5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.

5 TIps

* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile

Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.

Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).

So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.

Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.  

Ecommerce Strategy vs. Tactics
Which comes first ecommerce strategy or tactics? Trick question. Doesn't matter as long as you end up swimming in a blue ocean.

Yesterday at the Digital Summit in Charlotte, NC we ran into a familiar problem. "Marty we don't have any content," an growing ecommerce website shared.

I shared the good and bad news. The bad news is developing an effective content strategy takes time, focus and money. The good news is there are things to do in parallel that bring all pieces together such as:

* Create an Ask.

* Begin to CURATE content.

* Curate 90%, Create about 10%.
* Listen and set up Key Performance Indicators to LISTEN better.
* Develop a testing culture.
* Begin the journey to sustainable online community.

Added video notes to explain all of this to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1guIF1

Find video notes on platforms, content curation and community on Curagami's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/tSHeIxtrs4g

Hero Marketing: Compete with Amazon shares passion, customer focus, exponential thinking & need to create movements not promotions needed to win online and how SMBs can compete with Amazon.

WaNeLo.com
WaNeLo.com understands something you don't. They understand there is NO WAY to compete head-to-head with Amazon. Better to shift to a "blue ocean" by creating a highly social, mobile and gamified environment.

As a "mashup artist" WaNeLo.com can create pages that cost pennies, pages that may generate dollars. Are there bumps with this "new age" affiliate marketing? Of course, but, as the pagespread chart illustrates, you don't beat the giant YOU CO-OPT him :).

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

Ecommerce Revolution In 2015
Yesterday we planted a flag stating our intention to create an ecommerce revolution in 2015. Today first objections were heard. Learn why Can't is music to a marketing geeks ears and how you can join the ecommerce revolution so you can say, "Yeah, I helped with that," when others say they wish they could have been there.

Join The Ecom Revolution Today
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google  

Revolution Has Begun, Now Join & Contribute
Are you as frustrated, bored and wanting more from ecommerce as we are? "We" is five marketing, merchants and Magento programmers who know TOGETHER we change the way we communicate, share and sell things to one another.

Learn More
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google 

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

This holiday selling season (2014) will happen as close to real time as any thanks to the social / mobile web. Listening and curating are going to be important, but so is tapping the nostalgia and spirit of the season in creative and collaborative ways.

Ecom's New  Best Practices
Better have all of these if you expect to make money online these days:
* Easy To Get Free Shipping.
* Easy To Find Sale Section.
* Deal of the Day (once Woot.com only now becoming ubiquitous).
* What's New.
* Best Sellers.
* For Him, Her, Kids navigation (if applies).
* An ASK for User Generated Content.
* Clear "WE VALUE UGC" signals.
* Exciting "Magazine-like" content.

Via Tomorrow's Ecommerce: How To Design Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today on Haiku Deck http://shar.es/1nkirc

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

We've named the hard to see new seo The Invisible Giant. Thousands have now seen, interacted with, shared and commented on The Invisible Giant. Have you?

Haiku Deck
http://shar.es/1nCjlP

Curatti Blog Post
http://curatti.com/invisible-giant-hard-see-new-seo/

New Ecommerce Marty (@scenttrail) Note
I love this post sharing tips from a handful of ecommerce experts. I might fall into that category too after a 7 year tenure during which teams I managed made over $30M in online sales.

Our AOV (Average Order Value) was never more than $62 so hundreds of thousand of transaction. When I was hired the site's sales were below a million. When I left annual sales were over $6M.

Those times weren't EASY either, but they are were in comparison to now. Now ecommerce is complicated by:

* Increased competition.
* Muddled channel marketing ROI strategies.
* Social Media.
* Mobile.
* New SEO.

Add all of those new pressures together, all discussed multiple times in the linked post, and the inescapable conclusion is "easy" is OVER in ecommerce.

If you've been looking for a perfect web template for an on-line retail business you came to the right place, because today I'm gonna show you 16 of the newest and coolest e-commerce website templates.

Curagami Score & Ecommerce
At our Startup funded startup Curagami we’ve created a new “super metric” called a Curagami Score”. We combine 11 different metrics from pagespread (number of pages in Google) to inbound links. We also have a few proprietary metrics such as LEI (Link Efficiency index).

Once you know a site’s Curagami Score its possible to create an ecosystem combining ANY website. Once you have an ecosystem you can compare even the most unlikely sites. Why would you want to create such a comparison? Because it’s interesting and informative to know who is “winning the day” in online marketing.

I created Curagami scores for websites from Red Bull to Schwan’s wondering if we could learn even more lessons from the master brander Red Bull (see my Curatti post Red Bull Branding Lessons).

Once we created Curagami scores for six different websites we can add them up and compare the share for each. The pie chart, from my Connection: The New Ecommerce Haiku Deck, shows the results.

