Ecommerce Pulse

In today's episode, you'll hear an interview with Richard Lazazzera, an amazing ecommerce entrepreneur who shares his experience with manufacturing products in North America and building a men's fashion accessories brand. Richard has built, bought, and sold multiple ecommerce businesses, and has tons of experience that I'm incredibly excited to share with you.

The exact steps Richard went through when finding a manufacturer for his products and going through the manufacturing process

How he found a manufacturer with a Minimum Order Quantity of only 60 units per style

How he got the manufacturer to take on the risk of buying $15,000 worth of materials up front, rather than taking on that financial risk himself

How he's packaging his product

Richard's top tips for negotiating with manufacturers

The difference in capital required for Richard to start an ecommerce store selling his own manufactured products vs. starting an ecommerce store that sources wholesale products

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

ABetterLemonadeStand.com - Richard Lazazzera's ecommerce blog

Finch Goods - Richard's new brand selling men's fashion accessories

Alibaba - A source for finding suppliers and manufacturers for your products

Maker's Row - A curated directory of manufacturers based in the USA

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

In today's episode, you'll hear another ecommerce coaching session with Matt Ward. Matt recently started an online store selling remote controlled boats, and he reached out to me after hearing about the free recorded coaching sessions that I've mentioned on the show a few times.

Matt and I will be discussing how he chose his niche, how he’s currently getting traffic to his site and building backlinks, and you’ll hear the suggestions that I give him, along with a suggestion or two that Matt was able to give me.

If you’re interested in having a conversation with me about your ecommerce store, getting some free coaching, and being featured on the show, send me a message using my contact form and tell me your story.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

Remotorboater.com - Matt Ward's online store, where he sells RC boats.

Google Keyword Tool (now Google Keyword Planner) - Use this tool to research keyword search volume

/r/ecommerce - The ecommerce subreddit. In case you're not already familiar with Reddit, it's an extremely active community divided into smaller groups (subreddits) based around particular interests. The ecommerce subreddit is a great place to interact with fellow ecommerce entrepreneurs to get your site critiqued, ask questions, and top ecommerce articles.

The eCommerceFuel Forum - A great community of experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs

A few articles about how to advertise effectively on Reddit:

How to advertise on Reddit

How To Advertise On Reddit: My Experience & 9 Ideas for Advertising on Reddit

oDesk - I'm thinking about hiring an Adwords expert on oDesk to help me get things optimized

TrollingMotors.net  & RightChannelRadios.com - Andrew Youderian's ecommerce stores that both have examples of very prominent Unique Selling Propositions in the header of the site

MyBlogGuest.com - Submit a site if you want guest posts, or find guest posting opportunities

Andrew Youderian's strategy for choosing a niche and getting started with ecommerce (free ebook) - Profitable eCommerce

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

In today's episode, I share my written marketing plan for Survival Knife Experts, and then I drill down int...

Today's episode is an audio blog--an audio version of a blog post previously published here on Ecommerce Pulse. This is a bit of an experiment--I'm interested to get the feedback of you, my fantastic listeners, as to whether or not you'd like to hear more episodes like this in the future.

The topic is a challenge that faces every bootstrap entrepreneur: how to make a living while starting your business. It's no easy task to keep bringing home the bacon while also building a complicated, delicate, and needy thing like a business. I've experimented with several ways of doing it, and I've talked with other people who have done it other ways, and I'm sure there are others I haven't thought of. I'd love to hear how you're doing it, so leave a comment below, or even better, join the discussion on the original blog post here.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

The original blog post (5 ways to support yourself financially while bootstrapping an online business)

Zirtual - Work from home as a virtual assistant

oDesk freelancer types - Some of the potential jobs you could get as a freelancer

How to become an SEO freelancer in 48 hours - by Sean Ogle

Leaving Work Behind - Tom Ewer's blog about how to become a freelance writer

Dave's ESL Cafe - Find a job teaching English abroad

Dave Ramsey's budget forms (free PDFs to help you create a budget)

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

In today's episode, we'll be talking about several obstacles that confront us as we go down the road of ecommerce entrepreneurship. These are challenges that I'm facing right now, and things that have been on my mind a lot lately, so I wanted to share them with you. If you want to understand why it's so easy to procrastinate, how to stay motivated and avoid discouragement, and understand other mental challenges that we entrepreneurs face, have a listen! Which challenge stands out to you? How have you handled these barriers? Leave a comment below--I'd love to hear from you!

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

The 4 psychological barriers that you’re facing as an ecommerce entrepreneur and how to overcome them

The “not-sure-where-to-start” barrier

The marginal benefit barrier

The false productivity barrier

The friction/momentum barrier

Links referenced during the show:

The Great PPC Experiment, Part 1 - My recent blog post about using PPC for dropship ecommerce stores

Lift.do

50 actionable ways to build links to your online store

Quote of the week:

“Success is determined not by whether or not you face obstacles, but by your reaction to them. And if you look at these obstacles as a containing fence, they become your excuse for failure. If you look at them as a hurdle, each one strengthens you for the next.”

~ Ben Carson, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

In today's episode, you'll be listening in on a coaching session with Donnie Lawson. Donnie is in the planning stages of setting up his ecommerce business, and you'll hear us talk about the criteria he used to choose his niche, how he's finding suppliers, some tips for how to build credibility when approaching wholesalers as a new business, and tons of other great discussion.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

Out of the Sandbox Shopify Themes (my favorite themes)

The Product Listing Ads Guide

The Google Shopping Shopify App

Other resources mentioned:

The $100 Startup, by Chris Guillebeau

Quote of the week:

"When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say 'wow, that was an adventure,' not 'wow, I sure felt safe.'"

