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SECURITY
Shopify Store hacked, $24k loss
A Singapore based Shopify store doing $70k-$90k per month in revenue was hacked last month, and apparently, it lost around $24k.
Florist Wendy Han said that she logged in on June 12th to only to discover that her business had zero proceeds for the month.
Apparently, hackers had entered her Shopify account and changed the company’s bank account details. As a result, sales proceeds went directly to the hackers’ account instead.
Shopify investigated this and found that her account had been compromised on May 28th. The losses Wendy suffered stemmed from that single day.
The platform also claimed that the site owners were notified about this incident via email, but Wendy denied receiving any such notification.
Also, it says “Shopify is not liable for any damages or losses incurred as it is the merchants’ responsibility to keep all username and password information secure and confidential”.
All things said and done, the site owners do have a valid point here.
The company should have asked for verification before changing the bank account details linked to Wendy’s store.
The moral of the story? Change your password often and set up two-factor authentication for your accounts to keep them as secure as possible.
Or, even better, use your own custom-built stores rather than relying on an external platform like Shopify.
Complete the look: A scene-based recommendation system
Around 2 years ago, Pinterest launched ‘Shop the Look’ Pins on its platform. These pins allowed users to identify items within any Pin image and connected them to purchase pages for each relevant product.
Pinterest is now extending this system with a new addition called ‘Complete the Look’.
This new feature will provide users with related recommendations based on the products they searched for.
Basically, it’s an algorithm that will broaden its recommendations to visually similar or contextually related products based on a variety of factors.
“Complete the Look leverages rich scene context to recommend visually compatible results in Fashion and Home Decor Pins. Complete the Look takes context like an outfit, body type, season, indoors vs. outdoors, various pieces of furniture, and the overall aesthetics of a room, to power taste-based recommendations across visual search technology.”
While the algorithm is fairly technical to understand, you can read more about the process specifics here.
With this, Pinterest’s systems can now identify more highly relevant product matches based on the context of an image.
The social platform is already leading the social media pack in terms of product discovery. This addition could prove very beneficial for users and help Pinterest to further fuel its growing eCommerce ambitions.
SEO
Just another internal linking tip, just for you!
Here’s a useful and pretty cool internal linking tip that the SEOs and site owners among you might love.
As Steven Kang explains in his post, it’s a systematic way to add content to your power pages while providing contextual internal linking to other pages, but without making your pages look bloated.
Using this approach is a lot easier than looking for the right word from an existing paragraph for contextual anchor text.
How can you implement this?
- Visit Google and scan the ‘People also ask’ section for Q&A type content.
- Rewrite the content around it.
- If a keyword doesn’t trigger ‘People also ask,’ you can go to Answerthepublic.com and collect questions.
- Add a mini accordion style FAQ container on your webpage.
- Create internal linking to other pages.
There are some more tips shared by the community members which can add even more value to your web properties too. Here are a few that stood out:
Stockbridge Truslow suggests using markup from Schema.org for HowTo, QA Pages, FAQ Page to potentially show your content on Google search.
Another good way to build context between pages is to use <blockquote> or <q> tags to quote other sections of your site and add cite attributes to the pages where the text originated.
Brian Schofield suggests adding QA markup to each question. That way the questions appear directly below your SERP listing and take up twice as much real estate. Brian says he’s seen a huge increase in CTR doing this.
Need more details, got any questions or just want to share your own tips with the community? Visit the original post here.
SPONSORED
AWE19 Labs – Intensive content and networking for E-Com, Push, Native and Agencies
Time to lock in your schedule for Affiliate World Europe 2019 in Barcelona and choose which Lab you want to attend (or all if you’re feeling ambitious). Whether you’re into e-com, push traffic, native ads or run an agency, there’s a lab for you.
Each lab includes 2-3 hours of back-to-back speeches and panels by some of the highest performers and thought leaders in the industry and dedicated hour-long networking Mixers for your niche’s marketers and companies. Check them out!
Ecommerce Lab on July 8th from 11:40pm to 2:20pm
- Ezra Firestone – My Scalable Ecommerce Brand Blueprint that’s Generated Over $50M in 3 Years
- Zack Franklin – How Affiliates Are Crushing Amazon
- Oliver Kenyon – 10 Optimization Commandments to 7 Figure Ecommerce Stores
- Paul Kalka – Instagram [WH NUTRA CASE STUDY]: Zero to 80K in 10 Weeks
Push Lab on July 8th from 1:50pm to 4:15pm
- Andrew Payne – Zero to 7-Figures with Push Traffic: My Biggest Profit Producing Insights
- Anton Kornev, KJ Rocker, Erik Gyepes, and Ian Fernando – [PANEL] What’s Working with Push Ads: Offers, Placements, and Optimisations
- Anton Merkulov – Push Ads in 2020: Internal Secrets, Predictions and the Ultimate Campaign Setup
Agency Lab on July 9th from 12:10pm to 2:35pm
- Simon Mader – 5 Mistakes Holding Back Your Agency from 475% Growth in 2019
- Cat Howell – The Exact Funnels I used to Scale My Agency to 6-Figure Months
- Ezra Firestone and Molly Pittman – [PANEL] Train My Media Buyer
- Cat Howell, Simon Mader, and Dee Deng – [PANEL] Agency Owner Hot Seat: Inside Perspectives into What it Takes to Run Your Own Agency
Native Lab on July 9th from 2:00pm to 3:55pm
- Ralf Smilsarajs, Michael Thiel, and Daniel Kampf – [PANEL] Native Ads’ Biggest Lever: Cutting Edge Presells, Creatives, and Copy
- Haran Rosenzweig, Tyler Morrow, and Ervin Hoxha – [PANEL] Pay Bumps & Placements: Leveraging Rep Relationships for Profits
- Daniel Kampf – Foundations of Scale: How to treat each Native Ads Network different for setup and optimization
You’ll find The WTAFF Crew mingling with the attendees at each of these labs and you can get your Affiliate World 2019 ticket right here!
