This is Day 5 of my 30 Day Challenge to start a successful business. I am going to be using Kickstarter, I am going to put it on Shopify store. I am going to do all of that fun stuff. So, if you have not already watched days 1 through 4, check those out, too. In Day 4, I talked about my marketing idea I have for the Kickstarter of reaching out to Influencers in the health, nutrition, fitness space. So far, I have only been reaching out to people that have podcasts and as of this update, I have actually interviewed a few people which has been great. I have interviewed, I believe, so far three people and I am a little bit nervous about announcing this, but I am extremely excited because the ideal person I could interview on my show just confirmed. He has not come on yet. That will be early to mid-January. Dom D’Agostino who is has been on the Tim Ferriss podcast agreed to come on.

So let me tell you the story about how I got Dom D’Agostino to agree to com on my podcast. He has been on the Tim Ferriss. He has been on a lot of very big podcasts. So for him to come on my podcast is a huge honor. So I am going to be spending hours and hours making sure I have great questions to ask him and making sure we have a good back and forth. My hope is that when I tell him the idea of my product, he likes it. And, obviously, if he likes it, in an ideal world, I could get him, or someone like him, an authority figure to do – it does not have to be a testimonial on the product, but (more…)

This is Day 4 of my 30 Day Challenge to start a new company, start a Kickstarter, start a Shopify store. It is a whole new business that I am starting and I am really excited about it. If you have not already viewed the videos on the first three days, I highly recommend doing that. I am a little behind in filming the videos. I have been very busy. Let me give you some updates on what I have been doing. I have got some good news. A lot of really exciting things are going on.

So, the first thing I want to talk about is the marketing strategy I have. Now, a lot of people, I think, when launching a Kickstarter they reach out to Influencers and they say, “Hey, will you support my product? Will you send a Tweet out about it? Will you do this and do that and this other thing for me?” Now, I am flipping this around. Instead, I am asking people if I can help promote then. And the way I am doing this is kind of interesting. I have a personal podcast on How to do Your 20’s. It is a purely fun thing that I currently do on the side. I do not really make any money from it. I just enjoy good conversations. So, what I have been doing is reaching out to Influencers specifically in the health, fitness, nutrition space and asking them, “Hey, do you want to come on my Podcast.” Now, what this does is we end up having an hour long conversation and hopefully if everything goes well, I will develop a decent relationship with this person. Then, at the end of the episode I just mention to them this idea I have. Then, I judge from (more…)

This is Day 3 of my 30 Day Challenge.  I have a bunch of new updates. Obviously, we are only on day three so I do not know how far along I should be, but I am pretty happy. I am pretty happy with what is going on.

So, the first little tidbit – I whipped up two new batches right here. This is the first one. I changed up the formula. It is a little bit creamier in texture. It is a little bit hard to see with all of the lighting. This second one – you can see the little speckles in there – I tried playing around with chia seeds. The problem is my food processor could not grind them because the chia seeds are too small. ­I wonder if I put them in first if I would be able to do it. I might try out chia powder instead. That is a whole new conversation.

So, what else did I do. I had lunch with a friend that happens to own – it is a company called Barnana which does very well. There are in a lot of Whole Foods stores. It is in a space that is kind of similar to what I am in, a food space. Not only does he own this company but he is someone who is in my target demographic. This is huge. I think a lot of people think a lot of people who own companies do not meet with people who are in their target demographic. He is the type of person who would buy my product. He is very healthy, into the ketogenic diet, into hiking and camping and hunting and doing all of this stuff where my product would work perfectly for him. We had a great conversation and (more…)

This is Day 2 of my 30 Day Challenge. For those of you are just tuning into this video, in 30 days I am trying to see if I can start a successful ecommerce store. I am going to launch it on Shopify but it is actually an ecommerce store and do a Kickstarter. I am giving myself 30 days. One of the things to keep in mind though is that what I am doing is I am only working on it one day a week so it is 30 “working” days. I am going to be doing it every Friday kind of like my fun time. Google has what they call 20% time meaning that Google employees are allowed for 20% of the time work on whatever project they want. This is my 20% time project.

