Author: Brian

Before I tried to build a plugin from scratch to export my Zen Cart product feed to Google Shopping, I decided to research the best available plugins out there. Unfortunately, the none could really handle large product feeds (mine had over 40k products!).

It seems like the options were very limited – either you could export to Google Shopping with Magentic one, Numinix, or DataFeedWatch. Magnetic one

Numinix has problems exporting as well. One of the largest problems  with Numinix is you can’t export to Google Shopping in a way that lets you add extra fields that are present in your product pages, which limits what you can put into the Google Shopping feed.

Datafeedwatch exporting to Google Shopping only lets you have 5k products for $30/month, and each additional 1k products is $5/month! Worse yet, their Magento plugin is ridiculously outdated and doesn’t work well with variations.

Today, I’d like to introduce my friend and partner Gary Puterman. you can read more about him on his website GaryPuterman.com

In the short time that we’ve known each other, Gary and I have built several amazing  software that has changed the landscape of internet marketing. He is well known in both the SEO and InternetMarketing community, and Gary has a few insightful comments on Moz.

He has also been involved in reputation management, and Gary Puterman has a great slideslow where you can read more.

In addition to being a longtime entrepreneur, Gary Puterman is also a talented rugby player. If you want to see some amazing plays, check out videos of Gary Puterman on youtube.

You can read more about Gary Puterman at his about page.

You can also contact him using these social media accounts:
Gary Puterman Twitter

Gary Puterman Pinterest – has some great rugby and marketing pins

Gary Puterman Facebook

Gary Puterman Google+

Just how hard is it to generate an XML or CSV file of your product feed with PrestaShop? Apparently it’s not very easy, which according to the review on Exporting PrestaShop feeds to Google Shopping.

There are some free modules, but they come with a fair mix of problems where it either takes too long to export, or it times out.

After trying to export my WooCommerce shopping feed to Google Shopping, I had numerous problems with the extensions currently out there.

I’m not sure they work with older versions of wordpress (like 3.5), or if it was because I had over 30k products in the feed, which is why I had all the errors. I also couldn’t get product variations to work properly, and had to manually edit the feed at first which takes a really long time because of all the products!

But after trying the fixes incorporated in the Feedonomics WooCommerce API showing how to export WooCommerce article, everything seemed to be working fine.

Last week I had a few problems when I was trying to export my Magento Product feed with 10k products for Google Shopping. The script kept timing out and giving me Fatal error: Maximum execution time of x seconds exceeded warnings. I tried changing the php.ini parameters like max_execution_time, but no luck.

Once I switched to the Feedonomics API, exporting a Magento feed with thousands of products for Google Shopping was easy, because it took care of implementing the database logic in a scalable, and it worked flawlessly. Better yet, the Magento export took only about 40 seconds.

The melody from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is mesmerizing, but I couldn’t help feeling like I’ve heard it before.

That amazing melody in the song Step Out “composed” by Jose Gonzalez from Walter Mitty is NOT original, and is plagiarized directly from Closing Time by Semisonic! Just listen to these two audio samples and compare the dominant melodies:

After spending lots of time creating your Google Shopping feed, you might think that your feed is great and done with for the next few years. You upload it to Google Adwords and head over to Google Search to check if any of your products are showing up. You try searching for the names of your first 5 products and see that NONE of the are showing up for Product Listing Ads (PLAs)!

From my experience the best way to optimize your feed is to see what your competition is doing. Are their prices, titles and description better than yours? If you have several thousand SKUs, it will take forever to cross compare this manually. Luckily for you there are pretty cool tools that can automatically tell you where your Google Shopping feed needs optimization. All you need to do then is adjust the feed accordingly. The IM-PACT tool tells you if you are price competitive on all your products as well as where you’re losing exposure because or poor keywords in the title.

When you create an Adwords campaign for Google Shopping or Product Listing Ads (PLAs), one thing you are NOT able to do (unlike with regular PPC) is see which of your products show up for particular keywords.
To get this kind of exposure data, I tried manually searching on Google to see if I was coming up for keywords like:
men’s ties
neck-ties
long men’s ties
fancy ties
modern ties

Of course my actual keyword list was several thousand keywords long. It would take me 5-6 hours to search for a thousand keywords, which is frankly too long.

I looked for tools that automated this annoying process, and found the IM-PACT tool, which tells you exactly which keywords I didn’t show up for in PLAs. Even more amazing is that it tells you which competitors are ahead of you by showing up on more PLAs than you are. Also interesting is that even the top guys like eBay and Ties.com had less than 30% coverage. Now I’m going to work on getting my coverage higher by adjusting keyword descriptions and bid prices.

Turns out you can use Handbrake for more than just converting video files. You can also make large videos that take forever to upload to youtube far smaller by following this easy answer to make video sizes smaller.

Depending on the quality you want, you can decrease the video size by a factor of 2-3x!

I had this problem with my macbook air 2012. The colors were very washed out and the contrast ratio was completely off. I tried calibrating the external monitor, but to no avail. I was using the moshi mini displayport to HDMI adapter (purchased from the Apple store). It turns out this is a driver error on Apple’s part that has still not been corrected as of August 2013. Hundreds of people report the same color problem. The only way to fix it is to use a mini displayport to dvi connector. You can get this one for $5-$10: