The year of the video!

Every year since 2005 when Steve Jobs proclaimed it the year of the video with Final Cut Pro, every year digital marketers say, “This is the year of the video.”

More than a decade later it’s still the year of the video. Probably, not even Steve Jobs imagined just how much impact on the digital world video has.

Video is a way to communicate in a personal way with many people in visually. Use video as part of your marketing strategy, your competitors are likely doing so.

Years ago, producing videos was something only expensive productions companies could do. Today, even your smartphone can make decent videos on a small business budget.

Going viral

People always ask, how can I make a viral video. Not every video will go viral. Some videos will go viral for no other reason than they catch a funny moment, like a cat falling off a TV or kids coming on the set of a BBC interview.

Spontaneous moments that capture the fancy of millions of people are a great thing. However, to succeed with video marketing you need to have a strategy in place and communication tools that help drive users to your video. Some people can get lucky but in reality, it takes practice.

Is video really for me?

People will say, “I created a video and only 4 people watched it. I’m wondering if video is really for me.” Just creating a video thinking somebody is just going to come across it without promoting it doesn’t work.

There are many ways to promote your video on social media and with paid advertising. PPC ads can quickly grow an audience. Then as your audience grows, you can watch clicks on your video grow organically.

Here is the thing about “going viral” though – If you reach the hundred people you want to reach through the video, you really don’t care if 23,944,424 people are watching. The more niche your business is, the more value you’ll have with reaching a smaller audience.

If 100 people in out of thousands watch your video – you’re doing well. The video need not be a viral sensation to bring new customers. Just follow the ten steps presented later here and you can have some good results.

Your video doesn’t have to be an expensive slick production with all kinds of fancy effects. It is the content that counts. It’s difficult to create a video that goes viral, but doable if that is your goal, as shown in the following example/case study.

$100 Viral Video

Maybe you’ve seen the Blendtec “Will it Blend?” series of videos where things you would never put into a blender such as an iPhone are smashed to smithereens.

These viral videos started when the Marketing Director saw the R&D team blending up wooden boards to test product toughness. He had an idea to shoot a video of the operation and post it online.

With only a $100 in supplies, they made a video in the company break and blended up various non-food items – crazy things like marbles and a garden rake. Within five days of posting their videos on YouTube and on their own website, they had SIX MILLION YouTube views.

The take away here is to think of video as storytelling. Unlike viral videos that are often coincidental and just by chance, in the Blendtec case, it is a clear-cut strategy to say – how can we draw attention to the product, without talking just about the product?

Video length

If you listen to music, most songs are 3 minutes long and you can apply that as well to video. Anything more than that, if you look at that the trends in the graphs, after 3 minutes people fall off.

You want to have your 3 acts in 3 minutes when you tell a story with video. You can always go much longer, but it needs to be engaging to the audience.

One strategy is to design a campaign that is a series of short videos that if played in full would be 30 or 40 minutes long. Record ten or twelve 3-minute videos at the same time and then release one every week.

Video SEO

Google puts videos into the organic search results. If you have a video, you have a better chance of getting on the front page of the search results for your keywords because of your video content far more than just text. Another reason video is an important marketing tool.

10 steps to creating and promoting your video

Step 1: What is your story?

Number one – you will tell your story. For example:

• Why are you the best in the area you serve?
• What is your story about customer experience?
• What do customers think of you?
• What is your company culture?
• Who works for you what do they do?
• What kind of awards have you won?

You need to have a clear idea of what your story is and what are the theme and the purpose of your video. Making a video just for the sake of making a video is not a good reason. Take your story and connect it with the business objective.

What is the objective or your video? Are you looking to create an awareness of your business and promote it? Maybe you are trying to get more reviews or improve SEO for increased web traffic, leads, and sales. You could be looking for new employees.

All of these are possible reasons for the video, but the number one reason you’re creating videos is to tell YOUR STORY – and everything here is tied to the number one objective of all marketing – you want to grow your business.

