March 4, 2018

2 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

All too often, people steal other people’s photos and images without even knowing. Of course, many use other people’s images knowing that it’s unethical and wrong, but in many cases, it’s also downright illegal. Whether someone’s aware of it or not, as a photographer, professional or hobbyist, it’s up to you to go the extra mile to protect your images.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Using Stock Images Without Getting Sued

According to a 2016 survey, 64 percent of professional photographers said they’d had their works stolen more than 200 times, reports Berify. Forty-four percent of hobbyists also said they’d experienced theft. And for every professional photograph stolen and used illegally, photographers and photo agencies lose around $446. So who’s to blame for the lost money and stolen images? Thanks to platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr, bloggers and social media users do the most photo-stealing, followed by commercial businesses and individual professionals.

Related: 7 Tips to Start Taking Product and Lifestyle Photos for Your Small Business Today, According to a Professional Photographer

Unfortunately, image theft is a widespread problem. Compared to any other country, China has the highest number of cases of digital image copyright infringement, with France coming in second and the U.S. in third. Within the U.S., California specifically has the highest number of these cases — the state makes up one-third of the country’s infringement cases.

To avoid contributing to the problem, next time you want to use someone’s image, make sure you’re allowed to. While all original work is protected by copyright law, whether it’s registered or not, every image might have its own level of permission, so it’s important you do your research first.

Related: 14 Amazingly Free Stock Photo Websites

To learn more about online image theft today, check out Berify’s infographic below.

March 3, 2018

3 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Millennials often get a bad rap in the workplace, but the reality is many of these young people are extremely hard workers and willing to make sacrifices to get ahead in the workforce.

To find out exactly what these young people are willing to give up for their careers, financial intelligence company Comet surveyed 364 employed millennials who are single and don’t have children and asked them whether, and to what extent, they would put their work before relationships.

Related: 11 Reasons Talented Millennials Get Fired

For many millennials, it’s about the money. With a focus on their finances, 41 percent said they would end a relationship if it meant getting a major promotion at work. In fact, if offered a life-changing promotion, the average surveyed millennial said they would stay single for 11 years, delay marriage for seven years and wait to have kids for eight years. However, while many millennials might give up dating, when it comes to long-term relationships, it’s a different story. To the contrary, millennials are willing to make job sacrifices for a long-term relationship that has a promising future: Over half of respondents said they would give up a career opportunity in exchange for a long-term relationship and 86 percent said they would move to another city if their significant other was offered a better job.

Related: 10 Lucrative Side Gigs for Millennials Looking to Earn Extra Money

While focusing on their careers is one of the reasons the surveyed millennials said they chose to stay single, some avoid relationships for entirely different purposes. The top reason is because they are are “picky.” Others say it is because they haven’t found anyone or dated much, don’t go out enough or simply haven’t found someone they liked enough to date.

Overall, the study found that millennial men were more willing to make sacrifices for their careers than millennial women. According to the research, it would take men an average raise of $21,000 to choose to delay a relationship, while women said it would take a whopping $51,000 to make the same sacrifice. The same was true for delaying marriage and kids. On average, men said a $37,000 raise would influence them to delay marriage, while woman said it would take $93,000. Millennial women were also less likely than men to end a relationship if it meant getting a major promotion or pass on a long-term relationship if it jeopardized their career.

Related: 8 Ways Any Millennial Can Be a Millionaire in 5 Years

To learn more about millennials and the sacrifices they are willing to make for work, check out the infographic below.

March 2, 2018

9 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In theory, Google Shopping is simple. You upload your products to a feed through Google Merchant Center, connect it with Adwords and voila, your product images and price will start to populate on Google’s search results. 

Related: Why Ecommerce Owners Must Create Google Shopping Campaigns

If you are an entrepreneur looking to get started on Google Shopping, Adwards has a video tutorial that walks you through setting up a campaign in under 5 minutes.

Just so you have a visual representation of how Google Shopping works, below you can see how a product from your website will populate via an image after someone conducts a Google Search for the product name. If you have the right Google Shopping strategy, this can be a lucrative way to grow ecommerce sales.

The issue with Google Shopping is that you lack control, which means you can spend a lot of money without being profitable (unless you follow the hacks below). With Google PPC, you bid on keywords and your advertisements will only populate if people search for those specific keywords. I wrote an article on Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAG) that details how controlled you can get with Google PPC.

Google Shopping pulls in product information from the title of your product along with information on your website, so there are much more search terms that can drive people to your site. Sometimes this can be good, other times, not so good.

Related: Are You Taking Advantage of Google’s Local Inventory Ads?

Here are six hacks that can save you money on your Google Shopping while boosting your profitability. 

1. Optimizing content on your website

Make sure your product titles are strategically selected and the content on the product pages of your website is well optimized.

