How to be Unique Blogger

All too often bloggers and online marketers are focused on trying to make a quick buck. First of all, it’s not that easy to make money online. For every successful story you hear about, there are another thousand stories of failures that are never told.

Instead of trying to be the next “make money” or “wordpress” blogger, why not focus on trying to be aUNIQUE BLOGGER!

With millions of blogs on the internet, how are you going to differentiate yourself from the rest?

This is something I had to think about when I first launched my blog at ZacJohnson.com.

I already knew there were millions of blogs that I was going to have to complete with, but I still had the determination to make sure I stood out from the crowd.

Here are just a few things I did to make sure my blog was unique from the beginning.

• Used my personal name as the blog name
• Created a brandable mascot/logo that people would remember
• Launched the site with a unique wordpress theme
• Share my own stories of success and failure while helping others make money online
• Show proven results and strategies for others to replicate and find success of their own
• I made myself available to anyone who took the time to email and leave a comment
• Attending and speaking at various conferences around the country is a great way to get your face out there
• Connecting with my audience and guest blogging on other sites in the industry

As you can see, to become a successful and unique blogger it takes a lot more than just creating content and putting something out there.

If you want to stay a successful and unique blogger, than you are going to have to continually adapt and put in more work, time and effort to stay ahead of the competition.

This is something I’ve always focused on and through the use of my blog my personal brand has grown to immeasurable levels.

I just recently launched my new podcast series titled “Rise of the Entrepreneur“, which is yet another stepping stone to keeping my brand ahead of the competition. You can listen to it through the blog or find it in iTunes.

How Can You Become a Better and Unique Blogger?

Even if you’ve already started a blog of your own and still trying to find what makes you stand out from the crowd, it’s never too late.

Look at the current direction of your blog and see if you like where it is headed. Don’t create content for the sake of putting it out there, create it to provide a quality experience and value for your audience.

Don’t be afraid to try something different. Just take a look at Perez Hilton… he’s a strange guy that took his own twist for the entertainment world and made it his own. Imagine if he took the approach to just be an average blogger or news reporter?… he would never be where and who he is today!

5 Tips to Improve Organic Search Results CTR

SEO efforts may be concentrated on getting your site on the top results of SERP. But even if you are the #1 site for the keywords of your choice and interest, it still may not mean monetary returns. It is here that you need to focus on the concept of CTR (click through rate).

Why should a blogger worry about CTR?

Any blogger must view its CTR rates with care because it’s one of the crucial blog monetization factors. Visitors click on the ads and make purchases and these investments lead to profits. You cannot afford to ignore CTR.

Improve Organic Search Results CTR

Here are the top tips to improve CTR in your organic search results:

1. Measure the CTR and Keep a Check on Results

The CTR for your ads should be at least 0.2% per 1000 impressions.

Your advertisement should at least be rendering these many clicks because an audience that is looking at your ad copy is a focused audience.

They are people who have looked up Google or Bing to find out about the specific products and services. So, your ad being prominently placed should draw their attention.

If even 0.2% CTR isn’t seen, then it’s time to revise your ad copy to something more useful.

2. Improve Your Ad Copy

If you are looking at improving the CTR, there are chances that a review of your Ad copy may help the process.

By using the right keywords and the right proportion of keywords, by improving the heading content and making minor changes, the returns from the Ad copy can change drastically.

More so, by making the call to action more specificand improving on assertiveness and clarity, you can bring about a change in the CTR as your idea can be communicated and comprehended to more people.

3. Careful Use of Keywords in Copy

Reports indicate that ads which have the keyword in the heading or title, have a greater chance of coming to the notice of users and consequently, getting clicked.

Since the user is actually looking for things related to the ‘keywords’ that he has typed in, he reflexively appreciates the ads with copy including the keywords. This is a good way to improve CTR.

4.  Set Your Goals Right with Your Ad Campaigns

The response of a user on the internet to an advertisement and the response of a user to ads on television on other media are quite different.

While the user might turn off the radio when the ad plays or switch channels on TV, on the web, the user is relatively more open to looking at ads.

However, the problem that the web has been facing is that the campaigns are not targeted appropriately. People on the web, when they search about a product to purchase, then they certainly do have a mind to buy.

One needs to target such a user by advertising appropriately. You should understand who your target audience is and what their search queries are. You could take the assistance of experts to guide you on which keywords to target and how to get the maximum conversions.

The goals of your campaign and your target audience should both be crystal clear!