SEO/content value and increasing traffic

If one of your motives for making a video is SEO content and keywords, you can add keywords when you upload your video and that will drive your SEO.

Step 2: Who are you trying to reach?

Step two – determine exactly who your audience is.

Do you want to reach business owners? Are you targeting a certain age group? Most businesses don’t have just one audience. Is there a segment of the population you wish to reach but have not done so successfully? Maybe a video aimed towards them will help.

Often people are searching for answers on how to do or fix something. Create a video to reach people who need content for education. Show them a “how to video” that shows what you are doing for your specialty.

Step 3: Plan your production

Plan your shoot and then – shoot your plan!

There was a time when all the new video social networks had started that just shooting a real-time video interviewing people while walking was enough, that’s OK for a live video shoot.

However, when you’re going to tell a story, be prepared and think – what are the themes and stories that match your objective. Be clear about the purpose of the video and the intended audience.

Gather a team in your company and brainstorm on what the video story will be. You could create 3 versions and vote on which one is best. Look at other videos that have been very successful and learn from them.

Use a script to know exactly what it is you are going to say so you can deliver your message in a clean and concise manner. Decide whether you can produce in-house or if will you need a pro, and set a budget.

You can make videos nowadays easily on your Smartphone with video editing apps. Use the resources you have within your company and you can produce a video at very low costs. Remember – it doesn’t have to be really fancy – it is the content that counts mainly.

Step 4: Upload your video to YouTube and Facebook

The most important step is number 4. You can’t just shoot the video, leave it on your phone for months and months, and decide one day to upload it. You need to take action and tell the world your story.

YouTube and Facebook are two of the biggest and have tremendous viewership. People still watch TV, but they watch considerably more TV and video on YouTube, Netflix, and other Internet sources, especially teens and young adults. You need to upload your video to both YouTube and Facebook.

If you don’t have a Facebook page, which is different from a profile page, you need to create one. Every business should have a Facebook business page. Just go to “Create Page” on Facebook and select:

• Local Business or Place
• Company, Organization or Institution
• Brand or Product

Tips for increasing your video’s online visibility

To increase traffic to your website, put in information that gets people to go to your website in the description areas when you post a video on YouTube or Facebook, even if they’re watching the video in the in the YouTube or Facebook ecosystem itself.

YouTube

When posting your video to YouTube and filling out descriptions and titles, think about the people who are looking for your story. Your title shouldn’t be something like – video taken May 9, 2017. It should be something like:

How to Lite a Fireplace – When to Replace Your Roof – Best Way to Remodel Your Kitchen.

Be direct with your title. Add your brand name and relevant tags about the subject of the video. These are the things that Google and other search engines are going to look at.

Here are some more tips to get your video delivering results:

• Add the URL to your website in the description, best if it is in the first 6 words. This way people don’t have to scroll down and search for it.
• Search for similar videos on YouTube and add a comment letting them know about YOUR video.
• Engage and respond to people who comment (positive and negative) about your video. The number of comments helps increase the video’s visibility.
• Post short videos or teasers on Instagram, which will let you syndicate to other sites.
• Embed the videos on your website. This works as a backlink to YouTube.

Facebook

• Upload the video to your company Facebook page.
• Post from personal pages to increase reach (employees can help a lot)

Step 5: Click once and share all over

Your website should not be your whole web presence. Your web presence should work in symphony with social media, maps, and other local listings to give you a large web footprint. You will want to share your videos on as many social networks as possible.

If you have a Yelp channel or Google My Business or some of the other hundreds of directories, it can be very time-consuming logging into every single one and your social media to add videos. Then, if you need to update anything you have to go back and do it all again.

There are many publishing tools that allow you to just click once and your video goes across your entire web presence. Then signals come back so you can monitor your video’s web presence and see things such as how many views it has, how long it’s being watched and more.

