Many retail merchants feel like using one of the large shopping apps like amazon, Walmart, eBay or Etsy is the only way to grow their business. The problem with these marketplace commerce sites is that they retain ownership of the customer relationship and can shut you down without notice or reason. When your shop is your livelihood this is a pretty scary thought.

When using a site like Shopify which is your website hosting platform for your site, you build and maintain the relationship with your customer and don’t have that fear of losing your site due to marketplace rules. You can still get that marketplace experience by enrolling with the Shop App by Shopify. Today’s episode is all about the Shop App and how you can be part of a marketplace for small business owners who use Shopify to sell their products and services.

Innovation is a big buzzword in the world of corporate business and fortune 500 but we don’t talk about it a lot in the world of small business owners. Small Business Innovation is something we as small business owners can do to differentiate our business, we don’t have to do things the way the competition does them.

One way to get new ideas and concepts for your small business innovation is look at other industries and do cross-industry innovation. Today’s episode is going to introduce you to the concept of cross-industry innovation and how to use it for your small business innovation.

Google Ad Sense announced that they are now following the Coalition For Better Ads best practices for ad placement in 2022. We don’t know what that means yet.

I think the google ad sense update is an opportunity to test out adding ads to a website whether it’s your business website or a blog that is dedicated to earning revenue through ads to start creating content and displaying ads in an ethical way.

In this podcast episode, Im going to review what this update is and give you my thoughts on what this will mean over the next 12 months

Writing effective product descriptions is hard. You want to write descriptions that will help a buyer understand how your product solves their problem quickly. Knowing what people want to see before they decide to buy and how they want to see it can create confusion for a business owner. But Google has given you a guide on how to do just that.

Google’s Best Practices on Writing Product Reviews is also a guide on how business owners can write product reviews that get ranked higher in search which leads to more people seeing and buying your product. We share with you the best practices and how to interpret them for Product description writing.

On August 18, 2022, Google announced a major update to the Google Search Engine that will favor content that is written for People First. The initial rollout will start to take effect on or about September 8th.

For any business owner focused on SEO for a blog, writing helpful content designed to solve a person’s problem, and this is great news. If a business owner has focused on SEO for a blog designed to keep a search engine happy and game the system you will likely see your website rankings fall. In this episode, I talk about what the update is and how to evaluate your content to decrease the impact on your website’s SEO along with a tool that can help you monitor what’s going on.

You dream of having a successful business that you manage from home, but you don’t understand how much time starting and running a new business takes. We only have so much capacity every day. Allocating more time than you mentally have to business unbalances your life and leads to stress, burnout, and business failure. Learn how to define your goals and create a plan with the amount of time you need to achieve them and do it without sacrificing your life, family, and friends.

In my interview with Windy Lawson, owner, and publisher of The 90-Day Slay. We discuss working with home-based business owners to define goals and the time to achieve them. Windy provides great stories to help listeners to understand that you can have everything you want just not all at the same time.

Marketing your business well leads to awareness and leads. If you have a great sales process, you close those leads. Getting really busy and getting more clients can be overwhelming if you don’t have processes for business growth in place.

In my interview today with Jessical Millhiser, we talk about how to create processes for business growth and teams to help with the expansion so that you can continue to grow your business while serving all your new and existing clients.

To have a successful eCommerce website you need people coming to your site and browsing your merchandise. Awareness in search is the number one way to get people to find your site. SEO for eCommerce starts with onsite SEO for your website. You can also increase the SEO of your product listings with a Google Merchant Center account. The Google Merchant Center account provides SEO for eCommerce stores.

Benefits of using Google Merchant Center

-It’s Free
-Integrates with Shopify
-Displays in search, google shopping, and Youtube Shopping
-Add your promotion codes to your listings
-Links with Google Shopping Ads for digital advertising of specific products
-Product listing insights to see impressions and clicks and conversions

If you are a retail business, tracking where your sales come from is important. Knowing where your products are selling tells you where to increase or decrease your marketing spend. In this episode, I walk you through a system for tracking sales leads, using the process that we created for retail sales data analytics capture. This system works whether you are an online retailer, a physical brick-and-mortar store, or a combination of both.

Here is a list of sources we are tracking for referrals.

-Instore sales POS system
-Telephone Orders
-Email
-e-Commerce store front – Shopify
-Digital Ads
-Secondary selling platforms – Etsy, Amazon, Walmart, etc…
-Google Shopping/ Google Merchant Account

In order to grow, you have to have a professional business. Part of looking professional is answering the phone the right way. Small businesses struggle with when and how to add an assistant or office manager because they either lack the funds to pay someone or don’t want to hire a person to do the work.

Virtual Assistant Services like Grasshopper can solve all of these problems. You can look and be professional without having to pay the expense of a full or part-time employee and the paperwork that comes with it. You have all your phone calls answered and tracked for a low monthly cost and see it all on your phone. Today I’m going to talk with you about using Grasshopper and its many benefits.