If you’re like me you learn far more by getting your hands on a real life example. It’s one thing to read how Twitter can help you or that e-commerce success could be yours; it’s another to get the details of a true experience. Here are two posts I came across recently that through sharing their own experience or interviewing bring great insight into success online.

+ A “Non Big Brand” Twitter Case Study from Sugarrae
Get an outline of how a website providing Blackberry news and info started up with Twitter, gained initial traction, then flatlined and then reach a whole new level. This post has a great outline of what led to their recent burst and success using Twitter to strengthen their community and interaction with their website. Pay attention to the 9 great items on why their “Second coming” increased the success.

+ A Small Business Marketing Success Story: K9cuisine.com from Matt McGee
Matt wrote this article for Search Engine Land and put together a great interview with a niche e-commerce website that serves the premium pet food market. Company and website owner Anthony Holloway outlines their start, their success and the choices they made to get where they are.

Of interest to me was the information on how they leverage customer reviews of the products to increase the content and offering on the site. K9cuisine.com has created a simple but fantastic method to follow up with customers and get their 2 cents after the purchase. Every small business e-commerce website can learn one thing or more from this post.

Colorado monogrammed gifts retailer, little dreamers, has big ideas for their new e-commerce website that went LIVE last week. Business owners Nicole and Paula sought a better web design to brand their unique monogrammed baby gifts and more and they needed it powered by an easy to use content management system and e-commerce solution. Five’s custom web design coupled with the SMC was just the right solution.

Some of the project details for this e-commerce website were:

• Custom web design
• SMC for content & e-commerce management
• Enhanced product detail page visuals, details & options
• Layered item option selections for monogram options
• Payment gateway integration with PayPal Pro
• Search engine optimization & SEO friendly URLs
• Email marketing integration & web analytics
• Project, usability & e-commerce consulting

The complexity of the monogram options definitely gave us a challenge (great work Josh and Travis) that led to a longer production schedule then expected, but the final outcome more than makes up for it. Many times during the process and content entry phases, little dreamer’s commented on the ease of use the SMC offers and their excitement over launching the new design. We’re excited to see how our work impacts their business too.

See the new little dreamers website for yourself, maybe even get a unique monogrammed gift for someone you know and if you are looking for a fabulous e-commerce web design, give Five a shout!

Winning online is something I talk about a lot with clients. In looking at things like an Olympic track and field event, your website has to win a combination of heats to get to the medal round and then capture the ultimate goal, the gold medal. Online, that gold medal is the customer … and that can be their trust, their time, their communication or their money. Here is a short summary of just some of the heats you need to win to get to the medal round, but keep in mind they all play off each other to create success.

Heat 1: Getting Customers To Your Site
What are your strategies to move people to your website? SEO, Google Adwords, email marketing, local search marketing, banner ads and inbound links are all ways to push users to your website. Offline is important as well, placing your web address on all your materials and finding ways to include your website as a step in working with you or the end result. More than anything, you can’t afford to just rely on one of the strategies I mentioned, you need to leverage a team of them together.

Heat 2: Search Engine Results, SEO
It’s the race to be ranked. Good site structure, content, trusted inbound links and a good page title are just some of the pieces to get you into the race for great search terms with your competitors. Make sure you are in this race by utilizing good search engine optimization (SEO) practices. If you choose to ignore organic search results, you won’t be anywhere near the finish line.

Heat 3: Design of Your Website, Make a First Impression
What is or isn’t great web design, is always up for debate. You can’t ignore the value of a professional web design, properly coded and constructed to produce a clean, easy to use interface for your website. While it is cheaper for the kid next door to put something together for you, it is expensive to lose this race repeatedly because your quality, experience and trust never connect with the customer.

Heat 4: Website Content: Less Fluff, More Good Stuff
You land them on your site, your design and layout is trust worthy and inviting … now they want answers. Explain what you can do for them, give them examples of how you’ve helped others, product reviews, needed details, relevant photos or graphics. If you answer their questions and educate them, you win their trust … you win them. The web is increasingly going the route of full disclosure, giving as much information to the customers so they can make a decision in their comparison is a must.

Medal Round – A Clear Path, Website Usability
I touched on it a little in heat #2, a website that is easy to use is often a winner. Don’t loose customers, don’t confuse them and don’t make them think. Just provide easy next steps to get them to the end goal they desire (which is usually your goal as well). Clear navigation, content funneling, well placed anchor text and call to action buttons/graphics should all be in the mix here. You should also employ various web analytics and reporting tools to identify roadblocks or patterns as you can always fix things and try new routes.

If you’ve won these heats in any order, you most likely have won the gold medal and earned that customer. They found you, moved through your site and gained answers and insight to how you can help them with their need, problem or question. You funneled them to the goal and they bought your product, filled out an online form, signed up for an account or even called you. Enjoy your moment on the podium.

Thanks to Jason in our office for sending me this link, I was made aware of Woopra. Watch the video embedded below.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Woopra is a new robust web-tracking & analytics tool. Currently in BETA, it’s mainly targeted for small to medium websites. Watching the video above you’ll see that it allows real-time stats in a fabulous interface, pushing some extensive data on the users visiting and moving around your site. Woopra features also include real-time chat with your visitors, visitor tagging and activity search. Small e-commerce websites should be lining up to get a version of this.

The killer part? Woopra would like to provide their service for FREE. The bad news is that while they figure out how to properly scale it, you need an invite to put it to use. A service like this will obviously spark some privacy issues, but I think that’s always a good thing for discussion sake. For those of you begging for more data and visibility into your websites performance, this seems like a winner.

I’ll keep you posted (so you should subscribe) on this web analytics tool being available to the masses for sure.