DIY SEO for Ecommerce: Sell More Online with Search Engine Optimization

1. DIY SEO: an intro : in my new online workshop, D I, Y s CEO and E Commerce Inter for artists makers and badass creatives, You're gonna learn so much stuff that's gonna help you sell more stuff. What we're gonna cover is what S CEO is search engine optimization, how the search engines work and also how search engines like Google, yahoo and being are different from Etc. And Amazon's internal search engines. We're gonna talk about keywords what they are, how to find them, how to use them in your content and on your product pages. We're also gonna talk about links and how to get more links back to your product pages so that you can get found in the search results. We'll talk about digital PR getting your stuff featured in magazines and newspapers and TV stations. And most importantly, I'm gonna cover something that's not even technically part of S e O. But it is so important. It's called conversion optimization. And what that fancy word means is how to get people to buy more stuff once they're on your product pages. Super important. So I hope that you're going to join me if you need to sell more stuff whether it's on Etsy . Whether you're selling stuff on your own website, you really need this course. I promise. I make it easy to understand its 10 short videos so you can watch them all at once. Binge watching back to back or you can break him up and watch him over a few days while you work on this stuff, you can come back to it, Watch it again and again. It's gonna be awesome. 2. What SEO is & how search engines work: So first out what is s e o. So s e o stands for search engine optimization. And what that means is we're trying to get our product pages or websites ranked higher in the natural search results. Also called organic search results editorial free, right? So what I'm not gonna be talking about is those paid ads that you sometimes see at the top of the search results. So, for instance, Google has this where if you search for things that are really common really competitive, there's often gonna be three or four ads that are clearly marked as such at the very top of the search results. That's a whole other thing that I'm not gonna be talking about. That's much more complicated. Called paid search advertising. Google AdWords is the program that you run that on Google, for instance, not talking about that today, but all those results underneath is what we're gonna be trying to work to get our stuff found in, right. So why should you care about S E? Oh, well, when people want to buy things, they want to buy products like the ones that you sell. They're going to search for them search dries 10 times more traffic to shopping sites than does social media. We love social media. I love social media. But at the end of the day, if I'm looking for something very specific, like shoot red shoes for wide feet, I'm gonna take that into a search engine. Whether that's Google, Yahoo being or if I'm going directly to Amazon or etc. Or another e commerce site like that, I'm using search. So that's why you need to know the basics of how to rank better in the search engines. So how to search engines? Pick what goes on top. There's two main over arching ideas, and those are relevance and importance. The relevance boils down to does your product page or your Web, say, match up with what the person searching for? So if I'm searching for cute red shoes for white feet, does my product page have cute shoes? Are they read? And are they made for wide feet? Those are all the things that the search engines trying to figure out so that they can give the person who's searching the most relevant, accurate search result possible. They really want to help that person out who's searching so that that person will continue to use their search engine and not go looking for another search engine to use right. The next piece of the puzzle is important. So if there's two product pages or websites that are pretty relevant equally relevant, which one's more important? That's how they're going to figure out which one to put first and which one to put second. So there's a few different factors of importance, and these are constantly shifting a little bit. But there's some things that have historically been major factors for importance, and I don't think they're going away any time soon. The really big one, his links. So if other websites are linking to you, they're sending a signal to Google and the other search engines that, hey, I've decided that this website is important enough for me to link to its high quality. I'm recommending it, so every time you got a link to your website from another website that's sending a signal to the search engines that says, Hey, I'm also I'm important rights. You want those links? Now there's some other things to, um is your website more of an authority figure on a certain topic compared to another website, right? You'll probably notice there certain websites, like big news websites Huffington Post or The New Yorker really big news websites often come up at the top of search results. They have a ton of other websites linking to them, but they've also been deemed that they're really important, really relevant on a lot of different topics, right? Also, how did people interact with your website of your product page once they're there? And there's a lot of different ways that the search engines contract this, especially Google, because I'm sure that you may have used. Or you probably know people who do use chrome as their primary browser. Chrome is created by Google so they can gather a lot of data about how we interact with pages. Once we click through from the search results, they could see how long were spending on that page. Do we immediately go back to the search results and look for something else because we didn't find what we're looking for? Also, a huge percentage of the Web sites on the Web have Google analytics tracking installed, and that could be really helpful for you as a Web master because you could get a lot of data about how your visitors are interacting with your website. But Google can also use this to understand. Are the people getting what they're looking for once they're on this website? Is this useful? Right? So they take all that into consideration because they want to provide a really great experience for the users, for the visitors to your website or your product page. Also, click through rate from the search engine results page itself. So, for instance, if you are constantly coming up as the number four slot on the first page of the search results for certain search terms and even though you're number four every single time, people are skipping that 12 and three slot and they're going to you because they think that you're more relevant toe what they're searching right. Every time somebody does that and skips 12 and three and go straight to four, that sends a signal to Google that hey, number four is actually more relevant to us. So they're gonna take that into consideration. If that keeps happening, they're going to start moving for up above those number 12 and three slides. Right? So these are all things that come into play that helped tell the search engines. This is relevant. This is important. 3. SEO best practices: So we're back and now ready to talk about what search engines can't do yet and what they want you to dio. So the basics think about search engines are not people. They're probably getting a little closer with artificial intelligence, but right now they don't think the same way that people do. Do you have to compensate for that? So, for instance, search engines can't complete forms. So if you had something on a membership site or behind some sort of log in or wall a search engine can't get to it right, even though a real human being could log in. They have trouble with that cause they're just dumb computers. Search engines also can't process information in photos, video audio files in the same way that we as human beings can. Now again, they're getting better at this, particularly photos. Pinterest is actually a search engine in case you didn't know, and they and Google particularly have been working to better interpret what a photo is without having to have us explicitly tell them what this photo is. But we still can help the search engines along. To understand this photo represents this object or this person same way with video. I'm speaking in this video right now, but unless I transcribe it or give a really detailed description of what I'm talking about in this video, the search engines have trouble understanding the content of this video. They can't hear my voice and understand it in the same way as if we write it down for them . Also, search engines are getting better at understanding the differences in the nuance in human language. But they don't understand it in the same way that we, as people dio and especially for English, which is a very, very nuanced language. It's tricky, right? So, for instance, if you are working with international audiences where we spell things differently, even though it means the same thing, that could be something that you have to take into consideration. So, for example, if you sell jewelry, which is spelled very differently in the United States than it is in the UK, the surgeons, it's gonna have a little trouble understanding that those two words mean the exact same thing. So you might want to use both variations and speak to those different audiences that you're selling to also, in certain industries We use jargon that we in our industry talk about certain objects or products or practices, but our customers don't speak. That's in the same language. So really, we really want to think about how do our customers look for what we do and look for what we sell and how they search for those things. So, for instance, at my day job we worked with a lot of bridal boutiques, and I know, and you probably know they sell wedding dresses. But in that industry, they often talk about thes dresses as bridal gowns. That's the industry term for it. That's official. I get it. But if they want to be found by normal, everyday people who want to buy what they sell on their website, they need to use the words wedding dresses and match the language that their customers would use, Right? So what are the search engines want us to do to help them help us? Well, Google Yahoo being all those other ones, they want