5. Validation of Your Promises!

And finally, everyone looks at ads rather skeptically.

So, the best way to win your customer is show him that you mean what you say. You can do this by adding the ‘amount’ of your deal like ‘Branded Sunglasses 60% off!’ in the headline of your advertisement.

Also, adding a trademark symbol, ‘TM’ beside the name of your company in the heading, helps in drawing attention and appearing like a valid or authentic source.

The more you win the trust of the user, the more are the chances of him clicking through to your site!

EvoLeads White Label Tracking for Affiliate Marketing

There are many layers to the world of affiliate marketing and there are opportunities to make money at each of these layers. Perhaps you’ve had some experience as a publisher, promoting various affiliate offers from different networks. Maybe you’ve worked as an advertiser, using affiliate marketing to generate leads and increase sales. But have you ever considered running a network of your own?

Working at every tier along the way is a comprehensive solution from EvoLeads, an affiliate software system and offer marketplace that has something to offer for publishers, advertisers and white label users alike.

An Affiliate Revolution?

At its core, EvoLeads aims to power your white label affiliate program. Even if you don’t have any ambitions to run a full-fledged network, there is a lot of value in being able to have an affiliate program under your company name, using your own company logos and colors. This provides publishers with a certain level of confidence in what you are able to provide.

In this way, you could view EvoLeads as a white label tracking service provider. There are no set up fees for getting your own affiliate program going and everything is run through their reliable servers. For both you and your affiliates, you get real-time global analytics so you can best optimize your campaigns.

If you do choose to run a fuller affiliate network of your own with multiple offers from multiple publishers, EvoLeads is prepared to handle that for you too. Indeed, it is possible to set limits on the publisher activity so you don’t go over the budgets defined by your advertisers. This is the same kind of functionality that you see from much larger affiliate networks, but available to Internet entrepreneurs like you.

The EvoLeads Dashboard

After signing up with EvoLeads, you can log into your account and gain access to the main dashboard.

This provides you with a clean and intuitive way to get through all of your analytics and stats. The main dashboard will show your commissions, clicks and actions for the month to date by default, but you can easily access different time frames via the pull-down menu. Below the line graph, you’ll find the basic tables with your daily and weekly commission figures too, as well as the associated change in dollars and as a percentage.

The Offer Marketplace

While a big part of the appeal of EvoLeads is the ability to use the white label solution to run your own affiliate network under your own branding, EvoLeads itself is still an affiliate network in many ways. If you’re running your own network, you can still submit your offers to be displayed through the EvoLeads marketplace.

This means that you can effectively make money at all three tiers of the affiliate setup: as a network owner, as an advertiser, and as a publisher. The list of offers comes from other members of the network and you can sort through these based on category, tags, countries, traffic type, eCPC range, eCPA, click-thru and commission rate.

As of this writing, there are about 300 offers in the marketplace and they boast payouts as high as $340.00. There’s a lot of upside there as a publisher and it also means that there are higher tier white label users who are a part of the EvoLeads network as well.

Leading the Way

If you’re looking for a white label tracking solution for your network, then EvoLeads should be among your prime contenders. You get precise geo-targeting and you don’t have to pay any click charges. It’s priced at $499 per month and the four-page network registration form should only take you a couple minutes to complete.

‘Pin It to Win It’ – Use Competitions on Pinterest to Get Branding

Pinterest, the image-based social media site, has reached the ranks of being a ‘big player’. As one of the fastest growing social networks ever, the site is now one of the top 30 most visited websites in the world, responsible for more referral traffic to sites than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.

In addition, the high engagement levels on Pinterest means it’s not just delivering traffic, but high quality, high value traffic – an online marketer’s dream.

The Pinterest Audience

Pinterest is principally based on the sharing of images and other visual content, including videos. By encouraging users to “curate the internet” through pinning images they like as they find them across the internet, the social network has essentially created an audience who are already in the early stages of the shopping process when on Pinterest, without even realizing it.

By looking at what others, particularly friends, have pinned, users see a personal recommendation for whatever the subject of the image, be it a beautiful location, home décor idea, fashion accessory, or whatever.

In addition, a study by Neilsen revealed in a profile ofthe Pinterest audience that it is the exact same audience that shops online, which is very useful.

This enhances Pinterest’s ultimate USP for marketers. Unlike many other social media sites, Pinterest is geared more strongly towards products and purchases, rather than people and relationships; making it the perfect platform for businesses with anything visual to shout about.

