Tips Tuesday – eCommerce Guides and Courses, More Affiliate Opportunities

Boo y’all!!!

It’s Halloween week and I’ve got scary good news for you.

Tips this week include:

• Shopify Starter Plan for Downloads – new course in beta testing
• Shopify – different plans, same interface, and why you’ll need help
• Printify Pop-Up Store Setup Guide now available
• New holiday sweatshirts available
• Upcoming e-commerce courses
• Shopify themes are not like WP themes
• E-commerce consults available
• Put best-sellers in your store – affiliate opportunities
• Amazon affiliate marketing changes
• TikTok Shop is kicking butt
• Sell POD on TikTok Shop
• Watch out for course scammers
• How folks are making $10k from 1 video
• GA4 Quick Setup Guide coming
• SEO for e-commerce guide coming
• New Webmaster Services Directory
• WP 6.7 tests underway – public release soon
• Better Search and Replace plugin rumblings
• Have you backed up your devices lately?

BlogAid Happenings

I’ve still been a tutorial making maniac for another week, and will continue to be for the rest of the year.

The response to my recent posts about the upcoming e-comm courses and guides has been amazing!!!

So, I’m all in on stores and affiliate marketing now.

See what’s coming to help you make more money online.

eCommerce Tips

Shopify Starter Plan for Downloads – New Course in Beta

In the words of Dr. Frankenstein, “It’s Alive!!!!!!”

Every minute of my tutorial making time this past week has been focused on getting the Shopify Starter Plan tutorials made.

This first course is specifically on selling digital downloads that are stored on Google Drive.

I can clearly see why folks pay $100s if not $1000s of dollars to get help setting up Shopify.

I can also see why the same beginner questions keep popping up in Shopify groups, except they find out the hard way that they missed a critically important setting.

But don’t worry, I’ve got you covered with a super easy course that takes you step-by-step through the process so you don’t miss anything – and it will be cheap, cheap too!!!

Different Plans – Same Interface

With the $5 Starter Plan, you just get product listing pages and checkout, compared to having a whole store like on the rest of the plans.

But, the store interface and the app interfaces are the full things.

So, there are LOTS of settings you don’t have to configure, yet their wizards make it look like you do.

Half my time in investigating all this has been like going through a maze and ending up at a bunch of dead ends.

And the other half has been digging for all of the hidden settings that you do actually need. (Those are the ones that beginners figure out the hard way that they missed.)

My course will help you avoid all of that confusion.

You will do things in a straight line from beginning to end and you will know exactly what you are doing and why.

Easy peasy.

I was hoping to make it into a workbook, but it’s too big for that.

I wanted to chunk it down into super easy, bite-size pieces.

I’ve got the new course for it on the eCreators Hub.

And my beta tester is going through it now.

There are no videos.

Each quick tutorial is focused on 1 thing and has “click here, do that”, short text with screenshots for each setting.

You will be flying through the whole thing in an order that makes perfect sense.

I’ll be releasing it to the public with a big discount very soon.

And in 1 sitting you’ll have a store ready in time for holiday sales!!!!

Printify Pop-Up Store Setup Guide Available

WOOT!!!!!

My Printify Pop-Up Store Setup Guide is now available for download in my Shopify store!!!!

It’s a fantastic way to sell Print on Demand (POD) merchandise.

It’s straight through, with no settings missed.

In just 30 minutes you’ll have a POD store.

And the store itself is FREE!!!!

New Holiday Sweatshirts Available

I have had THE best fun making new holiday sweatshirts for my Printify Pop Up Store!!!!!!!!

I can definitely see this thing as an outlet for my twisted sense of humor.

I ordered my own and can’t wait to wear them.

And they are available at $1 over cost if you want one too!!

I used Midjourney for the bulk of the image.

Then I used Photoshop to tweak it and upscale it to make it print-ready.

But, there are other programs that you can use to manipulate the image too, and they are free or lower cost than Photoshop.

I teach all of this in the AI Images for Profit course.