Whether it’s a video or a photo, make sure that you have Metadata turned on, if you’re taking a video with your phone make sure geographical location is turned on. These are all signals that tell Google and other search engines this is really a local business.

Step 6: Create ad campaigns

When you spend a lot of time and effort creating a video, make sure that you get as much of your audience as quickly as possible. Especially if there’s a call to action. The way to do this is advertise on YouTube, Facebook, and the Google Display Network.

Create a Google ad campaign

TrueView video ads

Google’s TrueView Ads are a great way to promote your video. Everyone by now who watches YouTube is familiar with the advertisements that appear before many videos start and the “skip” button that appears to go straight to the video.

With TrueView video ads you’ll pay only when users engage (watch for 30+ seconds)

You can laser target your videos to any audience you choose in the Google Network using keywords, demographics, affinity groups, shopping behavior, remarketing list and more.

Step 7: Connect with community and industry influencers

Connecting with the community of others in your industry is a good way to promote your video. Show people in your community the video, get their feedback and ask them to share it on social, blog posts, and emails. Share it on the Facebook pages of industry influencers.

• Work with your community
• Let them know you’re working on something big
• Remind them when your video goes live
• Engage influencers via social media

Step 8: Create a specific email marketing campaign

Emails are one more way to get people to watch your video and reinforce your brand’s story and one of the most effective tools for generating sales. Another advantage is that unlike using paid advertising to boost your video views – emails are free!

Social media is a very busy and noisy environment with many messages coming across. Emails are a more personal one-on-one conversation that if done right can be more effective than social media.

Don’t just tell them about your video, embed it in the email by using the embed function from your video host. Marketers who use video in email campaigns see increased click-through rates, increased time spent reading the email, and increased sharing and forwarding.

• Send a special update to your email list
• Include a link to the video in your next newsletter
• Share the video with your employees internally
• Have your team add a link to the video in their email signatures

Step 9: Prepare for any crisis or controversy

Did you see the 2017 Super Bowl ad from 84 – Lumber? Here is a perfect example of why you should have a plan to deal with negative feedback or controversy on a video you are ready to launch. Have a focus group, discuss possible concerns, and prepare responses.

• Accept that you can’t please everybody
• Consider all possible negative feedback ahead of time
• Prepare various responses to possible concerns, then tailor the reply to the platform (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, email etc…)

Step 10: Post-release promotion

Finally, when you release your video, create a press release and send it out saying – Hey, everyone, watch our story. To make it more interesting you could interview the CEO of your company or perhaps a customer that was in the video and include your video in the Press Release.

• Send press releases
• Create a post and share the results
• Send a thank you email to everyone who worked on the project
• Submit your video to industry award contests

Video Ads

PPC Video

If you’re running a pay per click campaign with Google Ads, advertising with video works the same way – it is showing a video as the ad. With the pre-roll (an ad that appears before of a video), you won’t have to pay if no one clicks it.

You need something short, it could be 5 seconds or 15 seconds long. Don’t put up an entire video that would run 15 minutes. The probability a viewer will click and watch the whole thing goes down quickly

With video ads, just think about what you’re trying to say and deliver the message in the first 5 seconds.

If you have a dental practice, for example, a person uses the search term on Google or YouTube “bleeding gums treatment,” you could have a pre-roll video show up that talks about the common causes of bleeding gums.

That’s a chance to get in front of somebody interested in what you do. There are also ads that appear in the video as pop-ups and in search results.

How much does video advertising cost?

Just like pay per click, you have control over a daily budget. You may work with an account manager that manages this for you, so the cost is between you and the business that handles your account.

If you want to do it yourself and you understand AdWords a little, again, the one thing you need to remember is you only pay when someone engages your ad. If they skip BEFORE 30 seconds or the end, you don’t pay.

Say you’ve got a longer video that was 2 to 3 minutes long and they watch beyond the 5-second pre-roll and they go to 24 seconds, you’re still not paying YouTube for that advertising. For this reason, it’s good to get your message in as soon as possible.

