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E-COMMERCE
How competitors can shut your store down overnight. Basic tips for e-comm starters
There’s nothing worse than having unfair competitors… Here’s how to protect yourself from malicious competition. Starting out in e-comm? Depesh and Mo Ali Aguel give some tips on increasing your success rate.
Be aware of this Shopify flaw
Usually, competitors try to beat each other by using innovative marketing strategies, by offering better services to customers, or by lowering their prices.
But in some cases, competitors can stoop low and hit you below the belt. These low blows have the potential to badly hurt your business.
What exactly are we talking about?
Attila O’dree first shared a warning about this in his group. This is a problem that caused him to stop relying on Shopify’s platform and start using custom services instead.
What’s going on?
Basically, when you are running a successful Shopify store, you open yourself up to the danger of someone filing a DMCA takedown request.
If this happens you’ll be forced to remove the products mentioned in the DMCA takedown file. This can happen even if you’ve done nothing wrong!
What’s a DMCA takedown form? DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
A DMCA takedown form is a request to remove certain content from a website because of a violation in copyright laws. Essentially, with this act, the owner of the copyright of a product asks you to stop selling that product because it’s not yours.
Unfortunately, competitors can fraudulently use this procedure to temporarily take your store down, even when they don’t own any rights on the products you’re selling.
This is because, when a DMCA form is filed against you, Shopify will request that you take down those products before actually reviewing the authenticity of the DMCA complaint.
Obviously, you can respond to this procedure, especially if the DMCA takedown makes no sense.
However, Shopify will still ask you to remove the product within 24 hours of receiving the complaint, whether the complaint is valid or not. If you don’t comply they’ll simply remove the products themselves. So, if you were scaling those products, goodbye sweet ROAS!
As you can see, this loophole can be used to kill a competitor overnight. Although, as Atilla says, when you hit back at the person who initially filed the DMCA takedown form, you can hurt him 10x more.
Revenge is sweet, of course, but you still had to remove that product and interrupt your own business activities. Plus, you’ll have to go through the lengthy procedure of responding to that DMCA takedown.
So, what’s the easiest solution?
Attila suggests not using Shopify, and relying on more custom-built solutions instead. If you’re using a custom-built store, nobody can force you to remove the products when a fraudulent DMCA takedown request is filed.
You don’t have to build an entirely new store! You can just move your best-performing products to your own landing pages.
Steve Tan has an easier solution in mind. First, you have to use Shopify direct links and avoid URLs shorteners. In the event that someone DMCAs you, simply hide the product from the store and inform Shopify.
Then, create a new similar product and redirect the link to the new product URL. In this case, you don’t need to pause your Facebook Ads at all.
It’s a jungle out there, but these are some precautions you can take to keep your business protected at all times.
How to increase your chances of being successful with dropshipping
While we’re on the subject of e-comm stores, Ruan Oosthuizen asked a serious question on the Facebook Ads Experts Academy group: How would you give yourself the best chance of being successful with e-commerce?
Among the guys who replied, we found that Depesh Mandalia and Mohammed Ali Aguel gave some very interesting answers.
Let’s start with Depesh’s take: There are many ways of finding your next product and niche: Your passion, Google Trends, product trends, data trends etc.
According to him, you should start with an audience in mind and then find a product that has an emotional trigger attached to it.
In a similar manner, Mohammed Ali recommends finding a problem to begin with, and then choosing a product that provides a solution.
The next step is to increase the perceived value of that product and the AOV (Average order value) and LTV (lifetime value). After this, you just have to nail down your customer avatar and your offer before you can start running campaigns.
Well, some fairly basic tips to get started. Good luck with your e-comm adventures!
SPONSORED
Easily launch your own store to make money like Apple AppStore and Google Play with Digitap!
No doubt you thought about running traffic to your own offer, right? A place where users start loving your brand and come back to it day after day? Right? How about the same model Apple and Google use for their app stores? Especially if you are someone who promotes apps on a regular basis as an affiliate!
You’re probably thinking it’s impossible to develop, you need a lot of money, time, you can’t populate them. We get it…
But maybe it’s time to reconsider those thoughts and have a look at Digitap – instant games platform! With Digitap, in just a few steps, you can create your own cross-platform mobile games store with your own branding!
Here is why most companies fail to launch a proper store:
- No content or industry contacts.
- Zero knowledge in building a successful web app.
- Little knowledge on how ads and paid access systems work on the publishing side.
- Huge infrastructure costs.
- Time: it takes a minimum of 6 months from 0 to launching the first version when building from scratch.
- The need for an in house dedicated team.
…and the list can go on and on. All those problems are solved by Digitap!
If we were to come up with Digitap’s slogan it would be “We bring everything else so that you focus on marketing.” The games, the store, the reporting, security compliance… All this served on a silver platter for you to focus on marketing to acquire users for your own brand! That’s not all…
- Detailed and transparent reports.
- Weekly game updates and new content.
- Games playable offline.
- Notification engine to reach your users.
- Localization engine to publish your marketplace to users around the world.
- GDPR Compliant!
- Ready to go, fast loading web app.
- Custom web app design possible.
That’s just to name a few…
This is the quickest, simplest way to tap into the huge mobile gaming market while focusing on the skills you already have: MARKETING!
One last great thing: You pay per user, so you only pay $0.001 per monthly active user. It’s one of those things where if we weren’t having a blast doing this daily newsletter, we might consider pursuing ourselves.
What do you have to do now? Schedule a demo with Digitap to see how you can easily build your own gaming app store!