So, in this video I am actually going to explain what my company is going to be. I am not going to give all of the details but I am going to give more details. In the first video, Day 1, I did not give almost any details about what I was doing. Which I think is kind of silly. I think I might as well start telling. Plus, I have a lot of cool things that I want to explain and I need to tell you what the product is to do that. So, I am going to tell you what the product is and I am going to tell you what I did for this second day.

One of the first things I did, one of the most important things, is I called a bunch of co-packers. When you are creating a business, a lot of times you do not want to do the manufacturing yourself, especially if you are going to scale or (more…)

In this video I am going to share seven ideas for your content marketing strategy. All seven of these ideas are ideas you could implement in article form, in video form, or whatever you want to do. After I have shared all seven with you, we are going to dive into each one individually and talk about them at length on how you can implement them. Number 1 is a Buyer’s Guide. I think this is one of the best ones because basically you are telling your potential visitors, “This is the thing that you should be buying on my website.” Number 2 is a Roundup Post. This is very powerful, has a very high likelihood of going viral. Number 3 is a How to & DIY Guide. This is great stuff as well. I use this a lot on B Dancewear. This could be used on YouTube or a lot of different platforms very well. Next up is Behind the Scenes. This is something that I do not use a lot but it is another idea that could be implemented very well. Number five is Entertainment & Humor. This is classic. It is one of the most common marketing ideas. Number 6 is Checklist & Tools. We will get into detail as to why this is so powerful later on. Number 7 is Spotlight Marketing. This is absolutely my favorite one. It works just miracles. I will explain why later.

1. Buyer’s Guide
So, number one is the Buyer’s Guide. This can be used I a lot of different ways. But, basically you can get people who are searching for a certain product. For instance, searching for what headphones they should purchase. This is an example right here, actually. “What headphones should I buy?” Well, you could write an article about that. (more…)

Announcements

We have some big announcements and one of the first things we are going to talk about is YouTube inscreens. So, on YouTube, they now allow you to put a little box that says – like right down in here maybe, where at the end of your video you can – actually I think you can do it at anytime during your video, it would have a link to your video and it would show a little segment of the video, all that kind of stuff. It is really cool. I really excited about this because this makes it a lot easier to link to other videos. I am going to try to do an example of that right in here. I am going to hang it right around here. I will do a sample right over there. You will probably see me doing this in a lot of the videos that I do.

Why this is such a big deal is if you do not already have a YouTube channel for your ecommerce business, you should probably get one. I am very bullish on YouTube videos and YouTube channels. I think it is going to be, I mean there already is. It is already been proven to be the future of what people want. Our attention is going away from written text and into videos. Google is really pushing YouTube very hard. There are so many benefits to it. Plus it is a lot easier it is really easy to link to content. It is easy to capture people’s attention and it creates a connection with the viewer. I always talk about this but right now you are watching me, you are hearing me talk. That is way more impactful than if you write an article. Am I right? You probably (more…)

In this video, we are going to talk about how your online business should pay its sales tax. Now, sales tax is a state by state thing. It is not a federal government thing. So, what sales tax you pay in California is going to be different and the process is going to be different than, say, in Illinois, or actually any other state.  So, I am going to tell you how we pay sales tax and then, once again, I am not an account or a CPA. I am not anything like that. So, definitely talk to your tax person before you completely take my advice. But this can be a jumping off point. This is how I understand it and this is what we have done in the past.

