Do your photos need more zing? Give them a little “Bling”

It’s no secret that the quality of a store’s product images can have a significant impact on its sales. If you’ve invested time and effort to refine your product images, then you’ve likely found image editing can be a labor-intensive process, especially when removing and replacing backgrounds or improving the overall quality. So when I recently came across Vangie Beal’s ECommerce-Guide review of Bling! It, a new program Beal claimed could be used to easily accomplish these tasks in just a few minutes, I had to try it for myself.

As it turns out, Beal was right. While nothing compares to having professional-looking product photos to work with, Bling! It can help you correct less than stellar images with a few clicks of your mouse, and doesn’t require you to be a graphic design whiz. Most notable—and even fun—is the edge finding tool, which dissects your image into pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and allows you to adjust the tool’s level of detail as you work. Clicking inside of these pieces using the local brush applies a mask to these areas, and removes them from the final image.

When giving it a test run, I decided to use a slightly blurry photo that needed both a sharper focus and for the background to be removed. By using the edge finding tool and local brush to remove the background, setting a solid background color, applying the sharpen image option and adding a standing shadow, in about five minutes my photo went from this:

to this:

All-in-all, Bling! It requires a minimal investment of time to achieve very valuable results.

Bling! It can be downloaded as a 15-day free trial from Vertus’ website, and it sells for $49.95 (available for Windows only). Until February 21, 2008, Vertus is kindly extending a discount of $5 to Yahoo! Store blog readers. Use the coupon code BIYSTORE on the order page to take advantage of this offer.

Remember, having good product photos to work with is always the best option. Using a lightbox to achieve good lighting with virtually no background, or paying attention to lighting, focus, placement and angle, and positioning your product against a high-contrast, solid color background (if you plan to remove the background later) will only benefit you and save more time when editing your image. Often, though, product photos come from manufacturers and may not always be of the best quality. Bling! It is a nice option for merchants who would rather not re-shoot product photos, making it easy to display attractive images that can help generate sales.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Merchant Interview: Emitations Taps the Power of the Press and Social Networks

I conducted the following interview with Au-Co Mai, founder of Emitations that specializes in sterling silver jewelry. I met Au-Co at the Internet Retailer show. After looking at her site and speaking with her, I’ve asked her to share some tips and her experience in getting coverage for her products and site in magazines, and also how emitations leverages social media sites as a source of traffic.

A look at the new Emitations site design. Tres chic!

Tell me a bit about emitations and the products you sell

Launched in 1999, emitations.com specializes in celebrity jewelry for the price conscious consumer. We like to say that we help our customers get the celebrity bling without the sting. The emitations celebrity jewelry line primarily uses sterling silver, gold, and cubic zirconium.

I noticed you get a lot of media placement in magazines. How do you go about getting that exposure or do those magazines contact you?

It’s been a long process to develop relationships with the media. Sending the Media your PR collateral the old fashioned way via mail, email, calling, etc… was not very effective for us. The media gatekeepers are flooded with products and businesses hoping to catch their attention. Normally the editors don’t have the time to respond since they have assignment deadlines to meet.

How we got picked up?
Several years back we were initially contacted by a market editor from Us Weekly magazine who was doing an online research via the Yahoo! Shopping portal on celebrity look-a-like jewelry so that they could do a get the look-for-less type of story. We had exactly what they were looking for and they featured us. I believe that they found us because we created a product title and product copy that not only included basic product descriptions but also included keyword terms that were related to young Hollywood culture. At that time we were also doing PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.

Ever since, we have been working with the media outlets and have positioned ourselves as a partner and resource to editors and producers for anything related to jewelry and celebrities.

Are you doing any social media optimization in terms of getting traffic from sites like MySpace or smaller sites more closely related to your market such as StyleHive? If so, how did you learn about those channels and how are they working for you?

Yes, we recognize that social media is necessary. It’s important to be where your customers are hanging out, it also allows you to establish another channel of 2 way communication and cover topics that we normally can’t cover on the ecommerce site.

We do have a MySpace account and have used that in various ways. We have posted our promotions, articles written by staff members, contests, slideshows of new things that are happening at Emitations. We also decided to use it in conjunction with charities that we work with. One request that we have of the charities is that they invite their members to become our MySpace friend. They don’t have to buy anything in order for us to donate but it’s nice to know and see the people that we are helping to support by having them become a friend.

How do you know how much time to spend on these channels versus others where you may be able to track the return more accurately?

We focus the majority of our time optimizing channels that are directly tied to sales but we definitely include these social channels as a part of the marketing mix and continue to pay attention to what is being discussed.

What has been the biggest surprise for you in building your store to its current level?

I started dating my husband when I was 19 years old. I launched my first Yahoo! store when I was 21. I went from living in my walk in closet so that I could operate emitations from my bedroom in my college days to operating full time with an awesome team and all on the Yahoo! Store’s ecommerce platform. Finding a good ecommerce platform and a good husband that can scale with growth over time is really important. I am surprised and delighted that both worked out so well. Hooray for good datable guys and good eccommerce platforms!

