Product Listing Ads are probably my favorite type of PPC advertising I’ve ever encountered they work just. So great but the question I get extremely often is how do I get more clicks to my product listing ads campaigns and the answer is coming up in just a second hi I’m Travis with effective e-commerce and in this video I’m gonna tell you how to get more clicks to your PLA campaigns it’s a Wednesday which means it’s Q&A day and this is a question I had from one of my private coaching clients and they asked me how do I get more clicks to my PLA ads the great thing about PLA s is they work they tend to convert better than almost any kind of paid advertising that I’ve seen but one of the problems is at the beginning it might be hard to get a lot of clicks to them and there’s a few different answers and some of the answers you might not like as much as others the first one is if you want to get more clicks increase your bit that’s the quick fast and dirty answer but there’s some other things that we should think about here the other way to do it is to add more of your products a lot of people don’t have all their products up on their PLA S or if they do they aren’t properly segmenting them and doing a bunch of stuff I’ll talk about in another episode. So that’s one thing is make sure you have you increase your bids that’s one of the easiest and quickest ways to do it to increase the number of products you have available through your PLA s now the next thing is do you really want to increase your (more…)

In this episode of e-commerce news we talk about taxes because tax season is coming up we talk about some specific things that e-commerce business owners should know about tax season the first tip I have for you guys and this is really the biggest one double check that you’re not missing anything any meals that might be able to be expensed any trips that were in any way business-related really go through look at all your receipts make sure you’re not missing anything because if you’re missing a hundred-dollar dinner that you went to maybe you took a client out that’s a lot of tax money that you could be saving a lot of people want to think about what’s the best tip should I be an S-Corp sure I be an LLC things like that really high level stuff but probably the easiest way to save a lot of money in your taxes is make sure you’re not missing any expenses I recommend having a separate credit card that is only for business expenses have a separate bank account these are really some of the basic things but go through make sure you’re not missing any expenses the next tip with tax season coming up that I have for you guys is make sure that you’re writing off everything that you can do you use your phone for business do you use or going out ought to eat and you are you talking about business are you going on vacation and meeting up with people to talk about business really make sure that you’re not missing anything that you could potentially be writing off I know I’ve done this with my business there’s a lot of things that I wasn’t sure if I could I couldn’t write off and (more…)

In this video I want to talk about what I think is the best social media platform to drive traffic to your online store and hands down right now it’s Instagram in my opinion and it depends on what your niche is. But here’s the deal Facebook has really shut things down the organic reach is just not there. Instagram might be doing this soon but that is a whole other discussion. Right now it’s pretty good at getting traffic and it’s really good for getting engagement so I use a program that likes and follows people automatically. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this in that video but I’ve you let’s say I’ve used it before maybe. I maybe I stopped now and I went to a conference it’s called the Bulletproof Conference and when I was at the conference I had 10  different people come up to me and say Travis it’s so great to see you know how’s everything going. And I said you know I’m like great everything’s going good I have no idea who any of these people were and they said yeah you know you remember you do you recognize me we’re friends on Instagram. I, of course,  said yes I’m like yeah what’s going on but I had no idea so here’s  real people at a conference that’s specifically geared towards biohackers people that would be interested and my Performance Nut Butter product that came up to me and we’re excited to see me because my robot basically liked and followed them that’s power I also will go on there and comment and leave messages for people and like their photos for just like not using the robot actually for myself and you can build some strong relationships I actually met some other people that (more…)

Hey everyone out there in YouTube land! I want to give you an update on Performance Nut Butter my business what’s going on and I did do a video update for everybody that pitched in for the Kickstarter. So I’ll play that in just a second but let me give you some quick lessons learned. One of the big things is everything takes longer than you think it’s gonna take when you’re starting a new company and new product and build that in and even when you think you built in enough you have to build in longer. I’ll talk about more of that in my video everything has had more issues than I thought it would but it’s ok like you work through them along the way so I think with that being said I’m gonna keep this one short. I haven’t been doing a ton for this company because it’s all out of my hands. it’s all in the hands of the companies that I hired to produce the boxes produce the film that the pouches that the nut butters gonna go into then buying the nuts the manufacturer who their job doesn’t start until later but it’s it’s really kind of out of my hands now it’s all just a waiting game I could still be marketing if I wanted to I decided not to because I think my time is better used in some other spot some other businesses that I have but as soon as I get product I’m gonna be diving headfirst into the world of Performance Nut Butter. So I’ll go ahead and play that video that update video it’s gonna be a lot more information on what I’ve been doing for P&B so let’s go ahead and jump to that.  Hey everyone I (more…)