So, you only pay sales tax in the place that you are located. So, my business is located in Los Angeles, California, so if someone else in California buys something from us, we have to pay California sales tax. Now, if somebody buys something from us and they live in New York and we ship it to New York, we do not have to pay any sales tax on that purchase. So, let’s make the numbers easy, hypothetically we do $1,000,000 in revenue in 2017, for instance. And, of that revenue, $100,000 comes from people in California buying stuff. We would have to pay sales tax on that $100,000.  So we would say – and once again just to make the numbers easy, let’s say there is a 10% sales tax in California. So, we would give the California government $10,000 and say, “Hey, we had $100,000 in sales. Here is $10,000.” Now, your ecommerce store platform should be able to do this for you. Ours does. So, if you have (more…)

In this video, we are going to be talking about the Facebook Pixel and how to put it on your webpage and what you can do with it. Now, the Facebook Pixel is very important because that is how you can win market spoofing and it also can track goal conversions and things like that. So, there are a couple of different ways on how you can do this.

What we are going to do is go up here and go to Pixels and then choose Create a Facebook Pixel. This is going to be a Test Pixel because I have already created one in the past. Click Create and you will see Test Pixel is Ready.  Now, you can either Email the Pixel Code, that is especially in case you have someone else who is running the website, or Install Pixel Now. So, I am going to choose Install Pixel Now. Now, Copy Code to Clipboard. Okay, I am going to show you how to do it in WordPress and in Volusion. Volusion is what I use, but it is very similar to Shopify. So, if you go down to – for Volusion, click on Design and choose File Editor. Shopify – I would have to show you there how to do it, but I am sure that once I show you here, you will be able to figure it out. So, I am going to my template here. I already have another code. Basically, all I would have to do is paste the ­­­­­code here. Since it started up there, I am going to go ahead and delete this. Normally, I would click Save. I am not going to do that because, as I said before, basically I already have the code right here. If I were to go to (more…)

In this video, I am going to talk about audiences, how to create an audience and also audience insights. Basically, I am going to show you how to create an audience and there are several different ways you can do that. Then, I am going to show you how powerful audience insights are when you are looking for a future particular target and you are looking for what makes people similar. For instance, one thing I am about to do is I am going to upload my customer list and then I am going to look at audience insights.

So, I already have a customer list from a little while ago, but I am going to do a fresh one. Normally you would not have to do that. You could just add to the existing list. But, for the purposes of this video, I am going to create a new one. So, I am going to create a new Custom Audience. Then create a new Custom File. Choose a File or Copy and Paste This Data and choose Email. Go to a File and – Actually, check Copy. It is pretty big so I am going to Copy and Paste.  So, here are my files. I am not going to share too much. I need to go to another screen for the purposes of this. What I am doing, I am doing both the phone number and the email address. You can see their phone number.

I am only going to show the first 20. There are actually around 8,000 or 9,000. Do phone number and email. So, it is uploading. So far, 3,955 rows have been uploaded. Then we have 7,960 and now 9,463.  Then Lookalike Audience. Now, what a Lookalike Audience does is basically –Actually, let’s see – So, let’s do (more…)

Hello, my name is Chase Reiner. Today, I am going to show you the top five things you can do to SEO your website for 2017. This is a guest contribution for the Effective Ecommerce YouTube channel. If you want to find out anything more about me personally, I have a YouTube channel that is devoted mainly to SEO where I talk a lot about how you can do many of the topics we are going to be discussing in this video in more detail as well on that channel. If you want to check it out, it will be in the description.

The first thing that you are going to want to do is make sure that your titles are optimized for whatever search engine you are using really, whether it be YouTube, Google or even Facebook under certain circumstances. You do not want to have just exact match keywords on Title tags these days. You can still have them but you should focus more on LSI keywords. LSI keywords stand for Latent Semantic Indexing. That means the keywords that Google or these other search engines associate their main keywords with. The reason why you use these is because search engines, specifically Google, can better understand what you are talking about when you use other keywords related to your main keyword. So, if you look at something like LSI Graph/LSI Keyword Generator for free to look at your different LSI keywords, you can plug in something like “ecommerce” and it will show us all the different keywords that are semantically related to ecommerce – ecommerce sites, ecommerce website, what does ecommerce mean. So you can have semantic variations in Title tags and still rank your content well without having those exact keywords.

The second best thing you can do for SEO for (more…)