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We have a site, and we are a leading dealer in refurbished printer parts, toners, and inks.

We do business on multiple platforms,

and have an ecommerce site.

Printers New and Refurbished Printers, Accesories, Toners and Parts

as you can see, we use magento, and we do have quite the cash flow.

I want more traffic, more conversions, and more sales!

I want to compete in PPC!

But we need help. We have low capital, low time, and low knowledge.

Looking for help.

Thanks in advance.
#optimize
  • Profile picture of the author serpyre
    We'll just point you to this Google AdWords - some high-end consultants performed some tests and came to exactly the same conclusion as above (these guys design architectures to rank next to the top retailers with Magento). Then you have Business SEO & Technical SEO for organic traffic, the Business SEO are press releases, social media, backlinks and are time based - PPC should (although not any more) counteract lack of time by paying for the traffic. Technical SEO is what the top companies use (via clusters) - you can see information here High Performance Magento Clusters – Nexcess and http://magento5x.vanquishhosting.com/seo - it minimises the Business SEO in varying degrees depending on the underlying hosting provider and architecture.

    After that it becomes product counts, international sales, enhanced product details, inline margin & cogs calculations - they reduce bounce rates. For those you need onboarding tools which automate the process (data mapping, cleansing, loading) and product managers that allow you to manage 10-100x more products (drag drop, inline image editing, data enrichment) instead of data uploads and direct Magento product admin. Basically these are what the large companies use to increase staff productivity, hence why they have greater economies of scale. Tools such as these linking to Magento are rare beasts - normally they are for Hybris or ATG so we were quite fortunate to have acceess to one.
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  • Profile picture of the author kjamesnv
    You should definitely being doing PPC. I am certain that you can find many profitable campaigns in your niches.

    If you don't have the time to do it in house (which is strongly recommended) then have an agency do it. If that's not possible then check out Wordstream.com
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    • Profile picture of the author fey123
      You can promote your site a variety of ways.PPC for paid traffic, SEO for organic traffic. Also you can try the email marketing and social media. Facebook and pinterest can help you more traffic, more conversions, and more sales.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Printer Depo
      How can we do PPC in house? recommendation?
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      • Profile picture of the author kjamesnv
        Originally Posted by The Printer Depo View Post

        How can we do PPC in house? recommendation?
        If you want to learn Google PPC I would recommend a book by Perry Marshall.
        Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access...Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access...
        That book will teach you 95% of what you need to know. The rest comes with experience.

        Start with a small daily budget and watch the reports like a hawk. Make tweaks and adjustments as you get more data. Soon you will have some profitable campaigns and then you can increase the budgets and scale them up for more traffic.

        I believe you can get $75 vouchers for Adwords on Fiverr. That way you can get started for almost free.
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        • Profile picture of the author HappyComputer
          People are telling me this wont be profitable. We spent 50k in adwords one year with our company, and made 75k. This wasnt enough margin to be deemed profitable. Was there something we were doing wrong. These guys up above are saying that its not profitable for even larger companies, they just do it so we don't get the business, or they have the budget to play big dog, and bluff everyone out!
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          • Profile picture of the author dburk
            Originally Posted by HappyComputer View Post

            People are telling me this wont be profitable. We spent 50k in adwords one year with our company, and made 75k. This wasnt enough margin to be deemed profitable. Was there something we were doing wrong. These guys up above are saying that its not profitable for even larger companies, they just do it so we don't get the business, or they have the budget to play big dog, and bluff everyone out!
            Hi HappyComputer,

            Guys like that have been saying things like that for hundreds of years. All they are saying is that big successful companies have more resources and can use those resources for anti-competitive practices. This is nothing new and it will always be an issue in any competitive market. You shouldn't allow that to discourage you because it has always been, and always will be, one of the challenges that every business must tackle.

            You asked "Was there something we were doing wrong?", and the answer is most likely yes. There is so much that you can do wrong in marketing that everyone is doing something wrong at times, and that simple fact can be exploited.