If you are selling a product from a manufacturer, you’ll want to make sure the title is consistent with what the manufacturer has listed since this will likely be what people search and convert for.

If you have your own brand, it is beneficial to select titles that have keywords with good search volume so people can actually stumble on your product via Google Shopping. 

Having unique content on each product page is an important way to differentiate your brand. If you just copy and paste the same content as a manufacturer or competitor, you could be looking at duplicate content isssues. Google is going to crawl the content on your product pages, so optimize each product page with search terms that can convert.

However, even if you optimize the title and content on each product page, you’ll still drive traffic to your website that won’t convert, which is why the next step on negative keywords is so important.

Related: How to Make at Least $1,000 Your First Month of Ecommerce

2. Negative keywords

I can’t overemphasis how important it is to add negative keywords into each one of your Google Shopping campaigns. This can drastically save you money and increase your performance.

Within your Google Shopping campaign, you’ll want to click on “keywords” and then “search terms” and then segment by “clicks” to see which search terms are eating up the majority of your budget (see below). 

DermWarehouse, an ecommerce skin care brand, was nice enough to allow us to share campaign data for this Entrepreneur article so readers could get a better understanding of the examples we’re referring to. 

Google is trying its hardest to drive people to your site based on keywords on each product page. This doesn’t mean the traffic it is driving to your site will convert.

DermWarehouse sells a popular and trendy brand name Juara. Juara has several products that contain coffee ingredients. Above in the “search terms” report, you can see DermWarehouse converts on keywords pertaining to the brand name Juara (look at the conversions tab). When people searches for just “coffee lotion” they do not convert well. This is an opportunity to add the exact variation of “coffee lotion” as a negative keyword.

If you are having trouble grasping why the search term “coffee lotion” wouldn’t convert for this skincare company, think of how broad of a search term this is. Juara is much more specific, meaning people are deeper into the purchasing funnel when searching for this brand on Google. “Coffee lotion” is more likely an initial search people are typing in, meaning it won’t be as likely to convert. 

Can these more generalized keywords such as “coffee lotion” convert? Absolutely! You have to keep a close eye on your shopping campaigns to monitor what’s converting and pause the poor performers by adding them as a negative keyword. Anytime we see a search term that has over 30 clicks without a conversion, we either lower the bid or add the search term as a negative keyword. 

Related: Set up Your Google AdWords Campaign in 9 Steps

3. Segmentation 

One of the biggest mistakes we see among ecommerce brands is they upload all of their products into one Google Shopping feed and it is a massive free-for-all. 

Sticking with the skin care example, Glytone is a much more popular brand than Juara. This means there are more search terms for Glytone products compared to Juara. If you have one campaign with a $100 daily budget, Glytone would likely eat up 90 percent of the daily budget. Even though Juara isn’t as popular, since it is more niche, it could convert three times higher, which is why it is so important to segment your Google Shopping campaigns. You want all of your products to have a chance to prove whether or not they are profitable for your company. 

I recommend segmenting your Google Shopping campaigns based on the following: 

• Price of product: $10-$29, $30-$49, $50-69, etc. 
• Brands: Juara, Glytone, ClarityRX, Alphaeon, etc. 
• Seasonality: Summer, fall, winter, spring 
• Top sellers 

Below is an example of campaign segmentation for the top 30 selling products for DermWarehouse. In order to find the top selling products, there was prior segmentation based off of each brand. You can see the day I took the screen shot below, DermWarehouse spent $8.16 on this specific Shopping campaign and generated three conversions for $122 in revenue. This is a 14.95x return on advertising spend. While there wasn’t a lot of money spent at the time of this screen shot, you can see how past data is being used to make Google Shopping work smarter so the campaign is profitable. 

Related: Use This Google AdWords Hack to Lower Costs and Increase Leads

4. Proper bidding

In the example above, you can see how there are different bids (default max CPC bids) for each product. You want to make sure you are bidding strategically based on the price of the product along with your profit margin. 

We recommend taking the price of the product and dividing this by your profit margin. If you have a $100 product and your margins are 50 percent (after all expenses), then you are looking at $50 profit. According to SmartInsights, the standard ecommerce conversion rate percentage is 3.78 percent on desktop devices; on mobile devices, it is 1.14 percent (more on mobile bidding to come). You’d want to take $50 and multiply this by .038 to get a $1.90 bid. This is a good starting point! If you can convert above 3.78 percent on this $100 product, you’d be profitable. 

Too often, ecommerce businesses will have the same bid for each product despite a drastic difference in pricing. This is a major flaw that can hold back your profitability on Google Shopping. 

Related: 4 Ways to Squeeze Every Last Bit of Value From Your Google AdWords Budget

5. Mobile bid adjustments

Any digital markter is going to tell you about the importance of mobile. The issue is that mobile has an ecommerce conversion rate of 1.14 percent, less than half of desktop. 