Seriously though, I guess looking back, I am encouraged that anybody, including a college kid with negative assets and very little resources is able to create a viable online business. I think the key was to creatively re-evaluate the existing resources around me and use it differently than convention would dictate. For example, my first form of financing was from “Ross” the dress for less mass discount clothing retailer. I bought my first piece of jewelry for sale at Ross for $7.50. I knew that if it didn’t sell on eBay that I could return it for a full refund within 30 days. I was able to sell that $7.50 faux pearl choker for $65. I didn’t have a digital camera back then so I used a flatbed scanner to take the image. The lack of resources really challenged me to think creatively from day one.

What advice would you give to new merchants just starting out?

Just get started, with or with out a business plan. As you open up an online store and put your ideas to the test, your plan will evolve. Many people have the entrepreneurial passion and energy but don’t do anything because they become overwhelmed with all the details and the possibilities of making mistakes. Successful businesses of all sizes continue to make mistakes and learn along the way, just do it. Good luck!!!

Thanks Au-Co for sharing your experiences and tips. So take her advice merchants and jump in with both feet, not only to starting a business, but also in incorporating social media sites into your overall marketing plan—especially when your target market practically lives on these sites.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

A Few Quick Thoughts from Search Engines Strategies San Jose 2007

I was able to sneak out of the office this week to attend a few sessions at the Search Engines Strategy conference held in San Jose this week. Here are a few thoughts from some of the sessions I attended:

• Matt Bailey of Site Logic gave a hilarious introduction to the importance of segmentation when looking at web analytics data. Taking Star Trek (original series) as his source of data, he demonstrated the survival rates of red shirt characters when beaming down to the planet with Captain Kirk, segmenting between times when Kirk did and did not make a love connection with a female alien.

  (Author confession: Yes I like Star Trek, but no I don’t own any pointed Vulcan ears). You can read his full post on the topic in the ClickTracks articles.

  Takeaways: Segment your data when possible to make comparisons, contrast different segments to gain insights, and always view your data in context. I also asked Matt how small businesses should prioritize areas to optimize. He stated that merchants should focus first on their most profitable products and not the most or least converting as improvement to those have the greatest potential to your net profits.

• Allan Dick, senior plumbing evangelist (not making that up) for Vintage Tub & Bath, was the moderator of the same session and he answered the same question I asked Matt. Allan said that as a small business, they try to focus on key products (in their case claw foot bathtubs) and when buyers purchase those, they also likely purchase all of the hardware that matches the tub. In this way, they can focus efforts around optimizing for these core products and once buyers come and purchase, they also tend to buy related accessories.

  Allan also suggested focusing on fewer overall metrics that mean something to him (i.e. they spur him to action if changing by a certain percentage) rather than focusing on 30 metrics that you aren’t sure what they mean.

  Takeaways: Start with your core products and put your efforts there. Once you get the traffic, you can then ensure you are merchandising and cross-selling to boost your average order size. Also, read some of the interviews found by searching for “Allan Dick”. Allan began implementing what he learned at SES shows years back and that knowledge has helped grow the business to an Internet Retailer top 500 business. SEO is certainly more complex these days, but his story is proof that the effort to learn and network can pay off for small businesses.

Even if you can’t step away from your business long enough to attend such a conference, there are a ton of bloggers covering these sessions so I would recommend taking advantage of those topics where you want to learn more. Search Engine Land has a roundup of all the coverage for day 2 and other days at SES.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Knowing What’s Right to Write for Product Page Content

All too often I see merchants with stores that have recently opened (or have been open for a while but are complaining about lack of natural search traffic), with product pages that lack sufficient original content. Now while writing for the web means you write less (and make your text scanable with bullet points and shorter line lengths) than you would for a catalog, embracing minimalism with your product content is a sure way to rank poorly with search engines and also deter visitors from becoming buyers.

So how much product content is enough? I have seen sources that list 200-300 words as an ideal and others that recommend 500 words; the trend seems to be moving towards higher word count but use conversion and not just traffic as your overall success metric. The next question then from newer merchants is typically, “How do I write that much?” or “What do I write about to get that many words?”.

Realize though that it is not simply the volume of content you write for products, but the quality as well (hint: keywords). Assuming you have done your homework on keywords and keyphrases research for which you wish the product to rank in search engines, I would recommend two articles with helpful tips on what to write about and the questions to answer for your various buyers.

Writing Smart Copy For Your E-commerce Product Pages

The folks at SEO Igloo have put together an article about 5 topics you can use to shape product content. The topics include:

• Historical
• Modern
• Trends
• Psychology
• Scientific

Some of these will work better than others depending on the type of products you sell, but at the very least they hint at the ways you can transform simple product pages into content-rich pages which search engines may rank higher.

Dishing Out What the Customer Really Wants

This is a great article from the smart marketers at Future Now. I was fortunate enough to hear Howard Kaplan from Future Now speak at the Internet Retailer conference this year. Kaplan talked about the different personas of online shoppers:

• Competitive: cutting edge, early adopters
• Methodical: research and compare, need all the details
• Humanistic: speak to emotional benefits of the product
• Spontaneous: impulse shoppers

The article lists the various questions these visitor types have when shopping. Imagine your job as a copywriter is to be the sales person on the page answering the questions asked by these different personas. The spontaneous buyer may need only a persuasive headline and a compelling price to buy. The methodical buyer will want to see all product specs, any testimonials from other customers, and why to trust you with the purchase. You may not have all of these personas but viewing your product pages in this framework can help overcome any writer’s block and when done properly can boost search traffic and drive additional sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business