Don’t be frugal, be a savvy investor in your marketing & advertising.

You are not wasting money on your website and marketing. It’s an investment over time like your retirement fund. Some marketing decisions might have a negative return like advertising, and some marketing investments appreciate like SEO. Always measure and expect every investment should have a positive outcome. If it does not, measure and find out why.

Every new business we help, we indoctrinate them to focus on testing and measuring. It will piss you off when you lose money. Get used to it. Your competitors lost way more to get to where they are. It’s a part of doing business, and you need to rectify where you’re bleeding the budget. This is why being a measurement expert helps make faster decisions instead of blowing it all on a pipe dream on hearsay from a successful friend and superstition you read about on a blog post. If you can apply, measure, and be patient, you’ll have dividends.

Investors don’t grow rich overnight, they grow wealthy over the long-term.

Form the right business questions.

Why are you going to take this action? Are you just following some second-hand advice from a YouTube video? Are you basing this off experience? It’s easy to start looking for answers to the wrong business questions. Get clear on these as fast as possible.

Everyone judges a book by its cover. Your website doesn’t have to look like apple.com after a new iPhone launch. You have to take your website seriously because high-end websites use the latest features to POP on your screen. Always improve, but don’t over-invest into your brand. Gradually do it over time.

There might be 2-3 questions you focus on a quarter and that’s the length of time it can take to test ideas and patiently wait to recover results. Making decisions in real-time and slow-time takes a great deal of restraint.

Focus on clear taxonomy and organization

Your collections/categories should map to your products, and your products should be clear and detailed. Invest time into the story and give all the details possible. This is where Google Shopping and Google find relevant keywords and improve your Google rankings positions for SEO and Ads.

Organizing your store will help you with your thoughts, inventory, and even your communication. The more aligned all your processes are, the less friction you’ll have. Make it clear to your customers, yourself, and your team. It will make the website feel more fluid for customers, and your team will operate more efficiently because you’re designing it around the website and sales experience.

Start working with influencers

Shopify and YouTube are launching a partnership to enable influencers to feature products and tag them to sell them. Tap influencers in your industry and start engaging their audience with your products. That extra push helps build young brands and helps emerging brands establish themselves in the market.

Before the pandemic, the influencer market was $6.5 billion when Google ads allow is about $134.8 billion both in 2019. Be aware that there’s room to grow, and it’s an emerging market, and big players are creating tools for ecommerce stores to leverage their networks.

It can give you instant social proof!

Just have fun.

If you don't jump out of bed excited to go to work, skip lunch, and have good days and bad days, and wish you can do it all over again and again. It's not for you. You'll have extended hours and sleepless nights, but you're building something that's yours at the end of the day.

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