How to stop bad clicks. Daily life moments you should leverage in your marketing
Some tactics to keep low quality clicks away. FB reveals the moments that make a difference in people’s lives, and it could boost your marketing activities.
How to get rid of junk traffic
When pushing traffic to your page through Facebook Ads, you must know that there are good clicks and bad clicks.
The bad clicks are the ones that happen by mistake. The bot traffic, the clicks from people that didn’t find your page interesting, etc. Essentially, all those clicks that will never convert.
We don’t want these clicks, and Bøgdan Alexandru Radu shared a long post explaining different ways to get rid of such low-value traffic.
Let’s dive into them:
- Delay the pixel with Google Tag Manager: With this method, you don’t track visitors that don’t spend much time on your page. This is the easy way.
- Bind key elements to your pixel such as images clicks, filling forms, clicks on buttons etc. Basically, every action that proves engagement from the visitor. Then, optimize these events and create Lookalikes based on them.
- Scroll amount: Whoever scrolls down to the bottom of your page is very likely to be engaged in your offer.. Track the visitors that scrolled 100% of your page.
- Video sales letters: Determine the key moment in your VSL (Video Sales Letter). Define anybody that watches past that point as good traffic.
Use the API from YouTube (or whatever platform you’re using) to identify the actual time the user has watched the video. Create a custom event, optimize, and then create audiences based on this.
- Stalking: Use heatmaps to spy on your visitors and try to understand which elements on your page define a conversion.
- More advanced: Create a custom event that fires every X seconds. This will track traffic on each page and reload when a new page is opened.
Using a heatmap, you can see the behaviors of actual buyers and recognize the patterns. Then, with these patterns, you can create customized campaigns to push prospects towards the same patterns that lead to a conversion.
These are all the strategies shared by Bøgdan. Some good tips to implement in this new week. Good luck!
Moments that matter: FB Series
Facebook shared its 2019 report about “Moments that bring people closer together”.
It’s a report that lists the events that push people to interact and engage on Facebook and Instagram.
This isn’t just about the special events either. In fact, the report highlights smaller events in our daily life that people like to celebrate. These daily celebrations are moments that push them to engage.
Why should you care? Facebook depicts the types of moments that people celebrate as:
- Once a day moments.
- Once a year moments.
- Once in a while moments.
Each one of these represents a chance for you to connect with your audience and build a deeper relationship.
What are once in a day moments? People are turning their everyday habits into moments of interaction: Drinking coffee, commuting to work, choosing an outfit etc.
According to Facebook, marketers should consider that bigger events are made up of smaller actions such as these.
Ensuring that our campaigns and communications relate to these familiar, daily moments can help you develop a stronger connection, and subsequently have a bigger impact.
The report extends to once a year moments (Christmas, Single Day, Carnival, etc) and once in a while moments (Marriage, moving home, birth of a child).
All these moments present marketers with the possibility of establishing a connection with their audience.
But, in order to achieve that, you should know how people feel about each one of these events and what they expect. Facebook addresses all these questions and more in this report.
If you are curious about all these important events in people’s lives, and how to leverage them, you can download the report here.
FROM THE CREW
Email deliverability geek out session
When you’ve sent around 1M emails with an average 41.4% open rate, you probably know a thing or two about email deliverability, right?
Well, The WTAFF Crew, since our humble beginning, has now sent over 1.1M emails. We’ve maintained an average of over 40% open rate throughout (way higher than the 17% industry average).
And WTAFF founder, Manu Cinca, in a conversation with Rutger Thole, shared all the deliverability hacks The Crew uses in order to always hit your inbox.
Every. Damned. Day.
We already talked in the past about how we make the readers open our emails through a subject line creation solid process.
This time, the focus was more on deliverability. Before trying to make our readers open the email, we must first land in their inbox. This is an endless battle against spam filters and clipped emails.
Here are some hacks from the conversation between Rutger and Manu:
- Authenticate your domain.
- HTML size needs to be under 102Kb.
- Emails shouln’t be clipped (usually very long emails).
- Emails should look personal (conversations, no HTML, not many links).
- Drag and drop editor can add too much code, which makes email too big (over 102KB) to land.
- Don’t use spam words.
- Adjust vocabulary: Use different copies on websites, emails, etc.
- Use Glock Apps.
These are the topics discussed in their conversation. If you want to get more insights about email deliverability and you want to get those emails rolling as much as The WTAFF Crew does, just head here!
Did we hit your inbox this time too?
Kind of magic!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
From social media to… what?
Tomorrow, June 18, marks the day that cryptocurrency will start making headlines again.
Why? Because tomorrow is when Facebook will announce Libra, the FB backed cryptocurrency.
This time the project is very serious, and Facebook is not alone in this adventure.
In fact, big companies like Uber, Stripe, and Booking.com and other big names joined Facebook in this bold project. Each one will ponny up around $10M for the development of the cryptocurrency.
If they’re getting involved, it means that they probably think Libra will be a success. Better to put some eggs in the basket, right?
It’s also a chance to monitor Facebook’s payment ambitions.
Well, if three payment service giants are backing this project, it means that the Facebook cryptocurrency has good chances of taking the world by storm.
To all the hodl guys and gals out there that always believed in the blockchain, this might be your moment!
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