Upcoming Courses

The order for my e-commerce course builds is literally dictated by what my clients are asking for.

And each course will focus on exactly 1 type of setup. So these are not generic courses that try to cover everything you might want to do with a Shopify store.

My next course will be integrating Printify with Shopify so that you can sell both downloadables, printables, and merch from one store. And it will still be on the Shopify Starter plan.

My client who wants this has her on WP site and just needs to be able to sell more than one product at a time, but has a mix of downloads and merch. So, doing it in split stores, the way I’m doing my own, doesn’t really make sense. My merch is just for fun right now, hence the split, and that’s okay. But itt would be best for her to have it all in one store.

And then my next course will be on drop-shipping using one of the plans above the Shopify Starter, as my client needs more features, like a theme that has more customization options as well as other parts of the purchasing process that she wants more customization options for.

Shopify Themes are NOT Like WP Themes

As for the themes, Shopify just went through a major 2.0 update earlier this year and all themes are not equal – not even close!!! So, me and my client will be digging into them to ensure she gets one with the latest code, and I’ll be helping her go through the basics of customization, as what you see is not all you can do with a theme, as far as layout. You can move sections around pretty easily.

You need to be VERY careful with which Shopify theme you choose. It’s not like WP where blocks and plugins and such are separate from the theme. Most Shopify themes have custom blocks and Apps built in. (Apps are what Shopify calls their plugins.)

So, changing themes means rebuilding the store.

And not all themes in the Shopify Theme Marketplace have been updated to the latest 2.0 code. Actually, the most recent code should be called 2.1 because it is different from what they originally released with the 2.0 change from their proprietary Liquid coding language to more standard CSS and JS.

I expect there to be even more standardization with the themes over the next several months. So, this big changeover issue won’t last long.

Remember when we went through this in 2019 when Gutenberg blocks first came out? We didn’t have WP themes that supported them for at least 6 months. And by late 2020, most all themes supported blocks.

That’s kind of what Shopify is going through now.

So, if you see Shopify tutorials on YouTube or such, even from early 2024, they are likely out of date.

That’s also why having someone like me help you with the setup is so important.

Y’all know I’m digging deep and testing everything, and keeping you updated so that you avoid expensive mistakes and get it right the first time!!

eCommerce Consults Available

Beyond the 3 folks mentioned above, I’ve got 4 more clients ready to get into Shopify.

Contact me if you’re ready to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. 

I’ll either have a course for it or offer it as a done-for-you service if you want to go that route.

Just let me know what you’re looking to do, as that alone is dictating the order of new courses and services I’m providing.

And we’ll get it done in time for holiday sales, as I’ve already got the basic Shopify tutorials done and new course creation should be a LOT faster now.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Put Best Sellers in Your Store

Printify is going big to compete with both Amazon and Shopify as a direct sales outlet.

And they make it so that you can sell products from others too and get an affiliate commission.

Plus, you get early access to new products.

So, this is something I’ll definitely be checking into.

Oh, and did I mention that your Printiy pop up store is free?

This could be a whole new outlet for you to make money, and a fast and easy way to expand your affiliate marketing.

And yes, how to do this is on my course creation list too!!!

Amazon Affiliate Marketing Changes

Y’all need to read the new Amazon Affiliate Program changes.

It sounds to me like they are trying to cut down on paid reviews.

And what exactly counts as compensation? If the brand sends you something for free to get your honest review of it, does that count as compensation?

And what are people doing with the data? Sounds to me like is is something that Amazon doesn’t like. Do you know what it is?

TikTok Shop is Kicking Butt

I have to tell you, TikTok Shop is kicking Amazon’s butt with brands sending folks free stuff for them to do a video review and sell.

And there are PLENTY of folks showing their data on how much money they are making from TikTok shop too.

I have to wonder what Amazon is thinking with these new rules and how they might just send more folks to TikTok Shop.

Have you read through the Amazon changes? What do you think is going on? Leave us a comment here or anywhere you see this post.

