Remote work is gradually becoming the main source of income for citizens living in the CIS. Moreover, the most profitable form of earnings is self-employment. But in order to earn decently, most users consider it necessary to create and promote an online store. How to do it?
More visitors=more sales
Not every person who enters a regular store leaves it with purchases. In the case of an online store, the situation is approximately the same. The bulk of users visit the store's website to check prices or just admire beautiful photos. Sooner or later, a novice online entrepreneur understands that in order to increase the number of sales, it is necessary to acquire thematic content and take care of its attendance.
How to promote an online store from scratch?
Onlinethe store is, in fact, the same site. And you need to promote it in the same way as a regular site. The fastest and, as a result, the most expensive way of promotion is based on the acquisition of advertising banners and articles, the search for web pages for advertising, as well as the promotion of the site in search engines for high-frequency queries.
The free and slowest way to promote is impossible without quality content and should be focused on low-frequency search queries. Now it remains to figure out how to promote an online store and how to make it popular.
What if there is no budget?
Promoting an online store on your own, as it turned out, is not so difficult. That is, of course, the owner of the store will have to work hard. But for a seller who is well versed in the products he sells, it will not be difficult to describe his product and present it in a favorable light.
Promotion will consist of maintaining a thematic blog, each post of which is not devoted to the description of components (this topic should be covered in the product catalog), but contains tips and recommendations intended for customers and visitors. Experienced online entrepreneurs believe that the keywords for such a blog should correspond to low-frequency search queries.
Ideal Client Profile
Fatal mistakes made by novice online sellers, experienced merchants include the inability to "draw" for themselves a portrait of the ideal buyer. This is abouta collective image of a person, to meet the needs of which, in fact, the store was created.
The second biggest mistake is the vague description of the marketing niche. The second point is important not so much for an online entrepreneur, but for search robots. Having found inconsistencies in the product catalog and the description of the store, the robots will leave the site without indexing it.
When covering the topic of how to promote an online store, one cannot ignore the following fact: there are exceptions to every rule. There are cases when people who hardly graduated from school and had no idea about such concepts as a marketing plan, an ideal buyer and a business niche subconsciously chose just one segment from a rather extensive product line and began to succeed almost immediately. According to the information published on the Web, many of them are still thriving.
Planned success, or how to write a marketing plan
- The first paragraph of the marketing plan should be devoted to a brief description of the project: clearly outline the main goal and mission of the organizers and employees. In the same paragraph, you can put an outline of the document itself and comments on some of its parts.
- As part of the second paragraph, the project owner analyzes the current market situation and outlines its impact on the development of his online store.
- The third point can be filled by someone who has thoroughly studied a certain market segment where he intends to infiltrate. This section of the marketing planusually dedicated to describing competing companies.
- The fourth highlights the interaction of the project organizers with suppliers of goods and partners working in production. Self-made businesses can omit this item.
- The following is a detailed description of products, specifications and services.
- The following points of the marketing plan shed light on the production team (brief description, experience, salary), the process of creating goods, the characteristics of the consumer and buyer, the certification of the project and its marketing strategy, the financial result of the store.
- The final paragraph is traditionally devoted to possible risks and ways to insure in time, reduce possible losses or completely avoid risky situations.
Some entrepreneurs working on the Web believe that one of the points of the marketing plan must be dedicated to attracting targeted traffic through content. By the way, when creating content, it is important to follow one rule: video clips, illustrations and articles should not be devoted to describing goods and services, but to the lifestyle, tastes and requirements of the ideal buyer.
How to promote an online store on Instagram?
Experienced online salespeople advise beginners:
- Before you wonder how to promote an online store without starting capital, you need to take care of creatingselling content. At a minimum, you should create a short video clip or collage. And for starters, fill out your profile on Instagram.
- Make topical posts daily.
- Come up with "chips" and develop a strategy to attract the target consumer.
Details
Promoting an online store for free (both on Instagram and other relatively young social networks), as it turned out, is not so difficult. This process can develop in several scenarios. For example: for money, free, relatively free. Paid promotion is a kind of investment. The funds invested in advertising and blogging will return to the investor in the form of so-called leads - subscribers and buyers.
Today, the main question that worries most users is something like this: how to promote an online clothing store on social networks without investing a penny? Few people can master free promotion, but only because not everyone can pull out all the necessary qualities: scrupulousness, the ability to focus on small things and perseverance.
What exactly needs to be done? In general, a little: fill out the profile page properly, write advertising texts, do not forget about geolocation (tell customers about the geographic location of the store) and hashtags.
Relatively free promotion looks like barter. It is this type of promotion that is flourishing today in social networks, for example, in Contact. Unleash the InternetYou can shop here by creating a thematic group and offering the administrator a decent exchange or a percentage of sales. If a store sells clothes, there will probably be optimizers, copywriters and webmasters willing to work on a barter basis.
In most cases, an online seller is not limited to exchanging their goods and services for the work of a copywriter and optimizer. As part of this method, an interactive competition with incentive prizes can be organized, where the role of prizes will be assigned to promoted products.
As a rule, such contests are based on viral marketing methods: each contestant is invited to invite at least one friend. Relatively free, this type of promotion is called because the product used as barter and selected as gifts for the winners of the competition costs money.
The free method, oddly enough, has a number of advantages. It is the free type of traffic attraction that allows you to identify the degree of demand for the product and the quality level of advertising content. After all, all users who subscribe to the seller's account will be guided solely by the intention to make purchases and read the news. A lot of posts have been written about how to promote an online store on your own step by step. The next few paragraphs of this article are devoted to the most affordable ways to promote.
The free way to attract targeted traffic has its own "chips":
- Poll method. This kind of survey allows you to find out fromwho netizens learned about the new store, what prompted them to place an order, and whether they plan to visit the store's website in the future. The information received is extremely important for the seller - it will help him understand which levers (a successful post, the uniqueness of the product, or something else) contribute to the increase in turnover.
- Mutual PR (guest blogging). An effective and really working method of attracting targeted traffic. From the outside, everything looks like this: two bloggers write about each other or invite each other to exchange experiences in the comments.
There is only one condition that seasoned sellers say cannot be ignored: Business Partners who choose to promote their content by guest blogging must have the same number of followers.
How to organize sales through Instagram?
Recommendations have been found on the Internet on how to promote an online store from scratch on Instagram using third-party services. Inselly.com and InstaOrders.com are listed as the most popular intermediaries that do not claim commissions.
To organize sales through the site Inselly.com, according to the source, it is enough to take a picture of the item for sale and mark the photo with the hashtag inselly. To work with the second site, you need to register on InstaOrders.com. This is where the shop will be. By clicking on the Create your store button, and then logging in through your Instagram account, the online entrepreneur enters the panelstore management. Now he has to fill the future store with the necessary information. Confirmation that all fields are filled in correctly will be a congratulation from the site administration and the url-address of the newly created store. Now the owner of an Instagram account will only have to indicate the address of the store in his profile and check the mailbox associated with the store more often.
Promotion of an online store through authorship in public
Having found a public on the Web that is suitable for the topic (an account whose author writes articles on a certain topic), an Internet entrepreneur, after asking the permission of the account owner, writes articles or uploads videos that may be of interest to his target audience. However, it is worth remembering that this is not possible without permission.
Promotion by commenting
Advanced users who have already got their own stores and receive a stable income, classify commenting as one of the most effective ways to quickly promote their product on the Internet. This method of promotion consists in writing meaningful and useful comments by people who have authority among the visitors of the online store. As a rule, a comment is made in the form of a reaction to a post.