Hi friends, 

We're excited to share Part One of our 4-Part Shopify Store Launch Guide!

If you followed our initial Shopify Store Launch Success Guide Introduction post, then you've picked a date for your Shopify store launch. If you haven't done that yet, then choose a date, put it on the calendar, and make a public announcement so you have some peer pressure to hold you accountable. 

Today's post assumes you are 24 days away from your launch. It will give you specific instructions about what to do in our four areas under review:

1. Site Technical Setup: How ready your site is for "real" customers.
2. Product Plan: How complete your product strategy is.
3. Promotion Strategies: How you are going to draw a crowd to your site for the launch (and beyond).
4. Communication Plan: How you'll announce your promotion to your friends, followers, and even new prospects. 

Readiness Assessment: Since we're just starting our work. Let's talk about your readiness to launch....

It's a huge honor to have taught almost 6,000 students how to set up a Shopify store via our popular Shopify Power course on Udemy. And an even bigger honor to get to personally coach and mentor a smaller group via our Inner Circle program!

But the #1 challenge our students face is how to launch their store successfully. How to actually get it to a point where it is "ready for prime time". They ask about it frequently with questions like this,

"I feel stuck - I'm not sure how to successfully launch my Shopify store?"

This can be a huge frustration. It leads to confusion, discouragement, and feeling like a failure. Sadly, many students get stuck at this barrier and never move past it. They let their Shopify project languish for a few months, then ultimately cancel their Shopify subscription and chalk it up to "another good idea that didn't work." 

I know the feeling! I have had more failed websites that you can imagine. But thankfully, my wife and I (working together), got past...

Series Overview: There are the 4 attributes of a powerful e-commerce brand. In the first article in this series, I described the invisible aspects of a powerful e-commerce brand. In the second article in the series, I described the 6 visible aspects of a powerful e-commerce brand including the most important aspect - the name. But choosing names can be complicated by 3 primary factors, which leads us to today's topic. (Please note though, I am not an attorney, and this information should be taken as general educational information, not legal advice). 

In this article, we'll describe what I call the Brand L.A.B. ... asking the question: 

1. Is it Legal?
2. Is it Availability?
3. Is it Baggage Free?

Why is creating a brand so powerful - and creating an e-commerce brand in particular so incredibly cool? Here is a short list:

1. Anyone can make a brand. There are no rules about who can make them. 
2. They are easy to create - and if done properly - can be...

Series Overview: There are the 4 attributes of a powerful e-commerce brand. In the first article in this series, I described the invisible aspects of a powerful e-commerce brand.

In this article, we'll discuss 6 visible aspects of a powerful e-commerce brand and how you can put them together in support of your online selling efforts. These aspects are frequently overlooked entirely, or put together quickly without thoughtful consideration. This article will give you key insights into how to use them effectively.

Influences on this article include the work of Jon Ward, I'd encourage you to look into his work.

The 1st Visible Aspect - The Name Of Your Brand: The name of your brand is the most important visible element. It's the aspect of your brand that you need to spend the most time working on.

Myth: All the good names are taken

Reality: There is an unlimited number of great options available for your brand.

Let's look a just some of the options available to...

What if 10 years from now - you had a brand that sold a million dollar a year online? No, I'm not making any income claim or promise, but if you had such a brand...

It would fund your lifestyle, give you financial freedom, make your bank account bulletproof, allow you to live where and how you want. It would be your life's work. Your greatest accomplishment. Your pride and joy. It would allow you to look back on a fractured and random career and say, "it was all worth it - and it worked out really well in the end."

Take a few minutes and gaze backward in time from that point of success. How did you get there? What steps did you take? What puzzle pieces did you pick up and set into place to get clarity? Imagine your twenty-year old nephew comes to your house and asks, "how did you get started? " 

This is what you will say to your Nephew...

There are 4 attributes of a powerful e-commerce brand. Setting them up takes some time - and patience - and a commitment to see the...

Updated May 25,2020

By Jason Miles

Can you use Shopify to run a membership site? 

Can you get paying subscribers to your Shopify site? 

