We live in a world where there's always incentive to do more.
Write more blog posts for organic SEO
Tweet daily
Create Tiktoks to promote your products
Write unique content for your premium email list
And after a while it just adds up and you're paralyzed with an unending to-do list. I've found that the more on my todo list the less I actually get done. The more I can focus my attention with a clear priority for the day the more productive I am.
Recently I've been looking for ways to cut down my to-do list. Not by evaluating each individual task, that takes a ton of time, but by preventing tasks from getting on my list in the first place. I want to create rules so I know where I should spend my time.
Hello internet friends. Today I want to share some of the awesome SEO work that I've been doing at eCommerceFuel. 🤓
If you're familiar with SEO research, a lot of writers come up with a list of topics they want to write about and then they will search for keywords related to that topic. They'll find a keyword somewhat related to their topic, they'll write about it, and hope that it ranks. 🤞 I call this bottom-up SEO research.
Then there's what I'm calling top-down research. And the hard part is you start the process ignoring what we want to speak about at first, doing all of the SEO keyword research, grouping everything, looking at the volumes (number of searches), and then from that list deciding which keywords we want to write about.
The benefit to doing keyword research this way is you know if you rank well you'll see decent traffic. And it prevents common problems like keyword cannibalization which can happen when you don't make an SEO plan.
Let me show you how I follow this process and how it drives traffic for eCommerceFuel:
Ever since Chat GPT came out at the end of 2022 I’ve seen predictions about content. Some good and some bad. But the general idea is that ‘the cost of content is going to $0”. This is hot-take based on the hype-cycle around a new technology. This prediction doesn’t follow any historical cases, and it assumes that creating content is primarily writing – which it isn’t.
There are some highly relevant historical examples, creating content is more than just writing, and there are fundamental flaws in Chat GPT that humans need to compensate.
I recently developed a content creation process for eCommerceFuel. In my first three months, I built a process that satisfies two primary responsibilities:
Synthesize the most useful content for our existing members from the internal eCommerceFuel Forum
Publish blog content that will attract 7- and 8-figure eCommerce businesses and encourage them to join the forum
There are a surplus of moving pieces involved in research, strategy, and content production, so I devised a process to help me juggle multiple projects at the same time — without compromising quality.
That's because our target persona (7- and 8-figure business owners) demands very high quality content. If we expect to continue attracting the best and brightest to our community we have to hold our site up to a high standard. And, to ensure it remains consistently relevant, we still need to publish at least once a week.
Here, I'll share how we've created eCommerceFuel's new content creation process from scratch.
If you’ve been in the eCommerce industry for a while you’ve probably heard that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels out there. Some stats say that email marketing has a 36X return-on-investment (ROI).
But despite this many eCommerce entrepreneurs neglect their email list and they tend to go cold where your readers forget who you are and what you email them about.
When you have a cold email list, few readers open your emails. Email service providers like Google notice this and eventually funnel more and more emails into spam. This robs your readers the choice to even read your email. That defeats the purpose of the channel.
Today we’re going to explore how you can run a re engagement campaign for your email list. ✉️
Rather than just talk about how to do this theoretically we’re going to share actual numbers as we warm up the email list for eCommerceFuel.
Counterintuitively, by deleting users who will never open our emails deliverability for the whole list will go up and your open rate should increase. (hint: it did for us!) 📈
I’d never experienced anything like it. I was standing inside a real aircraft carrier surrounded by fighter jets while Maverick himself, THE Top Gun, took photos with smiling eCommerce entrepreneurs. With that perfect swagger and smirk I could have sworn Tom Cruise must have taken a break from filming Mission Impossible 8 to schmooze at the Opening Party for eCommerceFuel Live.
Last week over 300 eCommerce Fuel members gathered in San Diego for eCommerceFuel Live. With an exclusive guest limited to business owners who bring in more than seven figures, this is the top event of the year for many of the eCommerce entrepreneurs who attend.
If you’ve spent any time in the eCommerce space, then you know there’s a veritable glut of networking and informational events for online entrepreneurs. But only eCommerceFuel Live gives its guests the opportunity to mingle with the cream of the crop. By making this a private event for the most successful business owners in our already-vetted community, we guarantee each person in the hall is a peer with top tier knowledge and experience in their field.
One of the perks of an eCommerce business is that you can often get started with very little upfront costs. But at some point, nearly everyone with a growing business has to consider financing. A monetary boost empowers you to invest in essential resources for your company, such as inventory, marketing, and technology.
Without adequate financing, your eCommerce business may struggle to compete or fail to reach its full potential. In this article, we will explore the basics of financing for eCommerce businesses, what financing options are on the table, and when you might use each of these financing options to help you grow.
For a year and a half I was responsible for the website and the content on the website at Paid Memberships Pro. And the most important traffic channel for PMPro was organic SEO – basically Google.
To improve our SEO there are two main things we had to do:
Better organize our content
Write new high quality content
PMPro had over 900 posts when I joined so one of my main goals was to organize those posts into useful categories called cornerstone content.
While organizing content, we also had to make new, high-quality content. Over 18 months the team was able to create and update 175 blog posts. That’s over 2 posts per week! 🤯
Today we’re going to review these posts, see which categories and post types performed well, and then discuss how to best adjust the content strategy.
If you are are an eCommerce merchant you've probably heard about fulfillment networks or 3rd party logistics (3PLs). Fulfillment networks like Amazon FBA & Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) are incredibly powerful. If you can afford the cost they’ll store, pack, and ship all of your orders for you.
They handle an entire area of your business for you. For a merchant this is 25-35% of your responsibility. So being able to outsource this obligation and focus on other areas of your business can be massively helpful.
But calculating if a 3PL is worth the cost is complex. Shipping costs themselves are a nightmare of complexity. If you have more than 1 item in your store you will probably just understand the range of shipping costs to get several items from point A to point B. Trying to figure out a fair cost for the 3PL on top of regular shipping costs is challenging to say the least.
And there are challenges beyond just costs. You have to order and send in your products according to their schedule and in their preferred formatting. With all of that overhead switching 3PLs is painful and costly.
So fulfillment networks have some serious costs. But they also allow eCommerce entrepreneurs to live that idyllic lifestyle where you order piña coladas on the beach while your business continues to generate revenue. 🏖
Let’s look at the costs, procedures, and the tradeoffs for two of the biggest fulfillment networks: Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) and Amazon FBA so you have a baseline understanding of when and how you'd set up a 3PL for your own e-commerce store.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of PMPro’s larger strategic focuses. We have hundreds of posts which generate a ton of SEO traffic, but we’re always looking to reach more potential customers. That means we have to increase the organic traffic we get from Google and other search engines.
Our newest tactic to improve SEO is using Cornerstone content. This will better organize our mountain of content, for both website visitors and search engine indexing.
But how do we even know if it’s working?
Unfortunately, SEO is a notoriously slow marketing channel. If you’re making progress, you won’t see it for months. But you don’t have to operate in the dark.
This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in. KPIs measure a critical aspect of your business, to give you a better idea of how things are going. This could be sales calls per day, closed support tickets per week, or (in our case) organic traffic from Google each month.
Note: I changed the numbers to protect my employers data.
When I got the opportunity to create my own marketing team, I wanted to build a system of clear understanding. It would need to give me insight as the manager. But it would also need to give my team information on progress towards their primary goals.
I started with a pretty bare bones KPI sheet in January and kept tweaking every few weeks. Half way through the year this is where my KPI sheet ended up.
Output on the left & results on the right
Today, I'll explain:
How I built this sheet
What insights these KPIs give me
Why you should track both output & results focused KPIs
How you can use my template to build your own sheet