us to make pages that help real people right? Think about what information a riel human being would need to have to make a purchase to find the information that they want and serve that information up to them. Make the experience on your Web center your Web page as easy to use and a seamless as possible for a real person. And the search engines. That's what they're gonna be looking out for right. Also create keyword rich content that helps real people understand. That's also going to help the search engines understand what your page is all about and what kind of products you're selling and who you're here to serve. So the more information you can give, the better, because it helps real people. It answers questions, but it also gives context that the search engines can understand the language of what your product is right. You want to keep that content up to date. So if a search engine has indexed a page on your website from 2012 you've been around for a while. You've been doing business, but you haven't updated that. What page in a while that's still on Google's radar, right? And they might still be sending people to that page. And if people are getting to that page and they're finding outdated information, they're gonna leave. That's really bad user experience you want to keep that information up to date. You also want to make sure that your website or your e commerce site is structured in a way that it's really easy for people to get to. Wherever it is, they need to go. You wanna have a clear hierarchy and organizational structure for those people to find the things they need? Right? Um, you can't have a page that you want people to get to, and there's no link that points to it. You want to make it really easy. If there's a shipping information page, for instance, if you're selling products, you need to have some shipping information. You make it really easy for people to find that information linked to it helped him get there. Also, your you RL's that, um, that thing that shows up in your browser. Http. W w w w dot com All that stuff that's your your l and you wanna have that really easy to read because it helps real people, and it helps the search engines understand what that pages. So if it's just a bunch of gibberish in numbers and crazy letters, and it doesn't really make sense, it's not words. That's hard for people and for search engines. And they also want to make sure that your content isn't buried inside of photos and videos and audio files. That's hard for a search engine to understand if you use those things and all of those things were great. We want photos and videos, but you need to also add additional information so that the search engines understand what those files contain. Sound good, Let's move on. 4. The dark side of SEO: So now we're going to talk a little bit about the dark side of S e o Bump a bomb. And the reason we're gonna talk about this is not because I want you to do this. Do not do this stuff that I'm about to tell you about, but I want to make sure that you don't get screwed over by some dark evil company. Who says that they can help you with your S e O. But they really just want your dollar dollar bills, and they're not actually gonna help you. So s E O. This whole industry has been around for more than 20 years, right? Developed in the late 19 nineties. And in those early days of search engines, the search engines worked much differently than they do now, especially Google, which didn't even exist back then. Yahoo being It was a much simpler time, and it was much easier to trick the search engines by doing some stuff that was kind of shady, kind of felt icky and gross to a real human being. But these days, the search engines care about what riel people want, right? So we don't want to do stuff that feels spammy and icky and deceitful, right? But there's still some black hat s CEOs, which is the bad guys, the people who want toe trick, the search engines and trick real people. We don't want to do any of that stuff, so I want you to be aware of their tactics so that you know to stay away. So Black Hat Seo. They'll do all these weird, tricky things. So, for instance, they might use duplicate content, which is against Google's rules. Google doesn't want you to plagiarize, right? So some old black hat seo guys, they might take content from a website and just take it, steal it, put it on another website, all with the purposes of trying to just use that information for their own gain. We don't want to do that. If you see that your content is being pulled and scraped into some Spammy website trying to sell somebody else's stuff, there's ways to report that I won't go into detail about all the ways to do it. But it's bad. Don't steal people's information, right? Also, there's even crazier ways that old CEO Black Hat guys would take people's information and try to trip the search engines. So, for example, invisible text so they might take keywords. Word that they were trying to rank in the search engines and put them in black text on a black background in the footer of a Web page like, Why would you do that? A real person can't read black text on a black background. It was only for the search engines. Google doesn't want you to do this. Any of the rial search engines don't want you to do crazy stuff like this because it makes no sense for real people. Keyword stuffing in general, where you would just take words and phrases, cue word phrases and repeat them over and over and over and over in a way that doesn't feel natural. It's totally unreadable. It feels like it was just written for a search engine. Don't do that. It's bad. Also, if you ever click through a website and you thought you were going to one place and suddenly you're being redirected through this loop of the Internet and you're getting to a totally different once it. Then you met Teoh. That could be what's called cloaking or you're just being redirected that's bad. We don't want to do that. Also, if you're getting links from sites that have nothing to do with you solely for the purpose of building a link, it doesn't help you out. As I mentioned at the beginning of this, Siri's links or great we love links, but we also want links from other websites that are relevant to US links that are important links from news websites or other websites in our industry. We don't want links from spammy sites from, you know, they're selling pharmaceutical drugs that are probably illegal on the other side of the world. That doesn't help us, so stay far away from all of that. What is good? What is called White Hat? Seo White hat. We want to be good. We want to do awesome, do no evil, right? You want to think about helping the user. First, you create useful, relevant content that matches what they want that hopes you when you help them. Givers get also use complete sentences with spelling grammar, all that jazz. Now you can obviously use bullet points, especially on a product page. Bullet points can be super useful to kind of spell out the main features of a product. But if you're writing a paragraph or something really descriptive, use actual grammar. That's awesome. If you do have lengths, you want to make sure that they're relevant. Whether you're linking to another website or whether they're linking to you, it needs to make sense. Also, if you've got images, we want to make sure they're well labeled informative for the search engines so that they know what those images are and every little piece of your website, whether it's ah, the actual website content or your page titles were meta descriptions. I'll tell you more about those in a SEC, but those all need to be unique for every single page. We don't just want to repeat and repeat and repeat. That's it. Make sure that you stay away from the bad guys if somebody's trying to email you and saying that they can get guaranteed instant rankings at the first result of the first page of Google and they only do it for 100 $95 run, don't walk, run away 5. Keywords & search phrases: Now we're gonna talk a little bit about keywords while we still call it keywords inside of the S E o industry. What I really want you to think about is search phrases or search queries, questions that people would ask that relate to your products and the things that you sell on the things that you make now, the way that research has changed and that's caused the search engines to adapt as well to match the way that we search and a big reason for the way that the search has changed is the fact that we use mobile phones more than ever. And we're searching at all these different ways on lots of different devices. So if I ask Siri or some sort of voice out a question, I'm gonna search for something in a much different way than if I'm tightly you know, my desktop computer, right? So, for instance, if I grabbed my phone and I say, Hey, Siri, where's the nearest Chinese restaurant? That's a much different question than if I type into my computer Chinese restaurants near me, right? We know it's humans, that it means the same thing, but to a dumb old computer. It's not immediately obvious, except that search engines like Google have started figuring out how to adapt their artificial intelligence and their computer programs toe understand the differences and the similarities in the way that we ask these questions, right? So the smart, fancy cocktail party word for this is called Semantic Search. You don't really need to know that term, but just understand this concept and think about how we as humans use language in so many different ways. Even though we're talking about the same thing, right, that's semantics. So when you're creating content through Web site, when you're writing those product descriptions or writing an F A Q page, I want you to think about all the ways that somebody might be asking questions related to what it is you do and sell. And I want you to answer those questions as robustly and as clearly as possible. Think about all the things that people would search, that people would ask their mobile phones and that people would want to know, and the more information you can give and the more ways that you can talk about what it is you do, the more information you have on your page for the search engines. To understand this page matches up with this thing that this person asked, whether it's on their mobile phone or their tablet or their desktop computer. Right? So Google's top search ranking factors their cage of us all of the