One easy deduction? If Zappos and the other Ecommies on our comparison list were to adapt a more Red Bull-like branding approach their online “castles” would grow stronger faster. Zappos was closest the running of the Red Bulls but still a distant second. Look how completely Red Bull dominates their space.

Monster is so far away from Red Bull they won’t catch up in this lifetime UNLESS they disrupt instead of trying to copy and “be like” their bigger brother. Now imagine you knew your Curagami score and your competitor’s. How helpful would it be to know where you are winning and losing online?

Funny, that’s what we were thinking.

I just received an email from a woman who had a bad experience with a photographer in Myrtle Beach, SC and left him a 2 star review. He is now threatening… - Martin W. Smith - Google+

ShopLocket is the easiest way to sell something online. No store to setup, no risk to get started. With ShopLocket selling something is just as easy as embedding a Youtube video. Simply create your product, embed it in your website, Facebook page, or blog post, and start selling!

Ecommerce & The Next Million Bucks
This post explains two critical ecommerce ideas:

* Working in SCALE.
* Diversifying Your Channel Marketing.

Making a million online only takes 10% more effort and money than making $100K so always think in scale. Ask yourself where the next million bucks is going to come from then create a plan to get there (more on the plan when it isn't 2PM I promise).  

The other new ideas contained in this piece are about new marketing channels like the work we are doing on crowdfunding at our #startup http://www.crowdfunde.com.  

Diversified channel marketing doesn't get wiped out by the inevitable ups and downs of online channels. When your marketing is diversified you can sleep at night because you have the TOOLS need to recover WHEN (not if) things go BUMP in the night on one of your channels.  

CrowdFunde & Content Curators
When we started CrowdFunde, our startup to help B2C online retailers and B2B content marketers know how to use content to achieve their goals, we realized we would need a lot of help. As the tool took shape it was clear the guiding hand of a great content curator would be a CSF (Critical Success Factor).

As we explained on CrowdFunde.com great content curators do three increasingly important things:

* Find next generation of trending content.
* Fit seemingly disparate content into an evolving “jigsaw” of themed content curation.
* Help readers, followers and other contributors understand macro concepts.

I've worked with great curators on Scoop.it and the POWER and PRESCIENCE of that experience is why discovering and hiring 10 great content curators (to start) is one of our most important "Launch Goals".

The cool thing is, in many cases, we may be paying a hard working content curator to do what they love and what they are already doing for FREE. While no one is going to get rich on what our little startup can afford to pay there is a lot to be said for being part of a new company, a company dedicated to helping Internet marketers get to know their customers, be able to talk to and learn from their customers.

If you are a great content curator we hope you will APPLY and share our search with your friends.

Thanks, Marty and Phil

APPLY
http://form.jotform.us/form/40948367508162

LEARN MORE
http://www.crowdfunde.com/top-curator-contest-crowdfunde-hiring/

Stop Using Stock
Stop Using Stock & Increase Ecommerce Conversion In 2014
If your #ecommerce  website uses #stockphotography  and you want to make more money in 2014 then stop. This post has ideas for weaning off of stock such as:

* Use @HaikuDeck (http://www.haikudeck.com) to mine creative commons. 
* Ask customers / visitors to share their photos.
* Tell the story of your products (another great plase for UGC User Generated Contests).
*  Embed a photographer (hire a photographer to live in your company for a few days, week or a month). 
* Ask your employees to hellp bet many of them take pictures when I was Director Marketing at Atlantic BT there where three or four GREAT photographers.
* Shoot a lot of video (videos tell great visual stories and are also a great place for UGC see my Scoop on Vidrack http://sco.lt/8ePWtN . 

Netflix data shows "binge watching" is up. How do we create content marketing to encourage a binge?

Creating Binge Worthy Content for Ecommerce sites helps master the New SEO, but the process is different than for B2B because:

* B2C ecom content needs more UGC (User Generated Content).
* Ecom content needs to tell great stories fast so VIDEO.

* UGC needs engagement support so gamification.

* Tribal key for ecommerce, so needs to be highly social.

* Don't like to pull attention away from HERO, so selectively visual.

* Need to curate more "binge worthy content" from UGC and social. 

That last bullet demonstrates the core difference. B2C ecommerce is an act of curation as much as creation. Customers trust each other often MORE than the websites they visit. The more UGC an ecom website has the richer it is.

UGC can take many forms on an ecommerce site such as:

* Reviews. 
* Profiles (MyAccount). 
* Comments. 
* Response to contests and games. 
* Review the reviewer (was this review helpful?). 
* Social shares.
* Blog or social commentary (use only with permission as you will have to rake into your website with an Online Reputation Management tool). 

Stories and content are no less important to an ecommerce website, but there are distinct difference in the type of content that will help and not hurt conversions.