Sell POD on TikTok Shop

You may recall that a month or so ago I reported that TikTok Shop has a new integration with Printify.

And you can become a TikTok Shop seller with zero subscribers to your channel. (You need to have 1,000 subscribers to become an affiliate.)

That means that I could sell my new Printify Pop-Up Store shirts directly on TikTok if I wanted to.

And I may at some point.

Watch Out for Scammers

Now, I know all of this has got you excited. But watch out for some of those TikTok Shop course folks.

They aren’t lying when they say they made $10,000 off just 1 video.

Yeah, they had 1 video go viral and they have not been able to reproduce that result.

But,  they are now using that data to sell you a course on how to replicate what they did.

They just don’t tell you the full story – but I do!!!

But That’s How It Works

Hell yeah I’ll make 20 videos if 1 of them has a shot at bringing me $10k!!!!!!!

I was in the music business for years.

And for every 10 songs on an album, only 1-2 of them produce mass sales as singles, if you’re lucky.

That’s the way it works.

Look at your own site. 

How many posts do you have, and how many of them get mass traffic? 

It’s a 10:1 or 20:1 ratio, right?

You just never know what will hit until you try.

And don’t take it so seriously. Funny, entertaining videos get more play.

Give yourself permission to be goofy or show some personality.

GA4 Tips

GA4 Quick Setup Guide Coming

Because you can easily connect both your Printify Pop-Up Store and your Shopify Store with Google Analytics, I think I need to make a super quick checklist for doing the GA4 part of the setup after you make that connection.

I don’t intend to bring back the entire GA4 course with how to create the custom reports and such, especially now that we STRONGLY prefer to use EZ Metrix reports.

But, you do need a checklist for ensuring you have all the settings in GA4, like your retention settings that default to 2 months, and then other customer profile data that is not turned on by default.

I’m debating whether or not to include how to set up conversions in this guide or just put them in the EZ Metrix course because your stores will be a separate property, and that means they will be a separate report in EZ Metrix too.

Either way, this is on my tutorial list, but I think it will be short enough for a Guide ebook instead of a full course.

SEO for eCommerce

And I can see that I need to make a course for SEO on both your Shopify store and your products.

It will include how to make the best use of the AI Assistant they have available too.

Plus, it will also include making use of the Google Merchant Center, which has recently been revamped. And I’m betting this is a huge SEO boost that most ecomm folks are missing.

After running the DIY SEO course for a decade, I’m betting I can put together a one-of-a-kind SEO course for stores that gets real results!!

Webmaster Updates

New Services Directory

Need a little help with a task you don’t normally cover for your clients?

Check out the new Member Directory listings in the member dashboard of your Webmaster Training.

We can help each other with just about anything, and keep it in the family, so to speak.

I sent an email to webmasters with the direct link. But you can find the link anytime at the top of your member dashboard.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 6.7 RC2 

The RC1 rolled out last week and I expect the RC2 to be available today.

This week I’ll be testing it to make a What’s New in WP 6.7 post for you.

The final release is expected to be the first week of November.

We won’t be the first folks to update, though.

I’ll have special update instructions for my site audit Hub clients as well as my Webmaster Training members.

WP Hoohaa Continues

Yes, I’m keeping up with the continued WP drama and news.

But I’m only reporting on things we need to change or do, like the plugin below.

Plugin Tips

Better Search and Replace

This is one of the plugins made by WP Engine that got caught in the recent WP hoohaa.

I saw a post on X Monday that it had a warning label in the WP Plugin repo that it had been cut off from updates.

But I checked the plugin’s listing there and saw no such warnings.

As far as I can tell, if you install this plugin from that listing, it actually pulls from the WP Engine site and is the latest version, which was updated 3 months ago, before all this mess started.

I’ll keep an eye out for us on it.

Backup Tips

When was the last time you backed up your devices?

Now is a good time to do that.

How about your computer?

I use Backblaze for mine.