Most advertisers don’t realize that you can reduce your mobile bid adjustment, which will make your Google Shopping campaigns more profitable.

If you go to “settings” and “devices” you have the option to reduce mobile bidding. In the example below, you can see the mobile bid adjustment has been reduced by 50 percent. This has dropped the average cost per click by more than 50 percent on mobile. This is making our budget work harder on desktop, where all of the conversions have come from. While we don’t want to give up on mobile completely within this campaign, we know it isn’t as profitable as desktop and tablet, hence the 50 percent bid reduction. 
 

Related: 3 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Ad’s Clickthrough Rate and Lower Your Cost Per Click

6. Retargeting

I mentioned earlier that the standard ecommerce conversion rate percentage is 3.78 percent on desktop and 1.14 percent on desktop. This means that 97 out of 100 people who are visiting your website are not converting! 

Make sure you have retargeting set up so after someone drops off your site your branded advertisement will continue to be served for up to 30 days. 

There are advanced features of retargeting called dynamic search retargeting and RLSA (retargeting lists for search ads). For starters, make sure to create your first display retargeting campaign so your brand will stay top of mind to people who drop off your site. 

February 28, 2018

4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Standing out is one of the toughest things to do in a crowded market. You are too busy chasing your dream job and wanting to do your passion project for a living that you forget to make money. How do we go about it?

Make yourself equal and make yourself different.

What do others expect from you?

I always tell people to deliver what other people do not expect from you. Back when I was the CEO at Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment, we would tell our athletes to surprise people by presenting themselves in a different manner from how others perceive an athlete normally behaves.We taught the players to make sure they were always the first to hold a door and say “thank you.” A simple action can go a long way.

Challenge others to re-evaluate their perspective on who you are with your unexpected actions. Catching someone by surprise allows us to make a bigger impact on those around us who expected something else. Use this surprise in your favor by making it into a competitive advantage.

Create a competitive advantage.

Surprising people also means that you tend to have a competitive advantage over the rest of the field. You have something different to offer, which helps you to get noticed.

What we want to do before leveraging your advantage, though, is make ourselves equal to our competitors. Show how you possess the same attributes as your competitors, that you are equally deserving of consideration.

Simply saying “I’m different” does nothing to convince others of your value. Prove it. Show them that you have the same skills as your competitors. The same knowledge. The same desire. Then, show them how different you are from the rest.

If you cannot convince someone you are equal first, trying to convince them that you are different becomes more difficult.

See separation in action.

Whether we’re applying for jobs, dreaming about what we want to do next in our career or just meeting people, we want to make ourselves their equal first.

Recently I went into a business meeting and, because of my career history, they were expecting me to act like a sports agent. They were expecting more of what they had received in the past from other people in that industry, one based on greed and insecurity.

I showed up and made myself equal, as I still possess the skills and situational knowledge of a sports agent. But, I also made myself different from other agents they had met before with an abundant attitude. Unlike most sports agents, I believe that there is more than enough of everything for everyone and this approach resonates with people who do not expect it.

Differentiation means success.

Making yourself different means you are more likely to have long-term success.

Renowned business strategist Michael E. Porter teaches us that, “The fundamental basis of above-average performance in the long run is sustainable competitive advantage. Though a [person] can have a myriad of strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis [her] competitors, there are two types of competitive advantage that a [person] can possess: low cost or differentiation.”

Competitive advantage is broken down to two simple things: being cheap and being different. Which would you prefer to be known for?

With a differentiation strategy, a person seeks to be unique in an industry, selecting attributes that others in the industry perceive as important and positioning themselves to meet those needs.

Be the same and then be different.

You must remember to come into a situation humble and make yourself equal first, then get to work on differentiating yourself. Your competition never quits, and neither should you. Your work on yourself needs to be consistent if you want to maintain your competitive advantage. Keep striving to be different, but don’t forget to make yourself equal first.

February 27, 2018

7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Growing any business is, well, tough business. You’ve got your hand in every pot while simultaneously wearing every hat. You’re worrying about marketing strategies, product creation and growth plans, all in the same day.

Related: 39 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate

With so many ongoing tasks, it can be far too easy to let a little thing like digital presence fall by the wayside. However, that would be a grave mistake.

The Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on what exactly makes people want to complete a purchase from a particular website, and the results were a resounding “trustworthiness.” By making consumers feel safe, comfortable and at ease when they visit your online destination, you stand a much higher chance of not just encouraging them to complete a purchase, but convincing them to become longtime users.

A strong website design is paramount in creating this trustworthiness. By presenting an online destination that is straightforward and easy to navigate, users will have a more positive experience throughout your website, making them more likely to complete a purchase. 

