It’s the era when a can-do attitude can take you places where seven-year-olds can be big-time entrepreneurs. The accessibility of tools and courses points to an easy way to make money online. You can create a blog, maintain a vlog, or sell products online.
As far as being an online seller goes, the road is paved with fewer hurdles, such as capital, technical know-how, and inventory. While there’s no online business that can run on its own in the absolute sense, current options tell you that it is possible to pare down the administrative cost and effort of managing a business.
You can focus on the planning and strategy to nurture the venture as this guide will show.
Research
If you already have a type of product or niche in mind, examine its profitability and viability. Does this segment offer generous returns? Does it have the potential to grow and become successful?
More questions will come your way as you delve deeper into the industry you will be joining and competitors you will be facing. You can design surveys and read up studies about how viable or profitable your idea is or will be.
Some people prefer to start with what others are looking for and fill that need. A simple yet effective way is to search for a problem on Google, which has autocompleted queries that may be useful.
Click through results from question-and-answer sites like Quora and even online forums like Reddit. Have the questions been answered? Your simple query can lead you quickly to potential competitors and what they have done so far to address the particular pain point.
Take note of your insights in a spreadsheet, and revisit them later for product development, branding, strategy, and the like.
Angle and Position
While wading through reviews and customers’ opinions on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, you will have learned much about the level of competition in your field. What are things your competitors are doing and are worth emulating? What are they doing that you ought not to do?
These customer likes and dislikes can help you formulate your brand and position yourself in the industry that has scores of companies doing the same thing.
This year alone has seen 1.92 billion online buyers. When you pitch your product to these people, they’ll likely ask you, “What’s in it for me?”
You can answer with your unique selling proposition (USP) or what makes your product different and better than others. The price, the motivation behind their buying decisions, and the reason they prefer to buy your product will go into this USP. Because your business is not up yet, you can refer to others’ USPs to look for what you can improve.
Sell Your Copy
The written word is more relevant than ever for people on their phone or computer screens. Your copy should introduce your business as an entity that knows a problem exists and has the ultimate solution.
You will need help to make your existence known to your target audience. Look into pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to your website at the onset. Aside from copywriting, adopt best SEO practices like meta descriptions, keywords, and tags.
It’s also important to build online credibility. The best way to grow your site’s traffic organically is to provide valuable and free content. Give readers quality and useful articles, videos, and other forms of material to build your profile as an authority in the field.
Browsers look for relevance when sorting millions, if not billions, of web pages that will be the best fit for users. Imagine the exposure you’ll gain if your site were among the top search results.
Make It Easy for Customers to Buy
You want people to purchase your goods, so you need to make the process painless for them whether they are on a mobile app or a browser. At least a third of online buyers prefer to return to a shop they’ve bought from before, according to WPForms.com—that’s a customer spending pattern you can take note of.
Thus, you need a user-friendly and intuitive website. Use your copywriting and SEO skills to produce interesting and informative product descriptions.
That’s just the front end. Behind the scenes, and as the business launches and moves forward, you will have to iron out the smallest to the biggest details.
Specific areas to look into are shipping restrictions, sourcing products, drop shipping, trademark registration, marketing, advertising (as noted above), upselling, and customer service. These topics look boring and commonsensical, but these are key to any business’s operation and growth.
Get Started with a Platform
Consumer spending habits are ever changing, and there’s no guaranteed formula for businesses to succeed. In the same way, there’s no straight path to set up your online venture. You can go through conventional wisdom, in which you build everything from scratch, or skip a few steps and get straight to point B from A.
This is where online commerce platforms enter. They offer you a package that contains the basic to the most comprehensive services you need to run and manage your shop. Each of these platforms has outlined how to sell your products online, so the process becomes quick and doable.
Now, you can become an entrepreneur with more convenience and confidence.
