Hello World! (and why I’m starting this blog)

Two weekends ago, I helped a friend in Los Angeles set up a profitable online store in a day and a half.

She has a wonderful brick and mortar boutique and had paid a consultant to create an online store with the branding of her brick and mortar. She was disappointed with the sales results. Since I work on the web, I took a look.

What I found was bad:

Visual design was inconsistent with the brand (colors were off, the logo was pixellated and distorted)

User experience of the site was cluttered and confusing – search was in the right margin, there was no clear action on the homepage. Catalog pages were a little better.

Pages were poorly optimized for web crawlers

Order processing was insecure and highly susceptible to fraud. Credit card info was captured with SSL, but then run manually in store.

So, I pitched to her that we run an experiment. I suggested that if she was willing to spend up to $100 we could figure out if we could set up a better online store that makes her money.

We worked together and set up the store on shopify, I customized a template for her, and uploaded one product line for our experiment. We added a discount code for 10% off. We set up google payments, and google adwords to drive traffic. What I wanted to test is whether or not we could sell these products without removing all of her margin.

And we did make money! It took about a day and a half of work to find that out.

We’re now running a second experiment to see if we can add another profitable product line complete with google ads. Over time, we should be able to reduce the ad spend when google indexes the products and online customers become more familiar with the brand.

This experience is the impetus for the blog. It led me to realize that most people out there don’t really know how to put the pieces together to make a project successful or even which pieces to use. This allows subpar consultants to make a living providing bad service to people who know less than them.

In this blog, Im going to talk about the pieces:
Analytics, Adwords, A/B Testing, Site design, User Experience, etc…

and how to put them together:
Product strategy, Marketing

You too can use the internet for fun and profit! I can help. But, take my advice with a grain of salt – I am not a programmer .