Targeting

Whether you’re doing a campaign on YouTube or Facebook, just like Ad Words, with video advertising you target who you want to see the ad.

There’s a variety of targeting options that can help you reach the right customers for your business. Age, gender, location, interests and other subcategories allow you to say – I want my video in front of these people. Tailor your ad to the exact crowd you want to target.

Reach out and touch someone!

When you make a video to reach out to a potential client, you want to make it something that’s personal. Something they can easily understand and feel like you’re talking directly to them. Human to human – this is the mantra you need to attract customers.

You will want to talk about who you are, what you can do for clients and how they can contact you. 3 simple things that you can put into your video.

Built-in Analytics

What’s great about YouTube is the analytics built in so you can see the ad performance. You can make adjustments throughout it live and run multiple ads for A-B testing. You can also tell how long somebody’s engaged and watching.

Say you have a 5-minute video of an overview of how you do a project or job. If it’s 5 minutes long and you’re losing people at 3 minutes, what’s going on that people stop viewing? This information is powerful for knowing what is working and what’s not.

With analytics you can also see:

• How many views are paid for?
• Where your ads getting viewed
• How many clicks the ads getting

Analytics helps you see if your advertising’s working if you need to tweak anything or are if you in front of the right audience. These are all things you can change up.

Final thoughts

If you are communicating via video, you want to build trust with the viewer. You are showing your story about your business one on one. You are showing what you do and how you do it.

Make sure that your logo, contact information – phone number, email, your website all get into the video. Even if it’s a short video, people will be watching to the end if they are engaged.

PrimeView offers video distribution and video optimization as one of its many content marketing services.  Contact us and learn more about how we can help your Video Marketing efforts!

Without a doubt, both platforms are the kings of the ecommerce industry. Two of the most popular and powerful in the market today, WooCommerce and Magento. Both share great qualities of a selling platform, what to use still depends on you. This article will help you decide depending on your preference and how you see your ecommerce website in action.

The Similarities

Open Source

WooCommerce and Magento are open source products, meaning both are freely available to create a store that is professional and delivers results. With open source, the code can be modified to make needed changes in the frontend. One reason why these platforms are popular is that of its availability to the public. People are free to share their experience and encounters with the platform. This includes sharing source codes, experiments and of course, indulge in debates.

Forums

There are also many forums for both. Since WooCommerce is an open source WordPress plugin, there is an available support forum designated for it specifically with a wide range of topics and detailed documentation making it convenient for developers to use and look up. While Magento, as a large platform also appears in a lot of web forums especially in the ecommerce market. Both platforms assure you’ll get plenty of help from the community.  

Customization and Key Functionalities

Partly the reason for the success of WooCommerce and Magento is their capacity to give the users the ability to create their store the way they want it. The customization options of both are as wide as you imagine it to be. They support your business’ branding through plugins and add-ons that maximize the capabilities of your store. These platforms are brilliant for helping you make your online shop your own. Both also have the basic key functions of a fully functional ecommerce website: each has the cart, the product database and item details like prices and product photos.

WooCommerce

Pros

EASY TO USE WITH FAMILIAR WORDPRESS SETUP

Being a plugin for WordPress, a hugely popular CMS that supports 51% of the top million websites currently existing, WooCommerce is easy for past WordPress users due to its familiar user-friendly interface. With the said familiarity, it saves a huge amount of time in production and makes room for more creativity.

WooCommerce is a simpler, less technical kind of ecommerce platform, which is why it is best for businesses starting out. It has widgets giving customers the power to rate products and feature items like best sellers or those on sale.

GIVES MORE THAN JUST E-COMMERCE

WooCommerce doesn’t only give users the freedom to customize, it also gives the users plenty of opportunities to build a fully functional store, which is not only professional looking but also with integrated blog pages, and we all know how blogging is important for businesses to build their brand presence and manage reputation.