Pinterest Competitions

It’s perhaps for this reason then that social-savvy businesses are trying to make the most of this exciting new platform, creating their own profiles, and engaging with pinners.

Competitions are a huge attraction. It’s hard to argue for a better way to get large numbers of people engaging with a business’ new Pinterest profile than by giving them an incentive to do so.

The popularly named “Pin it to win it” competitions are popping up everywhere after adventurous leaders in the Pinterest field, such as Land’s End had soaring successes with them.

How do Pinterest Competitions Work?

As yet, there are no strict rules governing competitions on Pinterest which leaves it open for businesses to be creative with their use of Pinterest’s key features to make the competition engaging and exciting.

For example, some competitions simply ask you to re-pin anything from their boards (usually their products) or even directly from their website, and they’ll pick one of these re-pinners at random to win either a set prize or perhaps whatever they have pinned.

Another way some competitions have worked is people creating a pin board made up entirely of their favorite business’s images or products – email it in to the company, and the best board will win.

What Are The Advantages of Pinterest?

Quite apart from the obvious social media marketing objectives of engaging your audience and getting more followers, it’s easy to see the additional advantages of Pinterest competitions from both these approaches.

In each case, it’s getting people to re-pin the business’ images, increasing the reach of those images and resultant exposure of the brands and products across Pinterest. With Pinterest having such a highly engaged retail related audience, why wouldn’t you want to tap into its viral capabilities?

The Future of Pinterest Competitions

Being such a new social network, it’ll be really interesting to see how Pinterest and its user-generated “Pin it to Win it” competitions develop over time.

Pinterest is a powerful social tool, and if your business is in any way visual, you want to get in on the action.

3 Ways to Generate More Discussion on Your Forum

Online forums have always served as a great place to find new ideas, opinions, and discussions. Long before blogs and social media sites were around, forums gave visitors a great platform to share valuable or interesting information with their peers.

You’d have passionate brand loyalists, tech troubleshooters, travel guides and so on in online forums, ready to lend a helping hand to newbies and pros alike. And because these places were actively under the authority of forum moderators, discussions were fluid and to the point; a far cry from today’s unfettered social media comments.

Though they are considered remnants of an earlier Internet age, forums played a fundamental role in the development of the Internet and continue to be valuable even in 2014.

If you own a forum, it can certainly be difficult to compete with social media and blogs and keep users engaged and interested. However, forums continue to play an active role in the online ecosystem and are actually one of the highest paying advertising channels online. So, to help you keep your forum buzzing and your visitors coming back, here are three tips for generating more activity on your forum.

Help People Solve Their Problems or Learn New Things

Bombarding people with ads and worthless content is a surefire way to chase your audience away from your forum and ensure that they never return. However, if you give people a platform that enables them to help each other out, then you are on the right path to maintaining high levels of user engagement.

It is said that no good deed goes unpunished, and that’s true with forums. The more you help out your user base, the more likely they will be to reciprocate that gesture.

Tone Down the Promotional Rhetoric

Sure, your forum is for product X, but that doesn’t mean that you have to settle for singing the praises of that product ad nausea. Forum users can see a sales pitch from a mile away, so it’s in your best interest to be honest and steer clear of explicit sales pitches.

For people who disagree with you, be respectful and counter argue with logic. This lends credibility to the discussion, making more people engage and talk about the pros and cons of the topic at hand.

Learn From Others

There are probably a lot of people in the forum world who have been in the game much longer than you and you should do your best to learn from them. Study their site, look at how they interact with users, and apply their successful practices to your site. It’s also a great idea to go to networking events and tradeshows where you can meet with your contemporaries, talk shop, and share ideas. ForumCon (use coupon codeBLOGGINGTIPS to save 25%) , for example, happens to be a great starting point for people who want to manage their forum better and learn new ways to monetize from people who have made a living from their forums.

 

Forums, although viewed as an archaic Internet channel, are still one of the most informative and valuable types of sites online. They provide users with great relevant information and unparalleled networking opportunities, and should be treated as such. If you’re a forum owner who wants more traffic and more conversation happening on your site, take these tips into consideration and watch your site’s engagement levels increase dramatically.

Be sure to check out ForumCon and also list and of your favorite forums in the comments section below.

Three Great Reasons to Create a Membership Service with Your Blog

If you already have a successful blog, then you should start thinking about creating a membership program for your site. Of course membership models might not fit all niches and blog platforms, but if it fits into your existing blog model it’s a great way to expand your brand, loyalty and revenue in the process.

