Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review

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Magento 1.3 Sales Tactic CookbookThis is the third Magento book I have reviewed at this blog. The first book took a beginner through the basics of adding products to and running a Magento store and not much more. The second book was for Magento Developers interested in extending Magento’s functionality. So both of those books covered the “build it” part of running an online store with Magento. And this book covered the “and they will come” part of running your store.

And believe me the work has just begun once your store is up and running. Now you have to make sales. The great part about having an online store is that you can market it quicker and more cost effectively than a brick and mortar store. The bad part is that it is hard to know where to begin. But you have to begin.

The most common issue I run into when someone is wondering why they aren’t getting any sales is that they just aren’t doing anything to promote their sites, get links to it or interact with their customers. And Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook gives you the tools to get started on a marketing plan for your ecommerce site and hopefully with them, you can stick with it.

The SEO Part

One point brought up in the book was you optimize a page and not a site. The Sales Tactics Cookbook goes over the basics of fleshing out your product pages completely from product title to meta tags. Magento has a lot of places to add your keywords and the product pages have a lot of options. Don’t just skip through them. Use them to your advantage.

The book also goes through customizing the title of pages throughout your site in the Magento configuration menu. Every store owner’s first thought is to put the name of their store on every page title. This is definitely a good practice, but the importance of your store’s name depends on whether people search for it by name and whether that name is descriptive of the products you sell. Page titles hold valuable keyword real estate and if you can find common search terms to fit in there with your store name that describes what you do, you may be surprised at the results.

You will also learn how to create and submit your sitemap to Google. A sitemap is a file that tells Google where every page on your site is. It doesn’t really help with SEO but it does help Google pick up and index your newly optimized pages quicker. With Magento, you can cron your sitemap generation so that your store automatically generates a sitemap for Google and the other search engines every day or every week.

The Sales Tactics Cookbook also walk you through adding your products to Google Base and a few things you can do to make your products more visible there. Google Base and other shopping sites can bring you a lot of customers if you do it right. You are not going to be an SEO master after reading the book but you will know where to go and what to do in Magento to edit the data that will affect your rank in Google. After all, books 3 times this size have been written on just SEO.

The Landing Pages

I have shopped online for a long time. I do compare prices and tend to find the best price on things. But I also pass judgement on the sites I buy from. It doesn’t take long. A few seconds. If your site is inviting, well laid out and up to date graphically, I hang around longer and don’t second guess checking out. If your site looks like it has needed a design update about 10 years ago, then I go into security mode. Anything a bit off in the store and I am looking elsewhere first.

If you are selling online, look like it. The Cookbook will walk you through making your online store an inviting place for your customers. It will walk you through adding videos to your store, optimizing product images and using all 4 of Magento default page layouts. You will also learn how to use Magento’s CMS system to create landing pages, linkbait pages and customer service pages. Even if you are using one of the default Magento themes, you can still create an attractive store and there is no end of customizations you have available.

The Social Media Part

The internet is full of buzzwords like social media that make you think you are dealing with a whole new form of marketing. I don’t see it that way. You need customers in your store whether it is online or down the street. To get those customers to your store, you need to advertise and market it. The tools may be different but the concept is the same. This guide introduces you to social media and how you can use it to increase traffic and sales at your store. This book will walk you through setting up Twitter, Facebook and Posterous accounts and then show you how to effectively use each of your accounts to bring even more customers to your Magento store.

The Customer Relations Part

Magento was built for customers. Most of the features the average online store would need are available without adding extensions and for added functionality, you can choose from free or commercial plugins in Magento Connect. The Sales Tactics Cookbook shows you how to use these tools to bring in more sales and satisfied customers. In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  • Entice customers to add more to their cart with Upsells, Crossells, Related Products and Free Shipping
  • Create promotional pricing in the cart, with coupons or by amount of sale.
  • Build a clearance category to liquidate old inventory
  • Give your customers a voice with Reviews, Ratings, Polls, Public Wishlists and Tags
  • Set up Email to a Friend on your site
  • Create an international store or multilingual store to expand your market
  • Build a wholesale customer group, set up bulk tax-free pricing for them and setting your wholesale policies
  • Keep in touch with your customers with a Newsletter

All these features come in the free Magento Community version and I am sure most store owners are only using a percentage of these tools. This book is a must for anyone who is working to get their Magento shopping site more traffic and sales and have yet to learn any SEO or social media marketing techniques. It is also a great help for SEO’s that must work with Magento. It shows you where to go to make tweaks in structure and content.

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66 Responses to “Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review”

  1. Engrape Financier

    Wow.. Looks like I have the honor to be the first commentator of this post. You know my friend, being a reviewer is not that easy for me. Because it is really not what I always wanted. But as time goes by, when the first time that I create a blog, I have this thing in my mind to be a new of me. To change my self because I know that it is not good to just wait and stay, because by the end there were no one going to tell you that ” there were no use it you will keep your self down.