information because they don't want toe let go of their industry industry secrets. But there are certain things that we do know that they have explicitly said these or how we rank the search engine results. Now number one and number two are going to be links, which is that importance piece of the pie I talked about earlier in the first video and content. And that's the page titles, meta descriptions and the actual continent information on your pages. That's that relevance piece. Does the information on this page match up with what somebody searching for right? That's importance and relevance and how they actually play out on your website itself in the form of content and links. Now, the third piece that Google has said is a ranking factor is something that's we can't technically optimize for it, except we can if we try to help real people so they have this tool that they have called rank brain and what it is is basically their name for their artificial intelligence that they're trying to teach the computers how to think more like real people. Right, because the more that the search engines can understand information in the way that we Israel people can, they can match those search results to the people that are searching better. Great. So rank brain or this artificial intelligence program is something that the head of Google has explicitly said. You cannot optimize for this right because it's trying to be like a real person. But here's the thing. If you try to match all of the information on your website and the experience of how people interact with your website, how they click around how they purchase a product, how they do things once they're there, if that's good for a real person, it's going to be good for rank brain, right? So think first and foremost about how you can make that experience better for a real human being, right? Awesome. So next I want to talk a little bit about long tail keywords so many years ago, keywords then in like the late 19 nineties, early two thousands. They used to be literally a word or two words, and there was often this practice of keyword stuffing, which is bad. We don't want to do that anymore. That's where you would just repeat words over and over and over and use really similar variations of those words over and over. People search in much more different ways now because of those mobile devices, and just were trying to get more specific information all the time. So the more specific you're trying to be, you're gonna use more words when you search to get that specific result. And that's what's a long tail keywords. So long tail keywords or more specific, there's generally going to be less search of volume because their specific. So there's less people searching for that exact phrase, but they have a really high search intent when they are searching. That means they know exactly what they're trying to find, their trying to find it for a reason whether that reason is to get information or to purchase a product or to go somewhere and do something. Right now, more than half of all of the search queries that happen. The things that people search. More than half of those were more than four words at a time, right? That's why I really want you to think in terms of long tail keywords, because if you're just trying to rank for a single word like jewelry, right, that is really hard to rank for because there's so many other websites out there trying to rank for that exact same thing. But when you can get really specific and say how to clean my sterling silver jewelry, that starts getting more specific and starts matching with a much more high intent searcher , right, that person has a really specific question that they want answered, and you can answer it. They can be the person that comes to you. You can sell them something or give them that information that they need. So how do you find these keywords? So turn to the search engines themselves. Pretty much. All search engines have some sort of auto suggest or auto complete feature. Now, if you've ever been on Google, you've probably noticed this. Once you start typing in, it's going to start dropping down and suggesting things underneath. Now, if It's suggesting things it thinks that you're searching for. It thinks you're searching for that because lots of other people have also searched for that. So that's a key right there. If something comes up as a search phrase in those honest suggested features, that means lots of people are searching for it. So if those search phrases are relevant to what you do or sell, you can include those phrases in your content. Think about ways that you can include them naturally in a way that makes sense and it's helpful to your users. But start writing those down as things that you can create content around, whether it's a blawg post or more descriptive information on your product pages now at the bottom of the search results in Google. Specifically, there's also that searchers related to those air more ways that you can look and get other ideas of other things that are related to what you sell and other little phrases that other people are using to search for that thing, right? Pretty much all the search engines have some form of this who think about all the different search engines that you can use to mine this information, right? Google Yahoo being obviously the big ones, but also YouTube is actually one of the biggest search engines in the world, and it's owned by Google. So particularly if you're doing any sort of content like you're teaching a craft workshop or you're trying to share information that is helpful to your people in a blawg post. If it's some sort of like how to query or tutorial, YouTube is a gold mine to search for those sorts of query search ideas right also at sea. Amazon Pinterest. They all have these features, so use all of those tools and get that information. There's also another website called Answer the Public. But answer. The public is a really cool tool. It's free unless they change this in the future. But it's free, and they've basically done a lot of this research for you, and they've gathered all of the data. So if you type in a word or two, they'll give you lots of different search queries. Those long tail search words that people who are looking for and it's easy. You don't have to go through and like, type in everything yourself. They've done a lot of the work for you, so that's a really awesome place to start. So your homework, this is the big one. I want you to think long term about your business and where you want it to go because thes search raises are gonna be really important. As you're creating content as you're updating your website, think about what he words that you think are important to your business. Think about what search phrases your customers would potentially use when searching for things related to your business, your products, your industry. Also ask your friends and family, but also, if you already have customers, ask them. Use a survey, right. Ask them and get information feedback from them because that's your most valuable asset. You can get inside of their head and know exactly how they search. You're gonna be able to find more people like them to buy your stuff. So next after you've got the search phrases and ideas, then I want you to think about how can you turn that into content, whether that content is your product descriptions that are becoming more detailed and giving people more information about your products or whether that's a blawg post or video that you could post on YouTube or information that you post on social media. Think about all the ways that you can turn that into helpful content. Email newsletters. That's a great place to share stuff, even though these places, some of them, don't have a direct relation to S E O. It's still ways to get your products out to your potential customers. And at the end of the day, that's what matters is getting people to see your stuff and then went to buy your stuff. So that's it. Be back in a sec. 6. On-page factors: So I'm back and we're gonna be talking about on page factors. And these are all of the things on your website, your product pages that you have control over there on your page. So these things are page titles, meta descriptions, headings and your your L structure. In addition to the regular content on your page, your page titles, your meta descriptions are really important because that's what shows up in the search engine results page. Have you search in Google for something? You'll see that there's a blue line a little your L and then two sentences or so. Usually that's in black text, so that blue line is usually gonna be pulling from your page title. And that black, little to sentence blurb is usually gonna be pulling from your meta description. Now, if you set an accurate, unique paid shuttle meta description, Google will usually use those. Sometimes Google does what Google wants, and it's going to pull some other information from your page now, also, for certain platforms like etc. You can't actually set a meta description. So for that instance, your medicine option gets pulled from the first sentence or two of your product description , so that's important to know. But in cases where you can set your page title and meta description, you definitely should. And you should make sure that both of these are unique and descriptive to that page. You don't just want to use the same pay child, my description throughout your entire website or throughout your entire e commerce shop. You want to make it descriptive to each specific page. Now each should be brief is possible. But I also think about what would be descriptive and also what would help somebody click through from the search results. If you remember, I talked earlier about click through rate. So if you have that product page and it's always showing up is Number four in the search results and people keep skipping over 123 and they start clicking on you instead. That starts sending a signal to Google that maybe you should move up. You should move ahead 23 and then you should have had 22 if everybody keeps jumping down to click on your page title and meta description. So your page title in English Right now you've got about 70 characters to work with and your meta description. You have about 150 to 160 characters to work with. Now this concious ift all the time, and it's actually say characters, and I'm speaking about English language characters, but