In this article I’m going to highlight some of the many reasons why starting your own membership is not only a great idea for your blog, but also a lot easier than you might think. This is the third article I will be writing on this topic, as I previous wrote about it on my main blog and also have a published article in this month’s issue of FeedFront magazine. As you can tell, I’m quite excited about the whole membership concept and sharing it with others!

Three Great Reasons to Create a Membership Service with Your Blog

If you already have an existing blog with an audience and a loyal following, it will be even easier for you to launch your own membership site. Run through my list of benefits below and see if one is a good match for your blog and business.

Loyal Readers Will Pay for Premium Content 

Whenever you publish a new post to your site, you already have a ton of people coming to see what you have to say. Now imagine if you could get paid for every time you wrote a quality content piece of value? Better yet… what if you could create content that was catered just to your best readers who are willing to pay for your content. This is what membership sites are all about. You’re already creating great content, why not make the best of it exclusive?

Your Time and Content is Worth Money

Blogging can be a very slow and tedious process for making money, especially if you are in one of those niches where it’s tough to actually sell products or find on-site advertisers. If you can create a membership program around your site, you can focus your efforts on bring in new paying members on a weekly basis. Just one new member a week can result in over 50 new paid members per month. If you are charging $20 a month for a membership, you are now at a $1,000 a month recurring business model after your first year. Now think about what can be done with scaling and paid promotions!

Grow Your Blog, Brand and Business to New Levels

At the end of the day you want to be able to continually build upon your success with each new post, backlink and visitor. One of the best ways to keep users coming back for more and build your blog, brand and business longterm is to build a recurring revenue solution. This is exactly what a membership site can do for you. Many membership sites bill out on a monthly basis, but quarterly, yearly and lifetime options are available. Take a look at the type of content you want to offer, put a value to it and get started.

Among the many other benefits of having a membership site, using wordpress plugins and solutions to create and manage your paid program can make the whole process a lot easier. Some solutions allow you to simply set specific pages and posts of your site to private and members only.

Before launching your new membership site, take the time to poll your audience, see where the value is and look at what type of content you could offer in exchange for a monthly payment from your readers. At the end of the day it’s all about providing value and scaling over time.

3 Reasons You Should Be Using Native Advertising

There’s no arguing that native advertising is on the fast track to replacingtraditional display ads online. Why? Because native advertising is beneficial to both your end user experience, and also tends to deliver a better return on advertisers’ investments. Ultimately it’s a win for everybody involved, but in case you need more convincing, here are the top three reasons why you should be using native advertising:

Display Ads Are Often Ignored

Traditional types of online advertising such as display ads are becoming more obsolete as days go by. The overwhelming amount of ads, intrusive placement, and often irrelevant content have led online users to flat out ignore display ads, which ultimately costs advertisers and publishers money. These often expensive, ineffective, bulky ad formats are overlooked more often that not and are increasingly becoming wasted online space. With native advertising, publishers are able to share more interesting, relevant content that is tailored to their audience and is likely to lead to clicks and conversions.

Native Ads Improve User Experience

Online marketing is all about creating a great experience for the end user, and native advertising does just that. How, you ask? Native advertising improves the user experience by placing only relevant content in front of a targeted audience. Its chief aim is to provide readers with more information that they’re likely to be interested in and that will keep them on the page. Often, these articles are sponsored content from advertisers that share relevant information that subtly promotes the advertiser or their product. Ultimately, native ads are non-intrusive and supplement your site’s existing content with more related information that suits your particular audience.

You Can Set It and Forget It

As native advertising continues to grow, new tools are starting to pop up. Many of these tools allow publishers to not only share the best content with their audience, but also automate their native advertising efforts. For example, tools like Infocc allow publishers to optimize their site by adding a simple line of javascript. With the script in place, publishers are able to enhance their site with pop-able information links to related pages and offers, which ultimately helps increase website engagement, improve overall content, boost SEO, and generate more clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Below you can see an example of native advertising in action. If someone was to place their cursor over one of the links on the page, instead of opening a new window, it would open a popup tab that shows all relevant content.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that native advertising is the future of online marketing, and it’s no wonder why. By implementing native ads, your site will be more user friendly and provide a relatively easy way to generate more revenue for you and your advertisers. What are your thoughts on the future of native advertising?

Depositphotos: Royalty Free Images & Affiliate Program

Remember the latest time you wrote a post for your blog and wanted a really great looking image to go along with it? Of course you do! We want all of our posts to have amazing images to make the content and user experience on the site. These images are even better when they are original, high quality and really pop off the page.