These were the questions we wondered as we began to put together the program elements of our new Sewing With Cinnamon program.

Our outcome? We launched on March 28th and as of this writing (8 weeks later) we had 584 paying subscribers. By the end of the 3rd year (March 2020) we had over 1,000 members and we are adding them weekly.

In this post, I'll walk you through the concept, milestones, and lessons learned. So you can decide if a membership program is right for you - and if using Shopify to do it is your best path forward.

[Update: We recently recorded a video explaining a terrific marketing technique to grow your membership program - and to give you an update on how our program has grown. Watch it here: https://www.winningonshopify.com/blog/running-a-membership-program-on-shopify]

The Financial Benefits Of A Membership...

Presentation Highlights:

1:30: The reason to consider going from Amazon To Shopify.

4:54: How much time are you spending going from idea to idea without a solid long-term plan?

5:30: The real problem we are all trying to solve for as e-commerce sellers.

6:08: What can be achieved when you begin to solve the real problem.

8:00: Example - how one simple product can create dramatic wealth.

11:00: Our story and why we're so passionate about helping business owners sell online.

15:55: Is your current sales system creating the result you want?

16:50: The 4-Tests Of A Successful Brand - and how to pass them.

17:00 Test #1

18:00 Test #2

19:00 Test #3

20:40 Test #4

22:30 The Lean Startup Method-For Shopify Sellers

28:15: Overcoming the 3 biggest challenges of creating a successful Shopify Ecommerce website.

28:30: Challenge #1 - The biggest challenge with launching a successful Shopify site.

30:30: Challenge #2 - Overcoming the most difficult part of managing a Shopify...

You know it's coming. You can tell. Your boss is acting weird, the news from the top is not good in general, and there is a lot of restructuring going on. So when you boss asks if he can meet with you first thing when you get in - you know it's over.

As a former Human Resources Generalist, then ultimately SVP in charge of Human Resources, I coordinated a lot of these meetings. Doing the behind the scenes paperwork, preparation, and planning. It sucked. I always worried about the impact of the financial hit the employee was going to take.

I heard on the radio the other day that,

71% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.

So getting fired can mean serious financial stress. That's just part of our new economy. It used to be that just poor performers got terminated and it was fairly rare for good workers to get shown the door.

But today's marketplace is so incredibly volatile, and short-term in nature, it's really common for very good people to end up on the wrong side of these types...

How We Finally Got Retargeting To Make A Profit...

I'm an eager student, but a slow learner. So when retargeting came along a few years ago, I jumped at the chance to learn how to do it. In this blog post, I explain Retargeting as a marketing strategy and how we failed repeatedly to make it work - and then ultimately found our way to a successful retargeting strategy. I'm not claiming to be an expert on this topic in any way - I'm just a student of the technique sharing my story...

Retargeting Defined: (in case you're not familiar with the phrase), "retargeting", it is the idea of placing an advertisement in front of someone who has previously visited your website. You do it by installing a "pixel" tracking code on your Shopify (or other) website that tracks visitors - so that you can serve up ads to them later.

(Note: Google calls this "remarketing", Facebook calls it "retargeting")

Because retargeting is an advertising strategy - the folks who offer you the "pixel tracking code"...

Like a ton of online entrepreneurs - we started our e-commerce business (Liberty Jane) selling on eBay then added a Wordpress site. Then discovered Shopify in 2013.

Looking back, it's obvious now why Shopify is superior to Wordpress, but at the time, we weren't sure.

In this post, I'll share why (functionally) we prefer Shopify for e-commerce selling. But first...

Disclaimer: I use Wordpress sites, both hosted and self-hosted, for blogging - and really like them for that purpose. I'm not trying to bash Wordpress in any way. 

But if you're an e-commerce entrepreneur trying to decide on website options, I think this article will shed some light.

Achilles' Heel - There Is Really No Such Thing As A Self Hosted Wordpress Site

The first real problem we encountered with using Wordpress for e-commerce is, there is no such thing as a "self-hosted" Wordpress site. This confused us at first. What is "hosting"? But over time our thinking got clearer. What is implied by the phrase...