what it really will down to his pixels. So just f Y I. If you are ever optimizing in Chinese or Japanese, or another language where the characters are much different than our English letters, that's actually would be a totally different character account because it's based on the amount of pixels that it takes up on a screen. It's about the space that it takes up, but you want to keep them short and sweet, and you wanna write in a way that would encourage somebody want to click through, make them interested, right? You really wanna get their attention and make them want to click through to what it is you have to say. So that's kind of the big idea for page titles and men descriptions, and then you've got headings. So if you're only doing etc, or only doing Amazon generally have a lot of control over this, but you should really have some version of your own website because you don't want to build your empire only on somebody else's land because that person could get angry and take your land away or etc. Could change the rules, or Amazon could change their rules. So that's what is really important to think long term about having some piece of your own Internet domain. Your own website, your own e commerce shop, even if you're using those other tools, still have some version of your own home safe. So once you've got that own version of your own website, you're going to be able to use heading. So if you use a blawg post, these could come into play. You could also use these on products pages to. So what headings do is they break up long pieces of information. Think back to your days in high school, where you probably have to write some sort of paper or essay, and you had to suit do an outline, right, so you have the big title, and then you have subtitles and you have sub subtitles. That's basically what headings are. So there's headings one through six for the purposes of S. E. O. All you really need to care about is headings one through three or so, so heading one is really just going to be the title of your page. And that's the front facing title of your page, the page title that I was talking about a second ago. That usually does not show up on your user facing side that's gonna show up in the search engine results, and then it's gonna show up in the browser at the top of your screen. But people don't really see it showing up in your page unless you've also made that same thing, that title that people see on the user facing side. So that title, as usually gonna be a heading one. That's usually done automatically for you if you have somebody who's created to run state for you. If you're using some sort of theme from something like WordPress and Shopify, that's usually all done for you. But if you're writing, say, a long blawg post or an F A Q page, we've got a lot of information all on one page. You would want to break up that information you don't want just huge tongue chunks of text , right? It's really hard to read long, long, long paragraphs on a computer screen. We process information differently when we're reading it on a computer than we do. If we're reading war and peace in novel form, right? So don't make your website feel like you're reading Warren piece. That's gonna be really bad user experience. Do you want to break it up, break it up into shorter chunks of text and use headings? Headings to is going to be a bigger one? Usually in that heading three is gonna be usually slightly smaller than that. So use those to break up the different sections of your text. Any words that your rapping in that heading to or heading three styling that's going to send a signal to Google or the other search engines that says the's air. The subsections of this page that helps them understand. This is more information that helps us know that's what this page is about, right? So finally, your u R L structure. So that's again your http www dot com The way that that structured helps the search engines understand. That's what that page is about. So you want to use really clear words you want to keep it a short and sweet. It's possible and basically make it easy to use and easy to understand for a real person. And it's gonna be easy to use and understand for a search engine and for a computer you don't want to have, like a long string of numbers that make no sense. You wanna have actual words don't have those words broken up by hyphens. If you have a whole bunch of words jam together and there's nothing to break it up, that's really hard for a person to see where those words stop and start. It's also hard for a computer to understand where those words start and stop. So when use hyphens to break up the words and that you are well and just make him really easy to understand now also, if you are ever using a site like WordPress to do a blogger on, I want you to think about not including dates in your Euro On the reason for that is, if you ever wanna update Oblong Post say you wrote an amazing Blawg post in 2016 and then when 2017 comes around, you wanna update that block post and you want to republish it. You want to share it with your audience again if you have dates in your Urals. So it says 2016 slash 05 slash whatever this post is about, and then you change that date often. What? Your content management tool, WordPress or whatever you're running your website on often that's gonna automatically change that you're l to the current year. So it's gonna change it. 2017 2018 right? The problem with that is, if you're all changes if anybody else was linking to you that's gonna break that link, you have to set up what's called a 301 reader act, which is more complicated these air more advanced parts of S E O. That I'm not gonna cover right now because that stuffs more complicated and don't want you to have to worry about the complicated staff. I want you to keep it simple, right? So that's where they wanna try to avoid having those dates in our euro structure, if at all possible. So especially if you're setting up a brand new blawg, a new website, keep the your l as simple and short and clean as possible. Got it Good 7. Image optimization: So I'm back, and now we're gonna be talking about image optimization. So, as I mentioned earlier, Google and the other search engines have trouble understanding what a photograph represents in the way that a human eye does. But their shirt in ways that we can help Google in the search engines. Understand, this is a photograph that represents this object or this person or this thing. Now, if you're only using, etc. Etc. Is going to rename your photographs anyway, so that's a little trickier, but ideally, you should be using your own website in some form. So before you upload your photos to your own website to your blawg to your E commerce pages , I want you to do a few things before you ever put them. When you want ST and the 1st 1 is changed, the file names to be something descriptive that lets the surgeons you know what this photograph is off. So in this example, this is a really awesome photograph from a website called Gratis Ah, graffiti, and it's really cool free stock photography. And this photo is of cute pigs wearing birthday hats. So that's what I should name this photo. Something like cute pigs wearing birthday house. And in between each of those words, I should use a hyphen, not an underscore, not just a space. Ah, hyphen is the easiest way for a computer and for search engine to understand the difference between multiple words and the relationship between this multiple words. So use hyphens between each of those. So we don't want to leave our photograph file names with the name that comes off of her camera with We don't wanna have d sc 12345 or I m g 12345 We want to create really descriptive file names. Now. We also want to save our images for web before we upload them to our website. If you've ever been on a website that loads really, really slowly and it has massive photographs on it, those photographs are probably a really big part of why that websites loading like molasses . Right? So what we want to do is if you've got a photograph that doesn't need to be huge, huge, huge. If you're not using it for some sort of like full with banner image, you're using interest for a product page it doesn't need to be 4000 pixels wide. If it came off of your camera at that resolution, it doesn't need to be that big for your website. Now. If you're gonna be printing these images, say your photographer, you want to sell prints. Keep a version of that image that is the full high rez version. But you also want to save a version that's made for your website to use. That is a lower resolution than is a smaller sides, So I want you to resize these images. Generally speaking, I think there's no really reason right now why you need an image more than maybe 1500 pixels wide. Um, so that's a pretty safe, safe area. There's You can go a lot smaller than that. But generally speaking, you don't need a 3000 pixel wide or 4000 pixel wide image on your website, especially for just a product page. If you're not using it as a background featured photo, you really don't need an image that's that big. So resize those images. First the pixels shrink it, make it make it no bigger than it needs to be, and then I also want you to save for Web if that is a feature that your photo editing software uses. So if you use photo shop, save for Web is definitely in future. I also on Mac, really like a tool called pixel mater. It has a safer Web future as well. It's ah, cheaper photo shop alternative. It doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, but it's great for what I need. There's also tools. Orphan View is a PC version that's a free downloadable piece of software image Opt M is a Mac tool that you can use that just compresses the image. It just smush is all the data from that image and compacts it until, like a tight little box so that it will load faster. So then, once you get all that done, you've named your files in a very descriptive way, and you've compressed them so that they're gonna load fast. You've uploaded your image now for something like if you're writing a blawg post or if you're uploading it to your own e commerce website, you're usually gonna have options to fill in a title text and an all text or an alternative text, and you should fill these in, and you should make them as descriptive as possible and describe what this photo is. Now I'll admit, sometimes I get lazy and just fill the same thing in both