So, while things like company transparency, great testimonials, and a solid product are obvious ways to ingrain familiarity to potential customers, website design clearly ranks particularly high when determining if a brand seems trustworthy or not.

In order to stand out from the crowd, there are a few tried-and-true design elements that will transform your website visitors into loyal customers. Don’t worry, I’m not going to say something obvious like “responsive designs” — elements like that are a given.

Related: 10 Steps to Creating an Engaging Digital Experience

Here are five top web design and UX trends that will grow your business fast.

1. Video landing page

Incorporating video into your website design is a no-brainer. I mean, 78 percent of internet users watch videos online every week. 

But, don’t just embed any old YouTube video. Instead, take your website design to the next level by creating a video landing page.

You could target this video to a direct call to action on a particular web page, a la Salesforce. Or you could take a page out of Baesman’s book and create an immersive video that auto-plays on your homepage. Either of these approaches can provide information or drive home the brand’s identity — but both will improve UX and users’ impression of your company as a whole.

Not sold? The proof is in the pudding. According to Vidyard and Demand Metric’s The State of Video Marketing 2017 study — which surveyed 159 B2B and B2C professionals and entrepreneurs — it is predicted that 69 percent of website traffic will be video, while 70 percent of professional participants reported that video converts better than other forms of information and content.

Related: 50 Must-Have Features for Small-Business Websites (Infographic)

2. Parallax scrolling

While digital experiences have no doubt improved many aspects of our daily lives, it has had one negative impact: People are lazy. So lazy, in fact, that clicking a button is often too far out of the realm of possibility.

Enter parallax scrolling.

This uneven-like scrolling effect has combated consumers’ general laziness while remaining engaging and visually appealing. With a simple swipe (a la Tinder), users have easily consumed your information as they make their way down the page.

The popularity of parallax scrolling has also introduced more deep-scrolling and single-page website designs, and renders what information is “above the fold” a little less necessary, since it is easier to see what’s below, too. Ultimately, that makes prioritizing content easier for you to manage and increases your user’s likelihood of seeing everything anyways.

Make Your Money Matter took its parallax scrolling to the next level, with effects spanning an illustrated timeline that goes both horizontally and vertically, ensuring it captivates users.

Related: Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rates With These 6 Design Tips

3. Animated calls to action

Calls to action are a necessary evil in website design. The fact remains that your consumers won’t know what to do unless you explicitly tell them. Many. Many. Times.

However, simply telling your consumers what to do just isn’t enough anymore, either. They’re seeing stimuli and instructions from all corners of the web, so you need a little something extra to help your goal stand out.

Adding a little animation to your important action items might be just the ticket. Whether it’s a micro-mini interaction (such as “liking” a Facebook post and seeing the many reaction animations) or a simple effect to catch users’ eyes, consumers are more likely to execute the action you’re pushing when the call to action grabs their attention and provides confirmation of completion.

Need some inspiration? Airbnb uses its animation app, Lottie, to incorporate subtle graphics animations atop its calls to action throughout its website and app designs.

Related: 4 Ways to Make Your Business Website More User-Friendly

4. Custom typography

Every website needs text, but the days of boring Times New Roman, Arial or any other basic stock font have long-since passed. Instead, take your message to the next level with unique typography that encompasses your brand identity while simultaneously communicating to users.

This unique typography can take many shapes (literally) or be found in different areas of your design. Some brands may choose to utilize this in their logo design, while other businesses (like mine) will sprinkle custom font throughout the entire design to draw attention to important content, like this newsletter signup call to action (below). Ultimately, the choice in how and where you utilize this trend is up to you.

Related: 10 Tips for Web Design That Drives Sales

5. Artificial intelligence

Despite the surge in ecommerce sales over brick and mortar storefronts, people still crave connections, which is likely one of the reasons that artificial intelligence in all its forms is so popular.

AI in website design can take many shapes, but some popular examples include machine learning, personalization and chatbots. Machine learning and personalization are cut from the same cloth to a degree and ingratiate a feeling of “being special” with users that, in turn, fosters brand loyalty.

Chatbots influence user experience much more directly, though. While they provide an engaging element, the biggest draw to incorporating chatbots into your website design relates to customer service. Users can ask questions and receive answers in real time — which is easy to visualize — and acquire information quickly.

Quartz is a stellar example of chatbots within immersive app design. Through a conversational interface and hilarious memes, users are more likely to return to consume the entertaining content than they are to read a boring news article on another app.

Related: 10 Best WordPress Themes to Choose From for Your Next Website Project

By investing in website design, you can cultivate a broad and dedicated consumer base that will use your product time and time again. While there are many more design elements that you can incorporate into your designs, ultimate each choice should:

• Make users feel comfortable.
• Represent the brand.
• Clearly draw attention to important calls to action.
• Give users the information they need to make an informed choice.