            Marketing is all about math, science, communication skills, and strategy, especially strategy. Once you fully realize what marketing is about you will understand that math and science works equally well for the small business guy as it does for the big companies. If you get the math and science right, develop some decent communication skills, and have the intelligence to craft a superior marketing strategy you can go up against competitors and win, no matter how big they are, as I assure you they will be doing something wrong that can be exploited.

            How well you execute your strategy is the key to success, competence doesn't cost money and isn't limited to only the largest companies, and competence can be the great equalizer. Become an expert tester, optimize your website, your products and services, your advertising campaigns, and your marketing strategy. Do those things and do them well and you are likely to end up one of the big successful companies that your competitors fear and respect.

            One of the key concepts of marketing is market segmentation. Since there are so many different way to segment, you can often find segments that your competitors have yet to consider for targeting. Find unique ways to segment and target for testing and you may well discover missed, or under exploited, targeting methods that yield significant profits.
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  • Profile picture of the author kjamesnv
    If you are in a very competitive niche then yes, PPC can be difficult. But I can tell you from experience that PPC can be VERY profitable if you take the time to learn and optimize campaigns. It not something you can learn in a few days and then forget about. It complicated to get right but its very much worth the effort.

    A big thing people don't understand is that with PPC you pay for each click. So if your site (or landing page or offer) does not convert well it will be difficult or impossible to make PPC cost effective.

    An exercise anyone thinking about PPC should do is calculate how much clicks are worth. A lot of people (perhaps the poster above) make the mistake of paying for clicks that will never be profitable.

    A simple example: lets say your average sale = $100, your conversion rate = 5% and your profit margin is 50%. That means each click generates $2.50 in profit. Therefore it probably doesn't make sense to pay $5 per click (unless you are looking at life time customer value which is a different matter). However if you keep your CPC (Cost Per Click under $1.50 then you should make at least $1 profit per click.

    Of course this is a simple example and there are some other variables but if you understand this concept then you can make PPC work.

    We spent over $500/ day on Adwords alone and its definitely cost effective.
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  • Profile picture of the author serpyre
    @HappyComputer, that last statement of yours pretty much covers it. Look, this is the reality of how it works: 80-95% will look backwards at past results and extrapolate to the future; 5% will be netural and deal with it as it happens; 1% will look forward and see what happens before it does.

    We know some consultants/vc who work at the highest levels of business (forward looking), and they have seen that PPC compared to 2yrs is now a negative ROI unless you are just willing to throw money at it and is a small fraction of your marketing budget. It will take a little while (months to years) for those who look back at past results to see the effects - it may be they have a specific niche, are loss leading the business, funding the business from other ventures, or any multitude of factors. Something that works short term generally has a habit of breaking medium to long term - it just depends how long that short term is.

    The comment about it can work, abolutely, there are always exceptions, the key is are you, most think they are, but most are not. So where do you go from here, Medium & Large Enterprise work a 5-10:1 revenue:effort basis; Micro and Small Enterprise is more like 1:2 or 1:1 (the enterprise companies are squeezing it down every year). If you are desperate to generate traffic and use PPC, you lost, if you use PPC to just augment it works - but not always.

    The stardard marketing budget is 8% of revenue, Amazon.com is 4%, we won't bore you with the whys but a lot of enterprise companies use of Technical SEO combined with Business SEO (Micro and Small enterprise only using business).

    The consultants found PPC is fine for general branding or very selective niche long tail keywords, the rest will drive you out of business. Remember Google make 70% of their revenue via Adwords and a large propotion from smes, their revenue stalled and Pengiun and Panda were released which directly affected smes, co-incidence, who knows.

    You can read this, it is the basis of what we are trying to explain here - http://www.vanquishconsulting.com/bl...rganic-search/

    This is a quote from the discussion - "I recently started a new business, selling accessories for musicians on a dedicated website ( you can check -website removed-). I spent $10’000 for the past 8 months in SEO and adwords. I am working very hard on content. The results are not there, my ranking is not good, I am struggling to reach the first page. I am now loosing confidence in Google, and I am putting it in competition with FB, other search engines or marketing tools."