boxes. But there is actually a difference between the title text and the whole text, so the title text is a title. It describes the image and in some browsers, if you've ever hovered over an image with your mouths and you've seen a little white box appear next to your your browser to your mouse button that's coming from your title text that can also be really helpful. It's used for a lot of visual impairment tools, so if someone is blind or visually impaired, that could be helpful, because then that information can be read out to them to tell them. That's what this picture on this page is because they have trouble seeing it. So that's the title text. Then you also have the all text or alternative text. That's additional information that described your image. Google uses this field to really help it understand more of what your image is, so that's why this is really important. It's also important to note that this alternative emit this alternative text gets pulled in is someone pins your image to Pinterest, whether you pennant or whether they pin it on their own. That's what automatically gets pulled in as that pin description. So unless they change it, that's what's gonna describe your image on Pinterest. So that's another reason why it's really important to fill in this information and fill it in in a descriptive way. Got it good. 8. Link love!: link Love you remember earlier I talked about how Google and the other search engines use links is one of the main ways to decide what's most important when comparing websites for the search engine results. So let's talk about how to use links on your own website and how to get links to your website. So if you're including links on your own website, that's really helpful because it helps the search engines when you link out to other websites that are relevant and helpful to your users. Helps him understand more about what your page is, what your product pages are, what your websites all about. But it also helps your users if you're linking out to other websites that are helpful to them that help them understand more about something or help them to point to another resource. So if you use links on your own website, I want you to use concise anchor text, so anchor text is the actual words that you're wrapping a link in. I want it to be short and sweet, because somebody needs to understand immediately what they're about to click through to. If you wrap an entire paragraph in a link that's not very helpful. Kind of looks weird, and it's just a bad user experience. So if you're linking to another product page on your eCommerce shop, you've got some awesome handmade soap that your people are already looking at. And then you want a link to a really cute soap trade. So if you're looking at so sure, you could just wrapped the words soap trade and linked to that product page, and that's really obvious. If somebody's gonna click through, that's what they're clicking through to. So that's the anchor text. That's what you want to keep short and sweet and really descriptive. You also want to make sure that that link is really obvious, that it's a link. So if you're ever updating your website in the four matter you of what we're working with the Web designer, you don't wanna have great text and a great link. You want to make sure that that link is some other color or formatted in some way that it's very obvious that links are links that you can click on them. You don't want to create links that are just stuffed with keywords, just for the sake of search engines, and you don't want to link to stuff that it doesn't make sense to link to. This is one of those old school black hat Seo tactics that used to happen, but you don't want to do that because that's bad. So, for instance, if you're just linking to your home page all of the time while wrapping that anchor text in really descriptive keywords, but somebody is just going back to your home page, that's not a helpful user experience. So don't do that kind of stuff. If it feels weird, don't do it. Use links where they make sense on where they would help a real person. Get more information or find another product on your website. If you're linking internally on your own website to other products to other pages, which is great, you totally wanna link internally. That's why Wikipedia is so big. They link to their other pages all the time. If you've ever spent any time on Wikipedia, you'll notice all throughout any page there, linking constantly to other Wikipedia pages. I want you to think about linking internally to, because links also helped ghouls. Bots crawl more of your website so If that search engine bought is going around and discovering all of the parts of the Internet and it lands on your page, it's gonna then crawl all of the links, whether they're links pointing to another website or whether they're links pointing to one of your own pages. So the more ways that you can get them to crawl through your site, the better. If you're linking to your own pages, I want you to have it open in the same browser, same tab, right? Because somebody still staying with in your website, they don't need to leave, and I want you to create this list now. If you want a link to other websites, maybe you want to link to Wikipedia. Maybe you're talking about something that's a little obscure to your users, like they don't know exactly what the history of this thing is, and you want to give them some additional information. If you're linking to another website, I want you to link that show. It opens in a new tab or browser window. If that's an option, it's usually a little check box underneath. Wherever you're creating that link, if it's in WordPress or whatever, your e commerce platform is it's usually gonna give you that option. So just check that that you wanted to open in a new tab or browser window. Now, now that you've got all those links on your website, how our unit links back to your website itself from other places on the Web. So there's some really cool ways to do this. And it's a long game, right? This isn't like a sprint. This is a marathon. It's gonna take some time, but I want you to be thinking about this and how you can create more links to write save while you can get your existing customers to share your website. If your existing customers are awesome bloggers, maybe you can ask them toe link to your website or write a review about your product and linked back to that product page. If you create a company blawg and create really awesome in depth, high quality content, the kind of stuff that people naturally want to share and want to link Teoh that could be a way to help you earn links. You can be news where the and promote your successes, and I'll talk a little bit about more this in the next video about how you can use PR and getting in the news to build links to a website. Also collaborate with other people. Find other people who are relevant to what you do, who aren't direct competitors but who kind of work in a similar field. A similar industry that you can kind of help each other out in a way that's natural and makes sense and is helpful to your customers to your users so you can find these people in linked in groups. Facebook groups, online forums, different relevant communities that air for your specific industry or field. You can also get listed in directories that makes sense for your business. So, for instance, if you have some sort of brick and mortar location, you have a physical retail shop or a physical retail shop that you're listed in. There's directories like Yelp or Google, my business that list all of those local businesses. There might be directories that list specific companies in your industry, right? So if you sell handmade soap, maybe there's a directory of all of the handmade soup creators in the United States or wherever it is that you live, you would want to try to get a link from that directory. And also you want to think about bloggers and influencers. Now, in these days, we talk a lot about social media influencers. There's a lot of people who are only big on Instagram and Instagram, for instance, is not really gonna help you with S CEO. There's only that one link that we have on instagram that comes from our profile. That's not really anything to do with us you, but it's still brand awareness. It's still gonna help your customers find you. Your potential customers discover you great, but it's not directly related to Seo. But if that influence your also has a website, there are Blogger. You could kill two birds with one stone. Maybe they could feature your photos or share your product on their instagram page. That builds brand awareness. But then maybe they could also write a review about your product on their blawg and link back to you. That is gonna help you with S E O. But it all helps you market your product. So I want you to think about who can you be reaching out to? Who can help you build your brand and build links to your website and just get your stuff in front of more people now very quickly. Some really bad ways to build links. Remember Black Hat S CEO and all the bad guys. I don't want you to do these things, but I want you to know that some sketchy people will try to do these things and may ask you to do these things. So tell them that's not what's up. I'm not going to do it. So I don't want you to buy or sell links because it's actually against Google's rules. They have said, Do not do this. I do not want you to buy or sell links if somebody starts asking about that. Also, there's some sketchy things that if you really dive into S CEO, you might start hearing about. There's things called Private Blawg Networks, or PB ends as they like to abbreviate it. Link farms, reciprocal link exchange programs. Now it's one thing if you're collaborating with like minded business owners and linking back and forth to them because what they sell makes sense for your customers. But I don't want you to like get involved in some sketchy thing where you're just linking for the sake of linking, and it has nothing to do with your website and their run say has nothing to do with yours that doesn't make any sense for your customers. So stay away from that. And finally I talked about Web directories, and if Web directories are relevant to your business, get a link from them. But if there's Web directories that are low quality, they just take anybody and everything. There's no theme. There's no rhyme or reason, and especially if they