    Your SEO experience are helping me a lot. Thank you!
    .-= Engrape Financier´s last blog ..Wondering Why? =-.

  5. Free Traffic Site

    It would be better I think if you optimize each and every pages,post and articles.But it will take you a longer time to that.But the reward is great.So it would be better to do individual optimization.

  6. plate rack

    i have read all your post, this book seems that it doesn’t miss any thing especially for seo, i don’t like social media so much, but just concentrating on sales pages and their seo tactics is some thing very interesting, thanks a lot.

  8. Sports News

    Thanks a lot for sharing this valuable information, this is a fact that handling SEO on Magento is not an easy part. I can be a reason that it is very rarely used. But with passage of time people are switching from traditional web to CMS. I hope that future is of CMS. But currently not everyone can solves CMS problems easily.

  9. John Media@dedicated server

    Yeah I agree if you want your product to be sold you must find a way for people to see it often. You must use SEO techniques to do that though it requires learning the ways on how to do it but its worth the time and effort. It would be really effective if you’d do that.

  10. eZaroorat

    It is true that most of the store owners put their store name on each page irrespective of whether it contains the targeted keyword. Including keyword on each page, either through footer, catchline in the header or some other means is more important from SEO point of view.

  12. Alec Butler

    As a web designer, I find SEO is so important for websites, many of my clients just expect their site to be at the top of search engines and bringing in masses of sales. They don’t seem to understad that you need to work at a site to get it working for you at its full potential.

  13. Josh - Web Marketing

    HI,
    I appreciate your work, i do read strategies and tactics very often as online marketing needs some study as well. I am focusing on building relations with customers.

  14. Ron Lawson

    To tell you the truth the book sounds like it has good advice for all e-commerce merchants. I do imagine that it has some specific marketing advice relating to Magento, but still sounds like good advice for all. Good right up, thanks.

    Ron Lawson
    Ecommerce Review

  15. Andrew

    Its a good read. But the trick is this. When your linking to your site. Link to the inner pages. This makes it so much easier to rank for popular keywords. Saves you a lot of time and money also.

  17. Resimleri

    Magento was built for customers. Most of the features the average online store would need are available without adding extensions and for added functionality, you can choose from free or commercial plugins in Magento Connect. The Sales Tactics Cookbook shows you how to use these tools to bring in more sales and satisfied customers. In the book, you’ll learn how

  19. Manila SEO

    Our team lead recommends us to study Magento as it is useful and all e-commerce ‘thing’ are there, like functions and add-ons. It should be useful to those who are into building online-shopping website. I think it competes with Joomla.

  20. Importeure finden

    Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review looking very interesting and informative.In this book he not only mention the key point of good business but seo techniques also.

  21. buy air jordan

    If this book cover the all seo tactics then well.There are very few book on seo base subject that cover this vast fields.

  22. Haute Hijab

    We reviewed Magento when we were in the early dev process and opted to go with PrestaShop. It’s a lighter and more efficient platform. It also has the added benefit of a user friendly backend for our employees.

    Magento is great. But it only makes sense if you’re a large online store with 600+ products in your catalog.

  27. Free Unlimited Hosting

    One must use SEO techniques to do that though it requires learning the ways on how to do it but its worth the time and effort. I hope it will be very helpful…

  35. jimmy41687

    Well indeed magneto is one of the most powerful open source software for online shopping cart but we as a developer need the books like these to understand the functionality of magneto and thanks it helps a lot.

  36. website designer delhi

    Thanks your book is really good i just want to know one thing that i have heard that the web 3.0 is going to change the world and most of the big portals are moving towards web 3.0 version wikipedia, google, yahoo etc this is definately going to change seo techniquies. Hope for the best, there are always innovations that are to be discovered and being followed thanks again

  38. kale kasa

    Well indeed magneto is one of the most powerful open source software for online shopping cart but we as a developer need the books like

  39. katy

    very useful article,nice book,thanks for sharing this to us..
    good work
    keep it up..

  42. gowns

    Thanks for the tips. It makes sense to go right to the meat of SEO and promote the items you are selling rather than just the site itself. I also buy alot on line and never thought to rate the site verses my own. That is a good learning tool.

  44. Bill

    Hello, very nice this Post. I am currently living here in Brazil and is widely used to magento. Many agencies and vehicle use magento as one of the best tools for online sales. The fact is the best SEO with him, we have success stories, because the interface is great for magento seo.

  47. Maritime Lawyers

    The book does not only focus on the SEO businesses strategies but also with an SEO techniques. In this generation, knowledge about SEO is very important for it is way of making your page visible!

  49. tavlaoyna

    I can be a reason that it is very rarely used. But with passage of time people are switching from traditional web to CMS

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