There are painful things in life which we put off until we absolutely have to get them done. For me one task I put off until the last minute is gathering information for the tax time. Although I personally like my accountant and enjoy seeing her, it is the process of going through my expenses, income, receipts, etc that I find boring and painful. But, as I know the 2 things you can’t avoid are death & taxes, I deal with my procrastination head on. I make an appointment with my accountant which gives me a hard date by which I need to gather my information. As April 15th is a hard date, I can’t push my meeting with my accountant and try to get in to see her by February the latest.
So what the hell does this have to do with websites and social media you ask?
Good question.
For me the answer to my procrastination is simple, I make an appointment that I can’t get out of. The result is that I get accomplished what I need to. So, my advice for you is to schedule time to work on your website and social media properties. If your goal is to blog once a week, set up a recurring meeting to get this done. Treat it like a meeting though, don’t schedule anything else in that time period. The same goes for social media. Set aside time to work on your social media posts. You will get into a groove and the winner will be you and your company. Although some people find working on their websites, tedious (wait, I do this for a living, thank you!) it is necessary to keep your content up to date to succeed. As you have heard me preach, in this business, stale=fail.
Here is a schedule I recommend for clients:
Remember you aren’t alone in this. Hopefully you have a good web management company to help you, so you can just send them your content and social media updates that they can implement for you. If not, contact us, we are glad to help you.
When dealing with eCommerce, one thing is crystal clear, use the KISS principle: Keep it simple stupid.
First off make it easy to find products. Seems so elementary but I can’t tell you how many times people go to an eCommerce site and can’t find what they need.
Second, if you have add ons, make it simple to add them, either have a dropdown menu or checkboxes on the same screen as the product. I was recently on a client’s website and after you add a product to your cart, you get a popup window (really). Then you can select one of the items. BUT you then have to again hit add to cart. At that point you get another popup and have to again pick an add on and again get a popup. The result is very few add ons.
Third, and the most important thing is the checkout process. People want easy and quick.
As Bruce Lee once said: “In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions. It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.”
So when working on your checkout make the process as easy as possible, either a simple step AJAX checkout or a one page checkout.
If you follow these 3 simple rules, you will have success, provided of course you are selling a product people want. You won’t have abandoned carts, and you will maximize your profits with increased add ons.
The beauty of eCommerce today is that there are many options to choice from. Because there are several which are open source, the cost is low and many times free. If you need help, contact me and I can walk you through some options.