want you to pay to be listed in their Web directory, and it has nothing to do with what you do. Stay away. So that's it, for links will be right back. 9. Digital PR: and now we're going to talk a little bit about digital p R. And what that means is public relations. So this isn't technically a part of S e O, but because we want to build links to our Web, say, this could be a really great way to do it and get the word out about your business in general. And at the end of the day, that's what I care about. Is that more customers or finding you and finding your products and buying stuff from you? So in this day and age of social media and everything, we sometimes forget that journalists out there, whether they're print, journalist or writing for online news sites or TV stations, they still need help finding stories. And if you can be that source that can give them that new hook, that new human interest story, you can get some love back and you can share your story with a wider audience. So I want you to think about great times that you could send out a pressure lease and what the's times might be. Our times when you have something really exciting that would be interesting to a lot of people, and it might be people on a local level. I would really encourage you to think locally about your hometown, your general area instead of nationally. It's gonna be a lot easier to get local press, especially when you're just starting out than it is to get national press. So think about if you have new products that launch now. I'm not talking about just every product that you create, especially if you create one of a kind products. That's not what I'm talking about. You create like a brand new collection. So you're a fashion designer new creating an entirely new collection or if you creating a new product that really ties into something that's going on in the world like a current event or some sort of local seasonal thing, like a festival or a holiday or something if you creating that kind of product, that can be sometimes something that is of interest to lots of people in your community. If you open a new location, stay that you create a brick and mortar store where people can come and buy your products, or if you get picked up by a major distributor, say that you get picked up by West Elmer anthropology or some of these big companies that work with a lot of handmade artists and makers that could be really awesome and a great opportunity. Let your local community know that you're a small time artist from the small town, and you've hit it big on a national level. Journalists love those kind of stories, so that's a great time to send out a press release and let them know what's up. Also, if you've introduced a new partnership or collaboration with another company or another artist, or you're working with a local charity to do something really amazing, that could be another great timeto let people know so that you could help more people, right? Also, if you are rebranding your products, rebranding your company, changing your name, you need to do a press release to make sure that people get the word out and understand that you've totally changed what it is you do. If you've received some awesome award, you should brag about it and let people know. Send out a press release to make sure that your local community knows that you have received this awesome award. You were the best, right? So now that you know, wind to send out a press release toe, let people know what's up. I want you to think about how you're going to do that. So there's plenty of templates online. I'm not gonna get into the down and dirty of how to actually create the press. At least there's lots of information out there. I would also say, if you're not a writer, find somebody to do this for you. You can either find a copywriter locally. There's lots of virtual assistants who can help you with this. Also, you could reach out to a local college or university and find someone in the PR department or the communications department. They would love the opportunity to help you with this. I recently for the live version of this workshop. I had my college intern, who is studying communications. She wrote the first draft of my press relief. Now I went through and proofread it and cleaned it up. You should always proof, read or if you're writing it yourself, have someone else proof. Read it for you because remember, you're sending this out to journalists, to newsmagazines. This is a representation of you. You want to put forth your best effort, right? So now that you've got that press release, you know what? You're sending it out about who you're gonna send it to. So I want you to keep building up a press list. I have been sending out this stuff for a really long time, so I've had a press list that I've been building over time. But if you're just starting, you can comb through the local newspapers blog's that, you know, serve your local community. The TV stations. They often somewhere in there website has some sorts of contact email addresses or contact forms. A lot of the individual journalist somewhere you confined their individual emails, sometimes for a newspaper. The websites won't have this information because otherwise they'll get hit with spam. But sometimes in the print version of a newspaper or a magazine, somewhere in there there's actual email addresses and contact informations. You can dig through that to find all of this can be a really great intern project. By the way, if you found that person from a local college, you can have them help you build this list out really great in turn project. Um, you can also use Twitter to find Journalist Most news news personalities. Most journalists have some sort of Twitter account. Even if you're not using Twitter for anything else, it can still be a work around to get in touch with some of these people and get in front of them. So once you've got all those email addresses the way I format it is. I keep it just in a simple text document. You can get this in a Google drive or whatever, but I just keep it as a list alphabetically organized with a comma after each email address , because I want to be able to drop it into my email tool descended out to those people. Now, don't use something like mail, chimp or constant contact or whatever else you use for your regular email newsletter. Don't use that to send out your press releases. You should definitely have an email newsletter that you send and communicate with your customers. I highly recommend that, but that's a whole separate thing. I don't want you to add these journalists to that email newsletter unless they have explicitly opted in and asked to be added to that regular newsletter, right? This press releases a one time deal, so I want you to send it out in the same way that you would send some sort of other correspondents to one on one to a person. So what I would do is I send it from Mallory at Miss Malaprop. That's my email address. You can evenly, and I send it to myself. So the two in the from field are the same. I sent it to myself from myself and then in the blind cc field. That's where I drop in this big list of all these journalists email addresses, because you never want to be in that situation where your great aunt has sent you this email that a 1,000,000 other people are cc'd on. And you all see each other's email addresses, and it turns into this weird chain email situation. You don't want to do that especially to a journalist. Please be respectful of their time. All right, so that's the how of how you send it out. Once you've got this awesome piece of press, they've picked you up. They featured you in an article. You're on this awesome blogger. This website I want you to check it for accuracy. Now keep in mind pretty much every time I've gotten any sort of press. There's been some little detail that's been slightly inaccurate, but it's usually kind of like a nuanced thing, like I know that it's not exactly what I meant to say, but to the average person, it's still pretty much gonna mean the same thing. You don't necessarily have to follow up and make them change all of that stuff, because again, I want you to be respectful of their time there doing your favor at the end of the day. But if there's something that is a glaring inaccuracy, have them change it, ask them and tell them why it's important that that be changed. That's not correct. Now I also want you to follow up and ask for a link. If they didn't automatically link to your website or your product page or whatever, I want you to see if that's possible for you to get a link. Not all news websites do this. Some news websites have a policy in place that they don't link out. That's just what they dio. It sucks for us, but that's the way it is. But I want you to ask, right, so make it as helpful for them. It's possible, make it is easier for them as possible. And when you ask position in a way that you're asking for this because it will help their readers not because it's self serving, not because it will help you because it will help their reader. So, for instance, if you get featured in a gift guide and it's a Father's Day gift guide and you make a great handmade shaving soap for men, they feature that soap. It's gonna be more helpful to their readers if that reader can click right through from that article and go directly to your product page and by your so because otherwise that readers gonna read about this awesome shaving soap for men. But then they're gonna have to open up a new browser and search for and try to dig around and find it. That's a really bad user experience. So when you ask for this link position in a way that it's going to help their readers and they should want to help their readers and you want to help the readers to, so keep it focused on them and how you could help them, even though you know it's helping you. And then if you get that awesome piece of press, I want you to share it with your own network because that can again be part of that snowball effect. People love it When you are successful, they feel like they're on your side. They could to cheer you on. That's probably gonna be much more viral on social media. When you get some awesome piece of press, everybody's really excited about it. You're gonna get a ton of likes and shares. All your friends and family are gonna be really excited about it to go ahead and share it on social media and then one final resource that I want to mention. If you