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 decent money, most users consider it necessary to create and promote an online store. How to do it?
More visitors - more sales
Not every person who visits a regular store leaves it with purchases. In the case of the online store, the situation is approximately the same. The bulk of users go to the store’s website to check prices or simply admire beautiful photos. Sooner or later, a beginner online entrepreneur understands: to increase the number of sales, you need to acquire thematic content and take care of its attendance.
How to promote an online store from scratch?
An online store is essentially the same site. And you need to untwist it just like a regular site. The fastest and, as a result, the most expensive way of promotion is based on the purchase 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 requests.
A free and slowest way to promote it is impossible without quality content and should be focused on low-frequency search queries. Now it remains to figure out how to promote the online store and how to make it popular.
What if there is no budget?
Promotion of an online store on their own, as it turned out, is not so difficult. That is, of course, the store owner will have to work hard. But for a seller who is well versed in the products that he sells, it will not be difficult to describe his product and present it in a favorable light.
Promotion will consist of a thematic blog, each post of which is not dedicated 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 key phrases for such a blog should match low-frequency search queries.
Ideal customer image
The fatal mistakes made by novice online sellers, experienced businessmen include the inability to "draw" for themselves a portrait of an ideal buyer. We are talking about a collective image of a person, to meet the needs of which, in fact, a store was created.
The second most important mistake is a vague description of the marketing niche. The second point is important not so much for an online entrepreneur as for search robots. Having discovered inconsistencies in the product catalog and description of the store’s activities, 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 each rule. There are cases when people who hardly graduated from school and had no idea of such concepts as a marketing plan, an ideal buyer and a business niche, subconsciously chose only one segment from a rather extensive product line and almost immediately began to succeed. If you believe the information published on the Web, many of them thrive today.
Planned success, or how to draw up a marketing plan
- The first point 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 a plan of the document itself and comments on some of its parts.
- In the second paragraph, the project owner analyzes the situation on the market and sets out its impact on the development of his online store.
- The third paragraph will be able to fill in the one who thoroughly studied a certain segment of the market, where he intends to infiltrate. This section of the marketing plan usually focuses on the description of competing companies.
- The fourth highlights the interaction of the project organizers with suppliers of goods and partners working in production. Entrepreneurs who sell DIY products may 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 the buyer, certification of the project and its marketing strategy, the financial result of the store.
- The final paragraph is traditionally devoted to possible risks and methods that allow you to insure yourself on time, reduce possible losses or avoid risky situations altogether.
Some entrepreneurs working on the Web believe that one of the points of the marketing plan must be dedicated to attracting targeted traffic using content. By the way, when creating content, it is important to observe one rule: video clips, illustrations and articles should not be devoted to the description of goods and services, but to the lifestyle, tastes and requirements of the ideal buyer.
How to promote an online store on Instagram?
Experienced online sellers advise newbies:
- Before you ask yourself how to promote an online store without starting capital, you need to take care of creating marketing content. At a minimum, you should create a short video clip or collage. And for starters - fill out your Instagram profile.
- Daily write thematic posts.
- Come up with "chips" and develop a strategy to attract the target consumer.
Details
Free to promote an online store (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. Funds invested in advertising and blogging will be returned 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 dime? Only a few can overpower free promotion, but only because not everyone can pull out all the necessary qualities: scrupulousness, the ability to focus on trifles and perseverance.
What exactly needs to be done? In general, a little: to properly fill out the profile page, write advertising texts, do not forget about geolocation (inform customers about the geographic location of the store) and hashtags.
Relatively free promotion has the form of barter. It is this type of promotion that flourishes today in social networks, for example, in "Contact". You can promote an online store here by creating a thematic group and offering the administrator a decent exchange or percentage of sales. If the store sells clothes, there will probably be optimizers, copywriters, and webmasters willing to work on a barter basis.
In most cases, the online seller is not limited to exchanging their goods and services for the work of a copywriter and optimizer. Within the framework of this method, an interactive contest with incentive prizes can be organized, where the role of prizes will be assigned to the promoted products.
As a rule, such contests are based on viral marketing methods: each person involved is invited to invite at least one friend. This type of promotion is called relatively free 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 in steps. The next few paragraphs of this article are devoted to the most accessible ways of promotion.
The free way to attract targeted traffic has its own “tricks”:
- Polling method. This kind of questionnaire allows you to find out from whom netizens learned about the appearance of a 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 - they will help him understand which levers (successful post, product uniqueness 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, in the opinion of experienced sellers, cannot be ignored: business partners who have chosen guest blogging to promote their content should have the same number of subscribers.
How to organize sales through Instagram?
The Internet has found recommendations on how to promote an online store from scratch in Instagram through third-party services. The most popular intermediaries that do not qualify for commissions are Inselly.com and InstaOrders.com.
To organize sales through the Inselly.com website, the source said, it is enough to photograph the subject of sale and mark the photo with the hashtag #inselly. To work with the second site, registration on InstaOrders.com is required. This is where the store will be located. By clicking on the Create your store button, and then logging in through your Instagram account, the online entrepreneur enters the store’s control panel. Now he has to fill the future store with the necessary information. Confirmation that all the fields are filled in correctly will be a congratulation from the site administration and the url of the newly created store. Now the owner of the account on Instagram will only have to indicate the address of the store in his profile and often check the mailbox associated with the store.
Promotion of an online store through authorship in public
Having found a public on the subject 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 interest his target audience. However, it is worth remembering that without permission this is impossible.
Commenting Promotion
Advanced users who have already acquired their stores and receive a steady income, classify commenting as one of the most effective ways to quickly advertise their product on the Internet. This method of promotion consists in writing meaningful and useful comments by people who are respected by visitors to the online store. As a rule, a comment is made out in the form of a reaction to a post.