar

 

Blogging is an important part of developing your online community, and can be a very valuable part of your marketing toolkit. Using persuasive and topical content on your blogs and updating your blogs regularly have the following benefits:

• People searching for topics that you have blogged on will be more likely to find you
• Individuals will be more likely to return to your blog if they find fresh and relevant content on it
• Returning public will be more likely to purchase training from you

Successful blogging will also support your assertion as an expert in your industry.  Remember – you don’t need to be an expert blogger to be a successful blogger.

Tips on Writing Content for your Blog

1. Write with a specific topic in mind for each blog post

Let’s use this article as an example: My topic is “How To Blog” with the target audience “Business People”

2. Name the article something topical or informative

The two main thrusts of this article are “Blogging” and the audience is “Business People”; if this were the internal blog of a corporation, my title might be “Composing Your Blog Posts”.

3. Choose topic-specific keywords (words that are specific to your topic) for the content

I have identified the following terms (“keywords”) and keyword phrases as relevant to this article, with the intent of increasing the likely-hood that my audience, (small business owners and business people who would like information on how to blog,) would be able to find it easily, both on an internal site and from an internet browser such as Google or Yahoo:

Blogging, Blogging for Business, Marketing Toolkit, Successful Blogging, How to Blog, Tips on Writing, Writing Tips, Blog about your business

Notice that there is variation in how I use the word “Blog”. It is used in combination with other keywords and phrases, as well as in different forms, including “Blog” and “Blogging”. Try using variations of keywords that are relevant to your post within your post; this will increase the likely-hood that someone searching for you topic could come across your post.

4. Write in positive terms

Blogging is a relaxed form of communication, and can tend towards being anecdotal and informal. In the context of your business blog, you are representing yourself and your business to the world, so be sure that your communications are positive, avoid negative comments, and stay away from casual abbreviations such as “lol” and “btw”. Reinforce your position as an expert in your field by giving good advice that is related to the topic of your article.

Avoid the use of excessive exclamation points!!! and UPPERCASE WORDS. Notice how the preceding sentence took a turn for the worse in both clarity and tone? Uppercase words are read as though you are shouting, while repetitive exclamation points quickly dilute the meaning of your post.

5. Write bite-sized pieces

Huge blocks of text with no breaks are difficult to read. Paragraphs should tend towards being around 3 to 4 sentences, with bulleted and numbered lists of short phrases used when necessary to communicate related thoughts; this article is written for ease of understanding: those who don’t have the time or inclination to read the whole article can get the gist of it by reading the section titles. They also have to opportunity to focus in on the section of the article that interests them.

6. What do you want your reader to do?

Be sure that every post has a “call to action”. If you want your readers to purchase a specific workout that is related to your post, tell them which one: “In order to fully understand the techniques described, have a look at the “Triathlon – Training for Swimmers” video, along with a link to the video. (More on creating links below.) In the case where you would like to communicate information that is already publicly available on the internet, either paraphrase it and include a link, or simply tell your readers what it is about and include a link to the information.

7. Wrap it up

Summarize what your post has been about and make a closing statement. This can be done in a single sentence or as a short paragraph, that can also include a call to action, or to reinforce a previously stated call to action: “Go out and get started on your Ironman training today!”

8. Publish your post!

9. Respond to comments regularly, and with as much depth as possible. This is part of how you create your community.

By following these steps, have just improved your online marketing, created a new level of reinforcement of your client relationships, increased your credibility, and potentially attracted new clients to yourself.

If you would like more information on blogging and social media, come and join us for the Social Media for Wallflowers seminar, where I will tie in these ideas with Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

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• Categories Blogging, Style Guides
• Author Chelsea

 

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