Even though WooCommerce is free, it doesn’t limit you in delivering a great and professional looking online store. WordPress lets you choose between an assortment of WooCommerce themes in the Woo Themes Store that you can also customize – making it your very own style. You can do this by changing color themes, adjusting the CSS styles and even edit the code and experiment your way to a more personalized look.

FLEXIBILITY AT ITS BEST

One of its biggest perks for an ecommerce newbie is WooCommerce’ flexibility when it comes to its products, without having to learn all about the technical side of it. Products can be categorized, assigned prices and independent attributes and all the other basic things an online store can do. In addition to this, WooCommerce can manage to sell a physical product or even virtual downloadable types.

Cons

SOME PLUGINS AND ADDONS ARE COSTLY

WooCommerce earns money from its add-ons and plugins that users would want for their online store like the rating functionality, the featured products, coupons and more. It might be very customizable but for the right price. Unlike Magento, all the functionality you wish your online store has can be coded and applied. All you need to have is a team of well-rounded developers to have it functional.

LIMITATIONS

Even though WooCommerce gives you the freedom to customize and add products and get it to be fully functional, it also has limitations like every other platform. WooCommerce has pre-order limitations and for some businesses, pre-orders are an essential part of their e-commerce functionality. It is said that with WooCommerce when a pre-order item is added in the cart, then any item previously added is removed. A pre-order item cannot co-exist with any other item in the same order. It also seems like this problem has not yet been resolved until now.

NOT COMPATIBLE WITH EVERY BUSINESS

Being limited with the functionalities that come free with the plugin, not all businesses are compatible with WooCommerce, sure it can do basic online selling and whatnot, but a large business with a huge database of products might be a problem. WooCommerce Variations can slow down the loading speed, and although it can handle the products, the speed would eventually be affected by it being only a plugin instead of a standalone platform.

Another thing, this being a WordPress plugin, a software update might cause some changes in your WooCommerce store. Sometimes a plugin isn’t too quick to adapt to the updates, leaving the online store to experience glitches and issues that can affect your business.

Magento

Pros

MULTIPLE STORES

The great thing about Magento is it can run multiple storefronts from a single backend system. Running multiple stores with multiple brands is possible with Magento. This allows you to maintain a harmonized backend.

OVERALL MANAGEMENT

Magento has a designated admin panel where you can manage transactions in your online store, adjust the shipping process and resolve issues. It also consists a list of important data of your business like product list of most searched products, most viewed, most popular – you can even see if a customer has placed an item in their cart but didn’t purchase.

You can also import thousands of items and modify the attributes. You can upload images, set conditional pricing and decide how your customers will see the product in their window.

3 AVAILABLE EDITIONS FOR DEDICATED USAGE

Enterprise

This is for the largest of e-commerce retailers. The scalability and ability to create and add new features and marketing strategies is impeccable.

Community

Magento Community is dedicated for tech-savvy users or developers who handle the coding and programming. Here, users can re-use codes and apply it to their own unique platforms to meet their business needs. Users can collaborate on formulating extensions, codes and other knowledge to maximize the Magento platform.

Cons

COMPLEX FOR BEGINNERS AND NON-CODERS

Setting up Magento is not as easy as WooCommerce. This platform runs on PHP with Java code. Users must know how to configure and make the store fully functional on their own. You also must have advanced skills in PHP to maximize the customization capability of Magento.

SLOW

Since it runs in PHP with Java codes, it’s given that this requires a lot of memory during the process. This means strong hardware is needed to run the software itself. A lot of businesses use cloud services but still struggle to obtain a high speed experience.

TIME-CONSUMING IN DEVELOPMENT

The complexity of the platform is beyond confusing at some point. Even with almost 4000 lines of free reusable codes, it is still very time consuming to be able to figure out a way around it. This uses an MVC approach which follows best web programming practices which make it difficult to work with. If you decide to hire a team of professionals to handle the development, the only downer is how much this would cost. Since it’s a complicated system, you better have a decent amount in hand.

Conclusion

All being said, WooCommerce or Magento, both are amazing platforms you can use for your online business. What to use between the two still depends on your business requirements. If you want your customers to have the full experience of a web store without limitations and you can code your way through PHP and Java or even pay people to do it for you, then nothing is stopping you from using Magento. If you think your business is in its infancy and does not require a lot in the processes other than selling your product and get customer feedback and you have the budget to purchase special features, we suggest using WooCommerce since it is also good for growing businesses, a few steps at a time.

Img c/o Pixabay

Magento is one of the powerful open-source e-commerce system available today. According to Google Trends, it is the most popular platform among Prestashop, Shopify, LiveChat, and BigCommerce from 2008 to present. Magento’s success can be attributed to its functionality, comprehensive features, and flexibility.

Magento is chosen by one out of four businesses, and has three versions—Magento Go, Magento Community, and Magento Enterprise. For this post, we will tackle Magento Community and Enterprise, so that you can decide which one makes more sense for your business needs and goals.

Magento Community

Magento Community is free, and it is what makes it so appealing for most business owners. There are no fees involved with using the platform. The only things you need to pay for are your domain name, web hosting services, and programmer’s fee.

The main features of Magento Community are:

Code-level Access – Magento Community allows code-level access to its users, which means that you can tweak them and integrate changes in your system easily. If you need added functionality, you can for to Magento Connect Marketplace and access 7,500 extensions to use, some of which are free while others are paid.

Multiple Stores – You can manage multiple stores within the platform. For instance, you can have different stores for different brands, retail, and wholesale. You can also have multiple store views for different customer groups. For instance, you can optimize your site to be mobile-friendly or you can let users view your site in a specific language. You can also have a specific site for users in a specific country.

Persistent Shopping Cart – This feature saves the content of a shopping cart until a customer comes back even in a different platform—may it be desktop, tablet, mobile. This feature allows you to create discounts and other offers for specific customers. For instance, wholesale customers get an automatic discount of 5% or an on-going offer of free shipping for all orders made within a specific time frame.

Result Filters – Magento allows better browsing through filters and restrictions in results. With this feature, users can filter results according to color, size, manufacturer, and price.

Different Payment Configurations and Options – You can set different payment options as well as shipping options for international clients.

Product Options – Aside from the product name, cost, weight, size, color, description, and retail price, you can also set tier prices, which are different pricing systems for different customer groups such as retail and wholesale buyers. Meanwhile, you can also set special prices for a specific duration, which is typically done during sales or promotions. You can also designate up-sells, cross sells, and related products to encourage higher sales.

SEO – Magento Community is integrated with SEO tools, so that your website will be indexed by search engines.

Couponing and Promotions – Aside from helping you manage your e-commerce business, Magento also allows you to create coupons and promotions and easily integrate them in the system.

Customer Accounts Management – Magento allows you to edit customer     information such as their address, passwords, and phone numbers.

Order and Sales Management – Magento Community allows you to go in and process orders and mark them according to progress.

Magento Community, as it is, is already packed with features that are helpful for businesses. However, Magento decided to step it up a notch and came up with the Enterprise version to meet a more extensive range of needs and goals.

Magento Enterprise

Magento Enterprise is essentially the paid version of Magento Community, and it costs $15,500 a year. It contains the same features as the free version, but it goes way than that and offers a wider range of functions. Let’s look at some of their key differences:

Large Catalog – Magento Enterprise is designed for businesses that handles a large number of products, while Magento Community is only good for medium-size businesses. It indexes large catalogs 80% faster and it can add new products immediately, whereas Community could take 12 minutes before showing a new offer.

Full-page Caching and Quicker Loading Times – Full-page caching is not available on Community. You can run a caching system on your site, but most hosting companies don’t support it. More so, you need to manually rebuild the cache when you add or make changes to your site.