are thinking more on a national scale, particularly if you're in the United States, I'm pretty sure this is international as well. There's a great tool called Help a reporter out short Shorten is Herro H A R O, and this tools been around for the long time. Basically, what they do is if there are bloggers or journalists or anybody who's looking for a source or information for a new story. They post on there, and they post a description of what the information is, what kind of person they're looking for. Like maybe they need a doctor because they're writing some article about some medical thing that's in the news, right? So they right. Hey, we need a doctor with these qualifications to talk about this specific topic. And this happens all the time for things that are relevant to you, like especially around the holidays or Mother's Day or Father's Day or any sort of gift central colonic. A lot of times, bloggers and news magazines and things they're looking for the best new, unique product or new artist of feature, so that could be a great place to try to reach out and hopefully get your stuff featured Now. It could be really overwhelming because they send usually Monday through Friday, three of these emails a day, and these emails are very, very, very long, with lots of different requests to be prepared. Um, you might not want to subscribe to all of that. You might want to set up a special filter in your email so that all those toe one folder, and then you can just check it every couple of days or so. But it's also a lot of these things have really fast turnaround. So if you do have the time to just check it when they come in, glance over it, see if anything's relevant to you. If it is, respond quickly and if not, delete it. That's a great way to do it. Just know that it can be a little time consuming and a little overwhelming. But if you really want to go hard core into more press, that's a great resource, and it's free. I'll be back in a sec. 10. How Etsy & Amazon are different: So now we're gonna talk about the differences between etc. And Amazon's internal search engine and how that's different than Google Yahoo bing. So the main reason why the search engines air different is because they make money in different ways. So that's why they're going to serve up search results in a differently. So for Google, Yahoo being they make money by selling paid advertisement, those ads at the top of the search results that say at So. The more people use that search engine, the more likely they are to click on those ads, and the more likely they are to click on those ads, the more likely more people are to pay for those ads so they make money when people click when people use that search engine. So in order to keep people using that search engine, they need to serve up really relevant results. Otherwise, somebody is going to go to another search engine and try that instead where they're gonna click on ads over on that other search engine. That's not the way that that scene Amazon make money, etc. And Amazon make money when people buy products right. If somebody buys a product they make a commission, they make a transaction fee. So Amazon and Etsy have a different goal in mind. So they haven't been incentivized to work on that artificial intelligence piece of the puzzle like Google has, because it doesn't really matter if it's the most relevant searcher's old. It just matters if somebody will buy it, and because it's it's something that people will buy. There's a few other factors that come into play for etc and Amazon. So if somebody is buying consistently a certain product or a type of product, they're gonna be more likely to show that product higher in the search results. Because if somebody historically has purchased lots of these products that products more likely to sell than some product, that's brand new that no one has purchased before, right? So that's why you'll see if you ever search on Amazon or etc. Best selling products tend to rise to the top of the search results internally on those on those companies, so if you're already selling stuff you're probably gonna sell more. It's a little bit of ah, chicken or egg scenario. It's a little bit of a snowball effect. There's other things that come into play to like reviews. If you have a lot of reviews on your product page and they're all good reviews, that is helpful information of somebody who's searching and trying to buy a product. That information also send signals to etc. And to Amazon that thoughts of people have bought this. Lots of people have reviewed it. We think it's good, so they're gonna know that more people in the future are likely to buy that product. So that's why it's really important to encourage good reviews and give great customer service so that people naturally want to leave you good reviews on these platforms now, in terms of how etc. And Amazon actually understand the content on your product pages, that's where it gets a little bit more old school. It's It's more like how Google used to be maybe 10 years ago. It's much more literal in terms of the way keywords are. So I've talked about how you shouldn't keyword stuff. You shouldn't just repeat words over and over and over in a way that feels unnatural, and I still don't want you to do that for etc and Amazon. But you can repeat words more still. Try to keep it readable. Try to keep it where it still makes sense to real human person. But you can be a little bit more T word stuffy on those platforms than you can. If you're just doing your regular Web site and thinking about Google, I don't you to think about other variations of words. Think about synonyms and different ways that you would talk about the same thing. But think about the most important words and phrases that people would use to search for that product and include those first and foremost and your product titles. For etc and Amazon. That product title is gonna be one of the most important pieces of the puzzle that you have on the product page for etc. For example, that products title that's used is your title tag. If that product should have been in Google search results, so it's really important. It's also uses an H one tag and is your image poll tax so that products title is used in a lot of different places, so it's really important to get it right. Include all this descriptive words in there. I want you to fill out all of the information field that you have possible if you're selling on Amazon. If you're selling on Etsy, if they've given you, ah, place that we're even fill out stuff, use all of that content that you can because there's certain pieces of it that etc. And Amazon used for their internal search engine. But I want you to also think about Google on the other. Search engines are also using these product pages to Amazon. Specific product pages will show up in the Google search results so well, etc. Specific product pages. So I want you to think about all of the search engines. So that's why it's important to still right really full descriptive information in your product description on etc. You've got this tag features. You've also got similar tag features on Amazon, too. So for those tags, try to think about what those short phrases are that people search on that specific search engine, so for etc. Type in. If you sell a silver earrings, type in silver earrings into that etc. Search engine and look at all of the different variations that people might search for that and include those in your tags Now you've got a character limits. You've got to usually keep it kind of shortened sweets or maybe more like two words. You can probably do four words or something long, but try to use as much descriptive information as you can in those tags. I also really want you to think, especially if you're doing any sort of product that could be used as a gift or think about how your art could be used in a home. For example, if you're doing fine art, think about how it could also be home decor. Think about those other ways that people might use your product instead of just the literal . This is what the product is. Think about how our product would be used in terms of the way that you describe it in your tags and all that good stuff of talked a little bit about why it's important not to build your entire handmade our empire on somebody else's land because you're susceptible to whatever changes it it is that they want to do. I really want you to think long term about having some sort of your own website, even if you still use Amazon or etc. As another platform in another way to find your people. Think about having your own website, though, so wrapping it up, I'll be right back. 11. Conversion optimization: This is the last video. We're wrapping it up. So now I'm going to talk about conversion optimization. This is a big fancy word that basically means get people to buy more of the stuff that you sell. So this is again, not technically, part of search engine optimization. But if there's a ton of people finding your pages in your website in the search engines, but then they're getting to your pages and they're not buying any of your stuff, none of it matters. So that's why conversion optimization or getting more people to buy your stuff is really important. So first off, I want you to think about how you can make it as easy as possible for somebody to want to buy your products. I want you to remove any barriers to entry. Make it super simple. Answer all the questions that they might possibly have. Don't make them have to email you and ask you a question about your product. Answer it right there on your product page or on your shipping and information page or in your F A Q page right. Give them as much information as possible that they would need to buy your product right then and there, no questions asked. I also want you to think about focusing on selling your benefits and not just your features of your product. So this is like selling 101 But this is something that I don't know if it gets talked about all the time, especially if you're just starting out selling your art, your handmade goods. So if you've ever been in a store with, like, a really great hands on sales person, they're gonna be talking about, like how beautiful you would look in this dress they're selling you or how much this awesome blender is gonna change your life. It's going to make your life so much easier. They're not talking about the splendor, has five speeds, and it has these