Just a quick note here. Our domain registrar, Tucows, hosted a webinar about selling online when the .store (dot store) top level domain (TLD) became available. I was curious and watched/listened to most of it, the reason being many small businesses have made the shift to selling online, especially during the pandemic. With the growth in number of websites, being found, i.e. search utility visibility, continues to be a challenge. The bigger portals, Etsy, Shopify, and even Google, are doing whatever they can to suck you onto their platforms—the customer and the business person—at the detriment of arriving at individually branded websites.

The takeaways from the two featured speakers:

• A great, short domain name can still be bought on the .store TLD, sometimes your first choice.
• The .store TLD is a clear call to action—no ambiguity that product will be sold on the website.
• Even if you have a store on a portal, it’s important to have your own branding, offering credibility.

One of the speakers, when asked which marketing activities bring in the most revenue, listed them as:

1. Her email list generated the most sales. (My two cents: remind your people to share your email, spread the word, perhaps offering them an incentive.)
2. Live/video/group engagement where you can share specifics and direct people to that nice, short domain name.
3. Social media way down the list.

Interesting article in The New Yorker about historical business productivity:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake

A client recently shared their concern that WordPress with WooCommerce might not be a sufficient platform to support their own growth. A bit of research yielded the following sampling of robust WordPress websites.

Winning WP summarizes a list of WooCommerce sites, noting it’s been estimated “WooCommerce now powers over a staggering 30% of all active eCommerce sites.” Understand that any of the sites mentioned can change at any time.

Better yet, let WooCommerce users tell you themselves in the showcase.

A few non-eCommerce sites worth noting display WordPress’ utility:

• The Harvard Gazette
• Mercedes-Benz
• Bloomberg Professional Services

BBC America the site, and rationale explained in a case study: “Being a part of the WordPress and open source community in general has allowed us to accomplish things that could have only happened with great difficulty if we had to build another proprietary CMS.”

• 50 Notable Examples of Extremely Famous Brands Using WordPress
• 40+ Most Notable Big Name Brands that are Using WordPress

Define your goals

The internet is not only used for marketing, but for a variety of services and commerce, i.e. streamlining operations on an intranet vs. networking your office, supporting the needs of field personnel, posting information that your customers or suppliers use, setting up on-line ordering… [Read more…]