    Always remember the quote "A fool and his money are soon parted" - is Adwords a fools game except for those in the know which very specific goals or those with deep pockets?
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  • Profile picture of the author bhanusharma
    On-page Optimization –
    Web Site Analysis done in following way – we optimized ->
    1. Keywords Research
    2. Meta Tags
    3. Body tags(H1,H2,H3)
    4. Title of website (70characters),
    5. Image of Website,
    6. Internal link Structure,
    7. Sitemap creation and Optimization
    8. Website Content Optimization
    9. Adding buttons g+, fb, ln, Pintrest code
    10. URL optimization (1024 characters),
    11. Broken Links Check
    12. Response Code Analysis
    13. Geographic Target
    14. Setting Google Analytics Account (Tells – Website Analysis – Like No of visitors, New Visitors, Returning Visitors)
    15. Setting Google Webmaster Account (Tells – crawl Status, Errors, malware)
    16. Page load Optimization


    OFF PAGE TECHNIQUES
    Off page offers organic Link and Natural building or creating Back links for Website
    1. Social bookmarking
    2. Blog Comments
    3. Blog creation and Submission
    4. Article creation and Submission
    5. Online Discussions/Forums
    6. *Press Release*
    7. *Infographics*
    8. Micro Blogging
    9. Profile Links
    10. Directory Submission
    11. Local Listing
    12. Image Sharing
    13. *Video Sharing*
    14. Classifieds
    15. Document Sharing
    16. *RSS feed*
    17. Business Reviews
    Question and Answer
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  • Profile picture of the author DonaldRivers
    If you need more traffic and conversation on your website, then Social Media Marketing is best for you.Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. You can promote your website on diiferent social media sites like, Facebook,Youtube, Twitter etc.
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    • Profile picture of the author HappyComputer
      How would one do that, what is an average cost? How's the ROI? how do i optimize maximize ROI?
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  • Profile picture of the author chapiz
    reduces the loading time of your website. you can use GTmetrix
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  • Profile picture of the author hantoren
    To increase your conversion rate (and build a good list to keep your customers) try some kind of exit-intent popup service like Bounce Exchange, or OptiMonk (free beta).

    Here is an example video demostrating how this technique is used to decrease the bounce rate and increase visitor time, conversion, and opt-in rates. It works with blogs or forums as well, not just with ecommerce sites.

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  • Profile picture of the author serpyre
    You can use Ad remarketing, has a very high conversion rate as you are basically competing with yourself rather than others who are often loss leading the market.
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  • Profile picture of the author peekay
    You do quite a few things right, for example you have broken out of the mould of horrible printer ink cartridge sites.

    Your site looks neat and has a professional design unlike some others I can think of.

    However there are things you should do to improve:

    1. The search box - make it even bigger, think, Amazon, Zappos, etc.
    Site searchers are your best visitors. Site search is massive.

    Go into your Analytics account and compare the % of your revenue coming from visitors who perform a site search vs. those who don't.

    You could bump up your conversions just by encouraging more visitors to search.

    2. Your best offer "SIGN UP TODAY AND GET 5% OFF SITE WIDE!!!!" can easily be missed as it is hidden right at top.
    Move it down into the main body.

    Ink sales thrive on repeat purchases, so emails are very valuable to you for repeat sales, you should do more to get as many contact details as possible.

    3. Use that top part of your header for side-wide information like - telephone support number, live chat (crucial), etc.
    That is where visitors are expecting to find that information now.

    4. Include calls to action on your main rotating banners, like the Lexmark deals,
    what should I do next after reader about it? Where should I go to get the deal?

    5. Include text links to your most popular products just below the main heading.

    6. Your best selling products should be displayed first.

    I would also recommend having a Top navigation in the header (the more the merrier).
    You want to quickly move people off your home page to relevant products they are after.

    7. I don't see any remarketing tags in your source code, it is crucial to get people back to your site for those repeat purchases.

    8. No testimonials, are these deals legit? Prove it with testimonials, Facebook likes etc.

    There is a lot more, see this slide deck for more suggestions - How to grow eCommerce Revenues in 2014

    Send me a private message for more specific information on PPC and in-depth suggestions on traffic, conversions and engagement recommendations.
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    Find out free how CRO can double or triple your conversions, sales & profits in the next 60 to 90 days...
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