What’s even more important of a question is to askwhere you get your images from?

It’s very easy for many of us to head over to Google Images and pull any random image that shows up in their directory, save it and then post it to our sites.

Another option is to visit sites like Flickr and see if we can find anything that would blend in well with the content. In this situation you can usually post the image to your site as long as you provide a backlink and credit to the original owner.

In both of these cases you are still vulnerable to potential lawsuits and cease & desist letters. The business of copyright image use is very big and not one that should be taken lightly.

The Price of Using Royalty Free Images

For this reason and others, I switched over all of my image use to Depositphotos, which is one of the largest royalty free image directories online. Instead of having to find random images across the internet, I can simply search their directory and purchase any images I would like to use… and while the thought of “paying” for images might seem crazy or too expensive for you, it’s actually much cheaper than you might think.

Before I jump into some of the benefits and features of Depositphotos, let’s quickly look at their pricing structure.

When setting up an account you can pay for image use on a monthly, daily or pay as you go structure. I recommend going with the Daily Subscription as this will drop your image costs below .50 per image use and you can download 5 images per day (150 per month) and use them as many times or as long as you like.

If you don’t need that many images, the “Pay as You Go” option is also great and the images will still cost you less than $1 each.

So the question isn’t really can you afford to use royalty free images on your site, the question is can you afford not to? A few dollars here and there can save you a lot of potential problems down the road.

How to Find Great Images on Depositphotos

If you ever used Depositphotos then you will already be familiar with how their site works and how easy it is to find relevant images for your content. One of the problems with many other royalty free image sites is that they are loaded up with clip art and vector images. This is a problem because many of us want “real” looking images, such as people running in the park or working in an office.

This is something Depositphotos has gotten really good with over the years and I’ve shown two screenshot comparisons below. The first is a search for “affiliate marketing” images and the other is for “exercising” and you will see how each are unique and offer all three of the different images types that I mentioned.

With Depositphotos partner program in place, new photographers are joining daily and uploading new content to their network — which means a constantly supply of new images being added to their site on a daily basis.

How to Make Money with Depositphoto’s Affiliate Program

With all of the success of Depositphotos and how they continue to improve their images and site, it only makes sense for them to have an affiliate program as well. I’m recommending Depositphotos to you because I use them across many of my sites and I get asked all the time where I find my images.

For anyone that would like to not only use Depositphotos for their images but to also make some extra money on the side, be sure to check out their affiliate program which offers an industry high commission os 30% per transaction.

Remember when I was talking about the subscription and payment methods above? The average order on DP is around $100, which means you would earn a nice $30 average commission on orders placed through their site.

Other highlights of their affiliate program include:

• Best Commission Rates
  – Earn 30% commission for new and 15% for existing customer purchases.
• Various Promo Materials
  – Get access to banners, product feeds and widgets, text links, emails and API.
• Advanced Reporting
  – Stats are processed in real time and are available in all reports.
• Dedicated Account Manager
  – Contact our helpful Account Managers for any queries 24/7.

The next time you are writing a killer blog post and looking for that perfect image to compliment your content, be sure to check out Depositphotos.com and see what images in their directory would be a perfect match for your site.

Top 6 Web Design Trends of 2014

In the fast-paced world of Internet commerce, web design trends come and go on a constant basis. The top trends that we’ve seen so far build on trends from the previous year and give us a glimpse of what’s to come in the future.

There’s a greater emphasis than ever on user-friendly design, cultural influences, and the use of Smartphone and tablet devices.

Top 6 Web Design Trends of 2014

In this article, we will see some of the top prevalent web design trends of 2014.

Here you go:

1. Retina Support

The concept of retina support was first seen with Apple’s iPhone 4, which features a crisp, clean screen display. A screen with retina support boasts twice the density for a regular LCD display, which means that there are twice as many digital pixels.

Web designers can use this technology by creating two sets of images, including a standard version and one that is double the resolution. The high resolution image can then be scaled down for retina screens.

This gives a high resolution, crisp, and extremely lifelike image.

2. Responsive Web Design

Another major web design trend that has carried over from the past year or two is responsive web designing. This has arisen to meet the need of Smartphone and tablet users, who may have experienced slow loading speeds or difficulty viewing regular websites on their devices.

With responsive web design, a single layout can be created that is optimized for smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop devices alike.