~ Tom Preston-Werner

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

Today I'm joined by Shabbir Nooruddin of BootstrappingEcommerce.com for a discussion of Andy Dunn's article, "E-Commerce is a Bear." The basic idea behind the article is this: Big ecommerce companies like Amazon are like grizzly bears--they are the apex predators who annihilate or consume anything in their path. How can smaller ecommerce companies even begin to compete against Amazon's ferocious price competition and scale?

Andy discusses 4 strategies for competing against Amazon, so Shabbir and I decided to give a summary of those strategies while also sharing our own own thoughts, as well as giving a few real-world examples of ecommerce companies who are using these strategies. Our goal in sharing these tips and examples is to help other small, bootstrapped ecommerce ventures like ours and yours better position ourselves to compete in this tough playing field.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

BootstrappingEcommerce.com - Shabbir's blog

FishFinderSource.com - Shabbir's ecommerce store

SurvivalKnifeExperts.com - My ecommerce store

E-Commerce is a Bear, by Andy Dunn

Andrew Youderian's blog post about selling one of his ecommerce stores, TrollingMotors.net

Woot.com - A site with a "flash sale" model

I mentioned a discussion between Terry Lin and Andrew Youderian about "ambiguously priced products." In our discussion, I mistakenly said that Terry Lin mentioned this on his own podcast, Build My Online Store, but he actually said this on a recent episode of Andrew Youderian's eCommerceFuel podcast. Here is a link to that episode (conversation about product value/pricing starts at about 14:30).

AccessoryConcierge.com - A company that started off doing flash sales on Facebook, build a following of thousands of people, then used that momentum to launch an ecommerce store with a more traditional model.

ManCrates.com

ManPacks.com

RightChannelRadios.com - Another one of Andrew Youderian's ecommerce stores that provides an example of the second strategy discussed on the show (proprietary selection).

JustFab, Shoedazzle, and TrunkClub.com - Ecommerce businesses that use the third strategy we discuss on the show (proprietary experience).

Quote of the week:

Today we'll be discussing the challenges and psychological obstacles that face entrepreneurs like you and me. Lately I've learned a few strategies that have helped me overcome some of these challenges--here's a preview of a few of the topics covered in today's episode:

How to trick your brain into lowering your stress level and feeling more productive

How to start waking up earlier and boosting your morning productivity

The basic ideas behind meditation, and how it can help you focus, be more confident, and be more productive

2 tools you can use to block out distractions like social media sites

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

Tools

Inbox Pause - Put your Gmail inbox on pause to avoid distractions while you work

Anti-Social - Temporarily block distracting sites to remove the temptation to binge on Facebook and Pinterest ;)

Blog articles referenced

10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It

Meditation for Beginners: 20 Practical Tips for Quieting the Mind

Other resources

Mindfulness (Wikipedia)

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (Wikipedia)

How to do mindfulness meditation

Meditation: The Most Fundamental Habit

Quote of the week:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. ~ Reid Hoffman

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

If you're a bootstrapper, you're not going to spend thousands of dollars on professional web designers and marketers--you're going to be figuring all of that out on your own. In this episode, we'll be talking about some basic design principles and easy steps to setting up your own ecommerce store when you're not a designer.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

Design tools

SubtlePatterns.com - Get free tiled background textures for your site

Lipsum.com - Generate lorem ipsum (dummy text) to use as a placeholder on your site

ColorSchemeDesigner.com - Use a color wheel tool to generate ideas for color palettes

Design-Seeds.com - View color palettes based on photos

LogoPond.com - Get inspiration for your logo design

Pixlr.com - A free online photo editor (like a basic version of Photoshop)

Where to get themes for your website

Shopify Theme Store

Mobilia Shopify theme by Out of the Sandbox - My favorite Shopify theme to work with

Hiring tools

Fiverr.com - Get services (like a cheap logo design) done for $5

oDesk - Hire a freelancer

Elance - Hire a freelancer

99Designs - Crowdsourced design

Crowdspring - More crowdsourced design

Helpful Resources

How to take gorgeous product photos - Practical tips for taking your own product photos

A typography tip mentioned during the show:

Use 2 fonts: one serif and one sans-serif. Using too many fonts will make your design start to look cluttered and messy.

Quote of the week:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

~ Reid Hoffman

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!

I've been busy working on Survival Knife Experts, and in this episode you'll hear everything that's been going on with SEO, advertising, and what I've been learning.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

Zite.com - An app that learns your interests and delivers articles you'll enjoy reading

Survival Knife Experts - My ecommerce site that I've been working on marketing

The Backlinking Strategy That Works - with Pat Flynn

PR Powershot - The tool I use to find expired domains with high PR (normally costs $27, but you can get it for free at this link)

Source-Wave.com - Alex Becker teaches his SEO strategy of buying high-PR domains

Open Site Explorer - The tool I use to see the backlinks of my competitors and sites that I'm considering purchasing advertising on

Bartastico - A Shopify app that places a pop-down bar on your site. Can be used to ask for email addresses and integrated with MailChimp.

Quote of the week:

"I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying."

- Jeff Bezos

Subscribe to Ecommerce Pulse in iTunes!