Yahoo Store Profits

Content Creation for Yahoo Stores

Posted by admin under Content Creation

Rob Snell (Yahoo Store Expert) wrote a fantastic article about creating compelling content. Here is a link to the full article: http://www.wilsonweb.com/ecommerce/snell-ecommerce-content.htm

Here are some excerpts from the article that I think will whet your appetite for the full read.

“I’m a retailer, too. I get it. Retailers are busy. Retailers don’t have enough time in the day to take care of customers, shipping, suppliers and employees — and do the routine day-to-day — much less sit around and brainstorm unique product descriptions.

Back in 2004, my baby brother Steve and I changed the way we approached selling online when our growth stopped due to an influx of new competitors. Instead of simply offering products for sale, we took a proactive approach and recommended that customers buy specific products to solve problems in specific situations. Over the next six years this one major change increased our sales an additional $10 million dollars.”

“These are my two guidelines:

1. Best selling products. Start with your best selling products and work your way down the list so your best products get the most attention.
2. Higher ticket items. Write a paragraph of unique text for each $10 in an item’s price, so you create more content for higher ticket items.”

“Creating content is a full-time job, but that doesn’t mean you can’t split it up between multiple people in your company.

If you have an hour a day, that’s 5 hours a week times 50 weeks or 250 hours a year to create content. I tend to write product content in spurts, concentrating on a new product launch for a week or so before the product ships, or focusing on a specific part of an SEO project like getting Title tags written for all the normal products at one time, or seeing which products need customer reviews instead of working on one specific product at a time.”

“All products were not created equal. What’s the difference to your bottom line between a 10% increase in the sales of your best-selling SKU compared to tripling the sales of a normal product in the middle of your list? Focus on your winners. That’s where the real upside is. Chase the hundred dollar bills, not nickels and dimes.

Better performers need more different kinds of content than middle of the road or bottom of the barrel. For most stores I work on, I have three levels of products: top-shelf products, normal products, and backfill datafeed items (slow-selling products that I call “bottom feeders”) — and they all have different content needs.

1. Top shelf products need the full treatment:

• Compelling sales content with a headline + subhead
• Unique product descriptions
• Page summaries (abstract)
• Hand-written SEO elements (Titles, Meta Descriptions, Link Text)
• Custom copywriting fields like Grabbers, Differentiators, Short-name, and Alt-name
• Custom product-based text fields: range, warranty, accessories, etc.
• Multiple product pictures
• Videos demonstrating the product
• Links to manufacturer content
• Customer reviews for that SKU
• “Steve Says” editorial copy
• Buyer’s guide for that product category.
• Comprehensive line review for new product launches

2. Normal products need much less content.

• Unique category and sub category page text
• Unique product NAME (for Title tags),
• Unique product description (usually simply rewriting the manufacturer’s copy works)
• Baked-in SEO elements using our Yahoo! Store templates.

3. Slow-selling products usually have a minimum level of content, even for the lowest products in a data feed.

• Unique text on the subcategory pages for SEO reasons
• Manufacturer’s description (copy and pasted)

Usually this will have to do until the product moves the sales needle enough to get my attention. These products are pretty low in our site’s hierarchy, with little to no PageRank, so they don’t appear in the Google index, and are usually only sold as add-ons to browsers or folks using our internal search tool.”

This is truly an eye-opening article. If you run an online store take the time to read it in full by clicking the above link. Thank you Rob for sharing your insights!