3. Large Graphics and Photographs

There is a tendency for today’s web designers to go big and bold with graphics, photographs, and text. Screen-sized photographs can be made the background of a website, while large text and fanciful fonts can be used to capture attention immediately.

This type of design is particularly popular with websites for graphic design or media professionals, who can showcase their portfolio with appealing images.

4. QR Code Integration

Another design trend used by professionals is to integrate QR codes into the main site design. You may have seen QR codes around town, which are now prevalent in ads, billboards, and venues.

They can be scanned by smartphones to provide additional information. Websites are now using this same technique to provide an extra layer of interactivity for users.

5. Minimalism

This trend is not exactly new, but minimalism continues to be one of the hottest influences on modern web design trends. White space is pleasing to the eye, and consumers are quickly turned off by websites that are overly cluttered.

As a result, you can expect to see the trend of minimalist landing pages and product displays continue. Using a simple approach allows the consumer to focus on your central message without distraction, and can make a website easier to navigate at the same time.

6. Infinite Scrolling

When you search something on a website or try to load a website, the scrolling option is limited. In other words, you reach the end of the website and then either you need to click on ‘next page’, ‘load more’, ‘read more’ and other such options.

But, current web design trends are in favor of infinite scrolling technique in which when a user scrolls down the page, more elements or search results begin to load intuitively.

Check out Mashable.com to see how this works. This technique is good because the user finds all the information on one page and it is not intrusive as well.

These are just a few of the key web design trends of 2014, which all showcase steps that designers have taken to make websites more intuitive, user-friendly, and versatile.

Sell Online for Free: PrestaShop 1.6 Review

Opening up a conventional brick-and-mortar retail store can be a very expensive endeavor. You have to rent the space, buy all those fixtures, and pay for your monthly utilities… and even then, you’re largely restricted to just local customers. This is why so many companies have decided to open online stores instead, either independently or in tandem with their brick-and-mortar locations. Maintenance costs are far lower and you can reach a worldwide customer base.

If you’ve been thinking about getting into e-commerce, then you should take a serious look atPrestaShop, a free e-ecommerce solution that “provides everything you need to open, operate and maintain a successful online store.”

E-Commerce Made Easy

To provide your customers with the “best e-commerce experience,” PrestaShop offers hundreds of features that you can utilize in your online store. This will help you increase your sales without having to put in too much effort. All of the features are integrated into the software by default and are offered for free.

As other reviews of PrestaShop have indicated, the software is provided to you on an open-source basis. This means that it’s free to use. The way that PrestaShop goes about making its money is through the optional add-ons, but the core software and core features come at no cost to you.

Some key highlights include the robust inventory management, the ability to export your listings to eBay, an easy way to implement cross selling, the ability to list digital as well as physical products, and a product comparison engine that will help your customers choose what’s right for them.

Your Professional Online Store

You want to provide your customers with as positive an experience as possible and this starts with giving your online store a professional appearance. PrestaShop makes that easy as well.

This is one example of a PrestaShop-powered online store, but you could just as easily choose from the over 1,500 PrestaShop themes that you can download and implement. They approach a broad range of categories, including high tech, food and drink, travel, cars, children and kids, animals and pets, and beauty and jewelry. Before you pick a theme, you have an opportunity read through its description and get a preview of how it’s going to look.

The Backend Dashboard

After you’ve downloaded and installed PrestaShop, you can then get set up and access the main dashboard to configure and run your online store.

This may look a little daunting to the uninitiated, but the overall layout of the PrestaShop dashboard is very intuitive and easy to follow. All of the core navigation is located in the left sidebar with a floating nested menu showing up for the different sections.

When you hover over the “Orders” section, for example, you’ll be able to quickly access information about current orders and invoices, as well as merchandise returns, delivery slips, credit slips, statuses and order messages. Similar options can then be found for managing your product catalog, customer list, pricing rules, shipping details, localization options and so forth.

Engage Shoppers and Increase Online Sales

As PrestaShop is offered as free open-source software, it will take you some time to familiarize yourself with the interface and get your e-commerce store set up exactly the way you want it. This includes going through the process of installing the software on your own servers. The software itself is free, but you do need to pay for some of the optional modules and themes, as well as for a technical support package. These are optional, however, so you could run your store for free if you’d like. There is an extensive community forum at your assistance.

The cost to entry is effectively zero, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give PrestaShop a try if you want to open an online store. It makes it very easy to open up shop, list your products, and start making some real sales.

Willing to try out this ecommerce software? Visit the PrestaShop official website now.