Herd Marketing Podcasts

Herd Marketing Podcasts


Getting Started with an Online Business

September 05, 2019

Opening up an online shop or business is both rewarding and challenging. There are a number of important points that need consideration before, during and after the launch of your website. In today's entry, we are going to talk about some of the important aspects of getting started online, that if done correctly, will make your life a little easier and may even improve your online presence.

Your Website

From the very beginning, it is always advisable to build, develop and create your new website with SEO in mind. This ensures that the very foundations, long term scalability, and future of your website are starting off in the best possible way. This can include things such as writing high-quality product descriptions, taking good images and videos of your products, or making sure that all your website has SEO friendly URL's.

Social Media Channels

Ensure early on that you have opened and created social media pages, accounts, and channels that represent your brand name. It is critically important that you have continuity across all these channels. What I mean by this is that you are consistant in using the same logo, strap line, branding and messages across all social media sites.

Products

If you sell physical products that need shipping to customers, it is always advisable to hold a fair amount of stock, as online sales can surge during busier seasonal months such as Christmas or during a major sports event for example. Stock management is one of the hardest aspects of running a successful online shop and from experience, something that requires a lot of planning. Luckily, there are a number of stock management and CRM tools available on the market that will help with this.

https://youtu.be/15WUKPNG-uo

Order Furfilment

Getting orders to customers quickly and safely is a major challenge for e-commerce business owners and it is important to work with reliable partners. Before going live with your site, ensure that your delivery company accounts are all opened and ready for business. Your first orders set the standard for how well you will be perceived and if delivery is good, you will get recommendations - this is the best type of marketing. A solid piece of advice I got given many years ago is, 'It is always cheaper and easier to resell to an existing customer than to attract and market to a new one'. This is still true today and worth remembering. Choose your delivery partners wisely!

Paid Advertising

It can take some time to build paid advertising campaigns and it is critically important that these are built well and ready to be put live for your launch date. This will ensure that the strategic planning that you have done based on predicted sales, order volumes, website traffic and conversion rates, comes to fruition.

Content

Whether you sell physical products, services or downloads, your new website needs to have a good amount of user-friendly valuable content. This can be in the form of articles, blogs, good product descriptions, reviews, videos, and even podcasts. There are many benefits of creating and sharing content, from improved organic ranking right through to improved UX (user experience).

This entry today highlights some of the important tasks that really need to be in place before you go live and start trading online. Not every point will be valid for every reader and each business is unique and different. However,