Comprehensive Rollback System – When you accidentally changed something in the site and want to return to a previous version, you may be setting yourself up for a lot of work if you’re on Magento Community. Magento Community can only restore from the previous day’s backup, but what if you want to go back to an older version? Magento Enterprise allows you to roll back to a previous version of a page or any element in the site easily and quickly, letting you track changes and who made them.

Better Scalability – Magento Community works on a single server which handles DNS, PHP, caching, memory, database, etc. If you’re website has a lot of traffic, products, or buyers, the server may have a hard time keeping up. On the other hand, Magento Enterprise is designed for wider scalability, wherein those different functions are distributed to different servers.

Comprehensive tax calculation system – Magento Enterprise allows you to better manage tax rules, zones, and rates according to different rules per state or country. This can be beneficial if you have different retail locations and distributions across the United States and other parts of the globe.

Advance admin, logging, and access permission – With Enterprise, you can set up admins on a per site basis and restrict their access to other areas. It keeps a log of who goes into the site, who made changes, and who accessed customer information. It is an added security feature that allows for easier tracking.

Customer Management – Enterprise allows you to modify customer information quickly and divide them into different segments, which allows you to target your customers and offer a better shopping experience for them. Customer segmentation can be done by geographic information and order history.

Advance Shopping Experience – Enterprise helps you create a better shopping experience by allowing you to host private sales, offer gift and loyalty points, give store credits or online gift cards, provide gift wrapping services, and letting customers set up gift registries.

Return Management – When selling products is your business, you should always expect returns. In an online platform, it can be hard to stay on top of return merchandise, but Enterprise has that built-in within the system and makes it easier for you to manage.

Advance Searches – Enterprise is built with Solr search, which suggests queries and helps customers find what they’re looking for easily. A comprehensive search feature also helps lessen bounce rates.

Automated Emails – Email is a powerful tool to boost customer retention. Enterprise has an automated e-mail message trigger system for a number of purposes such as an abandoned shopping cart, follow-up emails for both new and existing customers, or any promotions that you’re currently running.

High Customization – Magento Enterprise offers a higher level of customization than Community. It allows you to create custom landing pages easily and integrate them into your advanced customer segmentation systems. Custom banners, codes, and discounts based on shopping cart rules can also be customized quickly in Enterprise.

Automated Product Suggestions – With Enterprise, you don’t have to manually set up cross-sells, up sells, and recommended products.

Customer and Technical Support – Enterprise allows you to have a customer service team on the back-end, which helps customers resolve issues they encounter while shopping on your website. Meanwhile, you also have access to Magento’s technical support team, which is not available in Community. If you experience any bugs or issues, Magento’s support team can assist you immediately, whereas if you’re in community, you may need to wait longer for answers and possible solutions from other users.

Auto-Generated Custom Coupons – Enterprise automatically generates coupons for specific types of customers, which they can use for different purposes.

The Right Choice

It all boils down to your business and goals. You need to be clear on what your needs are and determine which features you can and can’t do without. It’s also about careful projection of actual costs whether you choose to go with Community or Enterprise.

If you’re going with Community, how much time and money would you need to allot for added extension, features, and integrating them in your website. What if one add-on is not compatible with your hosting service or another extension?

Meanwhile, if you’re opting for Enterprise, consider the size of your catalog as well as your budget. While it’s handy to have advanced features within reach, you also need to gauge whether your business can handle the annual fee of running an e-commerce site on Magento Enterprise.

Regardless of whether you choose to go with Magento Community or Enterprise, your e-commerce site should have the essential elements to make it successful such as good hosting, products, content, design, and marketing campaigns that increase your visibility and strengthen your relationship with your clients.

Why Use WordPress?

People often make the mistake of classifying WordPress as just a blogging platform. Although that used to be true in the past, WordPress has evolved through out the years into a versatile content management system (CMS). While you can still use WordPress to create a simple blog, now it also allows you to create fully functional websites and mobile applications.

The best part about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough for just about anything. That’s the main reason why WordPress has grown so much in popularity. According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 22.5% of all websites on the internet.

Whether you’re looking to use it for your small business’s main website or as a blog, there are a couple of reasons to consider using WordPress. It’s a favorite amongst beginners and experts alike for various reasons: it’s free, customizable, powerful, and easy to master.

Different Ways to Use WordPress

WordPress can be used in many different ways. It is open to so many possibilities. You can use WordPress as the following:

• Arcade
• Blog
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Gallery
• Portfolio
• Rating Website
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WordPress is Still the Preferred Content Management System of Big Brands and Top Companies

WordPress is an awesome content management for websites of all shapes and sizes. One of the common misconceptions about WordPress is that since it is open source, it may not be good enough for big brands. This is why there is a list of the most notable brands and companies that are using WordPress on their websites.

• • • TechCrunch
    • The New Yorker
    • BBC America
    • Sony Music
    • MTV News
    • ebay Inc
    • Best Buy
    • Ford Social
    • Fortune
    • Time Inc.
    • Facebook Newsroom
    • The New York Times Company
    • Google Ventures
    • Harvard Business Review Blogs
    • Larry King Liveblog
    • ExpressJet Airlines
    • Inside BlackBerry
    • The Rolling Stones
    • The Walking Dead – AMC
    • The Mozilla Blog
    • The Wall Street Journal Law Blog
    • Reuters Blogs

WordPress is Free

WordPress is a free software, this means you are free to download, install, use and modify it. You can use it to create any kind of website. It is also open source which means the source code of the software is available for anyone to study, modify and play with. There are currently 2600+ WordPress themes and 31,000+ plugins available for free. You can download, install and use them on any website.

WordPress is an Open-Source Software

Due to the nature of open source, WordPress is a community software. It is maintained by a large group of volunteers majority of whom are WordPress consultants with active interest in growing and maintaining WordPress. Anyone can contribute to WordPress by writing patches, answering support questions, writing plugins, creating themes, translating WordPress and updating documentation.

By using WordPress you become part of that awesome community. You get free support from other community members, download free plugins and themes, and once you have little experience with WordPress you can even contribute back to the community.

WordPress is Easy to Use and Learn

WordPress is used by millions of people and almost every day new people are joining the WordPress community by creating their first WordPress powered websites. The reason why people quickly adapt to WordPress is because it is fairly easy to use.

WordPress is Extendable by Using Themes and Plugins

Most people using WordPress are neither web designers nor programmers. As a matter of fact most folks start using WordPress without any prior knowledge of designing websites.

The reason why WordPress is such an ideal candidate is because there are thousands of free templates (themes) to choose from, so you can give your website any look you want. There is a WordPress theme for just about everything.

WordPress themes are easy to customize because a lot of them come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, upload logo, change background, create beautiful sliders, and do other cool things with your website without ever writing any code at all.

WordPress is highly flexible and can be extended by using plugins. Just like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available for you to use (What is a plugin?). Not only these plugins can add extra functionality to WordPress, there are lots of plugins which can add a whole new platform to your WordPress site. Take a look at the plugins we are using on WPbeginner.

WordPress is Search Engine-Friendly

WordPress is written using standard compliance high quality code and produces semantic mark up which makes your site very attractive to search engines.

WordPress is Easy To Manage

WordPress comes with built-in updater that allows you to update your plugins and themes from within your WordPress admin dashboard. It also notifies you when there is a new version of WordPress is available, so you can update it by just clicking a button. You can keep all your WordPress content safe by setting up automated regular WordPress Backups.

WordPress Can Handle Different Media Types

Using WordPress you are not just limited to writing text. It comes with built-in support to handle images, audio, and video content. You can also use for document or file management.

WordPress supports oEmbed enabled websites which means you can embed YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio by just pasting the URL in your post. You can even allow your visitors to embed videos in the comments section.