colored buttons. That's not what I care about I care about. Is this going to make it so much easier for me to eat healthy at home if I buy this blender ? Or is this dress gonna make me feel like a movie star? If I buy it and wear it to this awesome party, I'm going to I don't care about like what the seam allowances or what the length of the dresses. I mean, I need to know that information if I'm buying on the line, but ultimately think about how your products are going to make your customers feel if you buy them. Think about the feelings that your customers are gonna have when they buy whatever it is you're selling, and I want you to think about how you can share that information with them now. You still want to include the actual features, especially when you're selling online. You need to give them lots of information. You need to have pictures that are really showcasing what your products are. They help you understand the size of that product. They help you understand how you might use that product, what that product would look like in a home or on a person's body, right? I need visual representation of what the features of that product. R and I need that written down, too. But I don't want you to think only about the futures. I want you to also think first and foremost about the benefits that your products will give your customers no next. I want you think about your calls toe action on what this means is, we're going to tell somebody what you want them to dio and for e commerce. That's gonna be by now. Add to cart. Click here. Order Now. Right now, if you're selling on Etsy, if you've got an e commerce platform, it probably automatically says one of these things. But there's sometimes where you can change what that is. There's also other places throughout the rest of your content where you can help reinforce that one button where they're adding the product to the cartel. They're buying it now. So think about ways that you could encourage customers to want to buy that stuff that you're selling. You don't want to be pushy, but you're gonna help them by getting them to that point of buying the thing that will really help benefit them. Great. Next up, I want you to think about free shipping, so there's some studies out there. A lot of different studies have been done on this, and many of these studies show that most people would buy more stuff if there's free shipping offered. Once that, he said that 73% of people listed free shipping as critical criteria when wanting to buy something online. Another study indicated that 93% of the respondents would buy more products if free shipping was offered. Now, if you have an e commerce store where you're selling lots of different types of products and they're all different weights and sizes, this gets a lot more complicated. But for many artists and small makers, you're basically selling a lot of the same stuff, or at least the stuff weighs about the same. It's about the same size. If you've been selling for a little while online, you probably have a general idea of how much it costs to ship most of your products, especially if you're shipping mostly if you're based in the US and your shipping mostly within the U. S. And Canada often tends to be around the same price for just basic flat rate standard. Every day shipping, you can probably start figure out how you can roll that shipping cost into your product cost. So if your product is $35 it costs $5 in shipping a reasonable time, it's much easier for that customer if they just know it's 40 bucks and it's free shipping, and I don't have to think about what that dollar amounts gonna turn into once I added to my cart. And then suddenly there's this extra shipping charge. It's one and done. It's $40 free shipping. Get it? Got it. Good, right? If you can figure out how to roll shipping into your product costs, even if that makes your total product costs seem more, it's gonna feel better from a customer standpoint. So think about if that's a way that you can roll that in and make people want to buy more stuff because you're offering free shipping and maybe your competitors are. I also want you to think about how you can give people all the information that they need to feel comfortable buying from you. I want them to trust you. So for an artist, your about page your artist bio. This stuff is really important because if people are buying from small, independent companies, they want to know the story behind that small independent company. They want to know why it's so much more important to buy from you instead of Walmart or Best Buy or whatever other company that is right. There's a really unique story about you, and they want to know that. Also contact information. You want to make it really easy. If they do need to ask you a question or get in touch with you, make it really easy for them to find that page for them to find your contact form or your email address. You also want to make any shipping returns and privacy policies really clear and easy to find. Somebody should not have to email you to ask you, Do you take return? They should know that before they ever buy something from you so that they feel safe and comfortable giving you their money. If you have a lot of questions, or if your product is something that's, you know, maybe people haven't used before. Maybe it's something really specific. Create an F A Q page and answer all of those questions that somebody might have remove those barriers to entry make it really easy for them toe by the thing it is that you sell. Also, you can think about trust signals and different seals and accreditations. So if you're a member of the Better Business Bureau, maybe you've seen that on the bottom of big websites, right? Or the credit cards that you accept, like Visa MasterCard, all that stuff or your member of some organization in your industry, like a handmade soap council or something like that. You can put that information on your website to help people know that you're legit. You know what you're doing? You're a really business. You're not some fly by night company that's gonna take their money. And they're never gonna get this thing that they paid for right? Make them trust you, make them understand that they should trust you. You could also think about reviews and testimonials from your customer. That could be another really great way to show your potential customers that other people have purchased from you before. And these new people should totally purchase from you because you do really great work. You deliver on time and you're awesome. Also make sure that people understand what payment options you do accept include that information right up front, Whether it's on one of those shipping informational pages, your F A Q page make it really easy for them to find that information out right? If you accept Bitcoin like I don't know I don't accept Bitcoin, but if you accept Bitcoin, make that really obvious that people know that you take that right, even if it seems obvious, like almost everybody accepts papal. Let people know I accept pay power. I accept credit cards. I want you to also think about up cells and recommended products. So if you're on something like that's your Amazon, they do this automatically. And there's a reason why they want people to buy more products. If you sell one product, that's great. But if you can sell to products at the same time to the same customer, that's even better If you have your own website, your own e commerce store. Most platforms that help you run an e commerce store now have some sort of feature where you can sell up cells. You can sell ad Elin's. You can package things as a gift set where you could just suggest other products that these people would want to buy that are also related to the CART product they're looking at or about to purchase. So think about how you can use those features and thinking about that. I want you to really think about the lifetime value of a customer, right? I've talked a little bit about email newsletters earlier, and that's not what this particular workshops all about. But I really want you to think about. How can you start gathering that information and start having customers that will keep coming back for more over many, many years that you're in business, right? Because it's great to have a customer that comes in and buy something once. But it's so much easier, so much better toe Have a customer that keeps coming back every few months and buying from your every year every holiday season and buying from you again and again and again. Those people are gold to your business. It's so much easier to market again and again to that same person via you're email s view your social media. Then it is to try to constantly finding new customers. You still want to keep finding new customers to, but you want to respect and honor and keep communicating with those customers you already have. So if you can consider subscription services, for example, if you sell something like handmade bath and body products that you would need to replenish those Maybe there's a way to roll that in where people can automatically get them. Think about the dollar Shave Club and those sorts of things that people automatically get this thing that they just need every few months. Maybe there's a way to do that in your business. Gift sets make stuff really easy where somebody can just one and done get a gift for their mom or their friend. Um, think about can you reward those V I P customers who keep coming back and make it make it in their best interest to share what you do with their friends? Can you give them an extra coupon or an extra free bonus item if they send a friend your way? And that friend purchases something from you? That's what do you think about all these different ways that you can keep selling more stuff and making more money and do what you love because there is a way to do it. People have done it, even if you still wanna have that day job or a part time job to pay part of your bills. If you want this just to be a side hustle, I want you to make a lot of money selling your art and making art and selling your stuff. I want you to make our every day. So that's it. Um, if you've got any questions, please reach out a mallory at miss malaprop dot com and I'll keep this update with more information. I've also got my badass creatives group on Facebook. You can join that and I hope you are awesome. Reach out, Let me know what's up and rock cod proof.