SEO
Updated Search evaluators guidelines doc from Google
Google updated its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines for the first time since July 2018.
This brand new version of the document was shared by Keys Jackson in our WTAFF Insiders Group on FB. Can’t access it? Here’s what you have to do.
Here are the key changes Google has made to these guidelines:
Bucketing E-A-T into Page Quality. Google is moving a lot of the documentation in these guidelines away from the term E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) and referring to it as the overall “Page Quality”.
This doesn’t mean that Google is discarding E-A-T. Rather that it’s making more of a distinction between page quality and E-A-T specifically.
Page Quality includes many things that aren’t specifically included in E-A-T. It’s possible to fake E-A-T, but nowhere near as easy to fake overall page quality.
So, this change could be targeting all those “how to fake or make your E-A-T” tactics that are being promoted in the industry. Signals of page quality are harder to fake, especially when compared against other high quality sites.
Author Expertise: The author expertise change applies to non-YMYL pages and is pretty significant. “Your Money or Your Life” pages that could potentially impact the future happiness, health or wealth of the users.
For example transactional pages, pages that offer financial or medical information.
There has been a lot of confusion about how site owners should be showing E-A-T on sites where the content does not “potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.”
This update makes it less stringent for non-YMYL sites to adhere to what they think Google wants to see with E-A-T.
Though, this does not mean that all sites should stop trying to show E-A-T to their site visitors. People do look at these types of signals on pages and sites they visit. So, make sure you are continuing to show E-A-T on all pages and sites, even if it is not a YMYL site.
Interstitials: A stronger demotion in the search results for obtrusive uses of interstitials, especially as Google is moving over to a mobile-only search results index.
Google released an interstitial penalty a few years ago, specifically targeting sites that were using interstitials. You can expect to see sites that use obtrusive interstitials to get hit hard in the search rankings in the near future.
You can download the latest version of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines here.
Newsfeed update for Pages and Group
Two weeks ago, Facebook released two updates to its Newsfeed algorithm. One was meant to prioritize a user’s closest friends, while the other was about prioritizing the links a person might consider most relevant.
On May 31, FB announced another tweak regarding Page and Group posts.
“We know that friends are not the only reason people come to Facebook. Many people come to see the latest from the Pages they follow and the groups they are a part of.”
For this reason, they’re now surveying users on the following things:
- How interested they are in content from a specific Page they follow.
- How important a specific group they’ve joined is to them.
Based on the response from the survey, Facebook updated the News Feed algorithm in order to show people the posts from Pages and groups that they predict to be more relevant.
Here are some indicators of how meaningful a Page or a group might be:
- How long someone has followed a Page or been a part of a group.
- How often someone engages with a Page or group.
- How often a Page or group posts.
However, it’s unclear exactly how Facebook uses these indicators. If a Page posts more, will it get more or less traction in the Newsfeed?
It’s unclear.
The changes to the reach of your post might answer these questions. You can review that data and maybe adjust based on that.
Lead generation email templates
Are you struggling to find new clients for your agency?
P.j. Pahygiannis shared a file containing a long list of cold emails he used to get new clients for his business.
Maybe you have a list of potential customers but you simply don’t know how to start?
Have a look at the guide. You can find many examples that can be adapted to your business and clients.
Besides, there are other suggestions that P.j. Pahygiannis uses when cold emailing:
- Do not add links in the first email you send.
- Use tools like D7 Lead Finder to find businesses’ emails. Also, Instagram.
- Never cold email from your primary domain. Instead, register a niche specific domain. This can help you gain more trust.
The guide is pretty large. Some things are pretty basic, while others are more advanced. Just have a look at it to get some inspiration.
P.j. Pahygiannis also says to not worry about the GDPR. Because “if you send cool emails nobody will complain”. Well, we don’t really encourage this practice, but it’s up to you to make your own decisions…
Video marketing metrics on LinkedIn
According to LinkedIn, users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post.
In terms of paid ads, users now spend 300% more time watching video ads compared to the time spent looking at static Sponsored Content.
For this reason, LinkedIn is improving its measurement options for video in order to help marketers gauge their ad performance more accurately.
A new integration with Moat Analytics has been announced, which will provide additional, third party data oversight to further validate on-platform video data.
It will give advertisers the ability to validate their viewability metrics and traffic quality stats. In addition, LinkedIn is adding in new analytic capabilities, with extra ‘audibility’ metrics.
Moat’s video performance data has become the industry standard, with several other social platforms already offering supplementary Moat data to solidify their metric offerings.
“With a deeper understanding of the viewability and audibility metrics your video campaigns are producing, you’re able to better determine which messages best captivate your audience.
That provides you with a recipe for finding what works and then following that template – rinse and repeat.”
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
How to protect yourself from the summer heat!
Have you ever heard about aerogel? It’s the lightest solid matter you can find on Planet Earth.
Aerogel is 99.8% air, and they are so light that if you removed the air from them, they would actually be less dense than air.
Because of aerogel’s unique structure, its use as an insulator is a no-brainer. It almost entirely counteracts the three methods of heat transfer: Convection, conduction and radiation.
These insulative properties make it perfect for use in aerospace industries and firefighter suits.
Unfortunately, it costs a lot to produce aerogel and companies are racing to find a way to bring costs down. At the moment, aerogels are more affordable for NASA than they are the general public.
Aerogel certainly has a place in our future though. Head to this video to watch some experiments that illustrate aerogel’s crazy properties!
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