Welcome to the effective e-commerce podcast. In today’s episode we’re gonna be talking about Google shopping ads also known as product listing ads also known as PLA so we’re gonna do a basic tutorial over everything and just like with AdWords I think it’s hard to convey all the subtleties of this over a podcast it’s much easier to do it over video where I have a screen share so I do have on my YouTube channel defective ecommerce YouTube channel I do have a complete tutorial about product listing ads or at least if I don’t have it yet at the time of this recording I will have it up pretty soon so you can go to my YouTube channel to see a complete walkthrough tutorial on that but I’m gonna do my best job on this podcast to explain as much as I can about product listing ads Google shopping ads whatever you want to call them for for the point of this podcasts I’m gonna call product listing ads or PLA s so what are PLA is you might be wondering well I’ve talked about it in previous episodes but just for a quick refresher course if you search something in Google I’m gonna use the example of red blender because I’ve been using red dance pants way too much and I’m just gonna use red blender for right now how at least if you searched red blender in Google and Google what happens is you get a bunch of different results you get a bunch of different things that show up you get a bunch of text results that’ll take you to websites you get a bunch of paid AdWords text results that’ll also take you to websites but at the top if you look there are (more…)

In this video I’m gonna give you seven secrets to starting a successful online store. Let’s get into all seven of the secrets right away so the first one is to Niche Down. This is the number one mistake I see so many beginners make I’ll talk about more I’ll talk about all these later in this video the number one niche down number two Create a Tribe you want to create a group of people that love your brand that would not mean not literally die for your brand but would do whatever it takes to promote your brand number three Influencers. It’s  at the time of their recording this video it’s the new age there’s influencers on Instagram social media all over the place this is the way to sell products currently next up is YouTube. You’re watching a YouTube video right now not only is YouTube great for interesting content fun stuff but it’s also great for getting your brand out there getting your online store and your personality out there because that’s what people want to buy they want to buy you they want to buy from your online store and you’re an individual they’re not trying to buy from this giant company if they wanted to do that they’d go to some other website so YouTube number four number five product listing ads aka Google Shopping this is the best period this is the best way to spend your advertising dollars in my opinion Pierre I mean there may be a few small little things but for scalability this is the way that I get most of my traffic to my website most of my sales come from product listing ads highly recommend this one we’ll talk about more later in this video number six this (more…)

So this is a question I get a lot, “should you quit your job to start an online business?” and the answer is it depends but probably not. I mean if you have a family and you have people to take care of and you don’t have any sales on your online business don’t do it save up some money first and then consider doing it or work on your online business on the side at the same time now. That being said, for some people out there some people watching this video: Yes! The answer is yes you do want to quit your job and start an online business at least that was the answer for me. I have a really good corporate job I mean at least it was good for me as a single guy back when I had that job I was making good money and I quit my job cold turkey. I didn’t have an online business I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do and I wanted to dive into it now the reason I did that was I had a nice little nest egg. I had some money saved up what we call runway. I had two to three years’ worth of runway so I could live two to three years without making a penny and be okay also my worst case scenario was I can go sleep on my parents couch. So I wanted to do that I wanted to burn that bridge I wanted to make it so I had no retreat one of my favorite stories and I don’t know actually how accurate this is there’s the story of this great warrior who went and landed on a new I think it was Cortes which you know I’m not (more…)

In this video we’re going to do a complete review and talk about what ecommerce shopping cart is right for you so there are a lot of shopping carts out there but most of them are outdated not built for e-commerce or just lacking vital features that you need in your business so that leads us with just these three right here so we have Shopify, Bigcommerce and WooCommerce so first off right off the bat I got to tell you there is a difference between hosted and upholstered shopping carts so Shopify and big commerce are very similar they’re both hosted shopping carts which is what you want a self-hosted shopping cart means that you need to either host it on your own computer or your own server or that you need to buy a third-party server which is much more common so you might need to buy Bluehost to run WooCommerce but let’s first off let’s look at Shopify and BigCommerce and compare the two very similar platforms except for in my opinion Shopify is much better it has better templates it’s easier to use much easier to use in my opinion better add-ons and plugins that go right into it and on top of that BigCommerce has a limit if you sell too much you actually get bumped up to the next here so let’s eliminate big commerce from this so now we’re left with really Shopify in WooCommerce and before I go any further I do have links up here and down below in the show notes Shopify bigcommerce both if you use these lengths you get a free -day trial or if you want to go with WooCommerce you are going to have to pay for Bluehost a hosting service so you can use those links (more…)