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…)

In this episode of the effective e-commerce podcast we’re going to talk about AdWords this is going to be a basic tutorial on AdWords which to be fair is a little hard to do over a podcast with just pure voice.  so I do have a YouTube video on this if you’re if you’re watching this podcast on YouTube you can click on the link up here otherwise just go to the show notes for this and I’ll have a link there or go do the effective e-commerce YouTube channel and you can see it there but I’m gonna do my best job to explain AdWords using just my voice using just audio. So what is AdWords first off most you guys listening probably know what AdWords is already but if you don’t let me just do a quick refresher a quick explanation of what AdWords is.   AdWords is basically the way of advertising on Google so anytime you do a search and you see ads on Google that’s the AdWords platform basically being used and more specifically there’s a few different types ads there’s text ads, there’s Google Shopping, also known as product listing ads which we’ll talk about in the next episode and there’s also display ads to access any of these all you got to do is log into Adwords so you need to get a gmail account first using you need to get a Google gmail account then you can log in to adwords.com and you can set up all of these. For the purposes of this podcast we’re going to talk specifically about text ads and then the next one will be product listing ads probably won’t talk about display ads anytime too soon because I just don’t think they’re that powerful I think that text (more…)

in this video I’m going to talk about why you shouldn’t use WooCommerce and there is a lot of different reasons why you shouldn’t use WooCommerce now in some situations I do think it makes sense and we’ll get to those later but first up let’s talk about why you shouldn’t use WooCommerce the first thing is it’s not really built for e-commerce it’s based on WordPress and WooCommerce is a plug-in but it’s kind of an afterthought and you’re going to disagree with me a lot of people probably disagree with me on this but it really is WordPress was built for blogging it was built for content management and that was kind of an afterthought that’s why for most people I recommend going with Shopify I mean even big commerce is probably better and I’m not a huge big commerce fan then WooCommerce in a lot of situations some situations I do recommend WooCommerce in fact to be fair I do use WooCommerce on one of my sites we’ll get to that later the other reasons you shouldn’t use WooCommerce is the customization is just not therethere’s not as good a templates as there are on Shopify there are a lot of templates for WordPress but they’re not built once again for e-commerce there’s they’re built for blogging which if your main purpose of your site is blogging sure go with WordPress get the plug-into WooCommerce to sell a little bit extra stuff but if you’re the main purpose of your website is to sell things which it probably is if you’re watching this video then you need to go shopping hands down so some other reasons why you should not go with WordPress you have to host it yourself and it’s more likely to get hacked I’ve had (more…)

In this episode of the effective Ecommerce Podcast we’re going to be talking about paid ads PPC advertisements which basically just means pay-per-click and we’re going to talk about AdWords product listing ads, aka Google shopping ads, Facebook ads, Pinterest, YouTube ads, Linked-in ads, Twitter ads Amazon paid ads a lot of different things I’m going to give you a quick overview of all these we’re not going to get too in-depth because I’m going to do separate podcasts on each one of these the point of this episode is to do a few different things number one help you determine should you be using AdWords Facebook Ads what should you be doing number two it’s going to be helped give you some tips that are general enough for all forms of PPC and I’m hoping that this will be is information dense as possible and give you as many notes to walk away with so let’s start from the very beginning what is pay-per-click advertising basically alit is advertising online or you pay as the advertiser every time someone clicks on your ad to go to your websites you might tell AdWords or Facebook ads I’m going to give you a dollar every time you get someone from my advertisement from Google to my website so if you don’t know already AdWords is Google’s advertising platforms every time you see an ad anytime you do a google search and you see an ad well that is AdWords basically it’s also includes display ads which I won’t talk about too much because I don’t think they’re the best for most forms of Ecommerce I think they’re great if you’re doing remarketing but I don’t think they’re the best for most cold traffic so that’s the first thing so let’s talk about (more…)