An excellent Link Building video from the Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing

From: Conversation Marketing embedded with permission.

Its been a while since I’ve blogged and even though the reasons are good, been very busy with projects, a lack of posts on a regular basis isn’t good.

So I’m going to be trying my best to write several times a month with good lists, tips and ProStores help.

To celebrate I’m offering to answer 1 ProStores question per person. This starts now 12-15-09 at 12 noon Est until 11:59 pm Est Thursday the 17th of 2009.

Questions must be submitted as a comment, you must include a link to your ProStores site as well as a valid e-mail so you can receive the notification that I answered your question.

E-mail questions cannot be accepted, you must post them as a comment and I will reply to them on the post.

Follow me on twitter!

Thanks!
Matt

Ever get to the point where you’re out of stock and its been discontinued? Typically you just delete the item or un-check ‘active’ to hide it.

Why is this a bad idea? Because that product has been gathering authority (or Link Juice) from the search engines and if you just hide then boom all that authority is gone and wasted!

Also you then have potential customers coming to your site landing on a page that says “Sorry, no matches were found containing ****** “. This isn’t search friendly, nor is it visitor friendly and people just aren’t patient any more.

I’ve found that a better way to handle it is to keep the product live, keep all the nice content that is bringing you rankings, and create a duplicate Product Detail template that leaves out the tag that adds in the Add to Cart template. This effectively removes the Add to Cart button. You can even replace that tag with “We are Sorry, this Product is Discontinued”.

You will need to assign that new template you created to the product. Open the Product up in your Store Admin and load up the Product Information page so you can see the Basic Information section and look for ‘Product Detail Template:’ and then pick the new product detail template from the dropdown list.

Finally, you find other products that are similar to the discontinued one and add them to the Related section for the discontinued product.

This way you keep the traffic coming in, you send the authority you’ve gathered to products that could use it, and give your customers some additional options.

Welcome to the first post in a series of four.

Today’s video and post will be about Google Analytics filters and how to use them as well as some aspects that are unique to the ProStores/StoreFront environment.

Read more »

This brand new video tutorial will lay out the steps for installing Google Analytics in your ProStores site. Without exception if you own a ProStores store you MUST have Google Analytics installed, if you don’t you won’t be as effective with your site as you could be. Google Analytics provides the data that you can take and use to better understand where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your site, and why they are or aren’t turning into customers.

I hope this video tutorial will help you learn to install Google Analytics in your ProStores site.
Read more »

I’m pleased to present a guest blog by Cindy Runge. Cindy is an active member of the ProStores message board community. Thank you for taking the time to write a little bit for my blog Cindy!

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Internet Success – Reality

The reality of the internet is that you can feel lost in the crowd. Your potential audience is very big, but they don’t know you exist without you telling them. You sell widgets. A lot of people need widgets. There are a lot of places to buy widgets, so you either have to compete by brand, price, quality or shipping speed. You need to follow your competition to find your niche. You have to convey that you have the best darn widgets and be able to explain “why”.

Once you’ve figured out your battle plan you have to implement it. You have to let potential widget owners know "where" you are and "what" you carry and "why" they should buy from you. Once they do buy, you have to make it such an easy experience they want to come back.
Read more »

Next up in my series on how to use Google analytics with your ProStores store we have guest blogger Ian Lurie from Conversation Marketing. Ian writes an internet marketing blog and is presenting a great guide to Advanced Segmentation for Google Analytics. Bring your site up a level with this great ProStores Google Analytics Guide.

Segmentation in Google Analytics from ian lurie on Vimeo.

I encourage you to visit Ian’s internet marketing blog for more great information and a delightfully sarcastic sense of humor.

If you are a ProStores user and don’t have Google Analytics installed in your store go read my Installing Google Analytics in ProStores Guide

Matt

Goal tracking in Google Analytics is important for your ProStores store.

What is goal tracking? Goal tracking allows you to specify particular pages to track, usually in sequence.

In this ProStores tutorial I will be showing you the set up, steps, and an example of setting up a Google Analytics Goal in ProStores.

Lets assume you are already logged into your google account and are at the Google Analytics page and are viewing your ProStores store’s Google Analytics profile.

This example is tracking purchases completed from the Cart all the way to your Order Confirm page in your ProStores store. Read more »

Welcome to the first post in a series of four.

Today’s post will be about Google Analytics filters and how to use them as well as some aspects that are unique to the ProStores/StoreFront environment.

What are filters? Just like on your Brita, filters strain out the unwanted. In the case of Google Analytics, filters can be set up to strain out unwanted information, but can also help to add more information that you can’t see by default.
Read more »

Hey folks, next week, Tuesday, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive and author of Conversation Marketing, a Internet Marketing Strategy blog will be hold a FREE Webinar. Ian is a good friend of mind and really knows what he is doing. You NEED to attend this!

Btw, I’m not making any money or anything like that, I’m just trying to inform all of you that read my blog and want to strengthen your businesses!

Sign up!

From ConversationMarketing.com
Transforming Google Analytics Into Business Analytics
When: 12 PM PST/3 PM EST
Where: Here, on the web, silly

The focus: Making actual, real-life use of Google Analytics to grow your business. No fancy shtuff like advanced segments. I’ll talk about:

* Data overload and how to avoid it
* The 3 factors you really need to track: Profit, Growth and Pipeline
* The system you need to make it work: Configure, Track, Apply
* How to use click value calculation to simplify it all.

I’ll also have Q&A at the end.

Sign up!