Starting an online shop to make money? Do your homework first
So I was thinking the other day just how many people I see on a daily basis starting out ecommerce sites with just the hope that they will make money (just because they are there). I suppose this attitude stems from the offline world where if you open a shop you will get a certain amount of foot traffic (and thus sales) from people who are just walking by. Thing is people just don’t stumble across your website (well not usually) as we don’t just go around typing random we addresses in with the hope that one will eventually work.
Back to the point, it’s amazing how much people will spend on the creation of a new website when it comes to design and programming compared to how little is set aside for promotion. In my opinion your promotional budget should always be a couple of times what your building costs are.
This also brings me to another very important point. If you’re hoping to be making money with this ecommerce thing for a while to come then surely you’re going to want to have this skill in house? After all SEO is a full time job do you really want to be paying money to an outside agency for the rest of your internet career? The way I see it if you are starting an online shop you have a few options when it comes to increasing your earnings with SEO.
- Go with a marketing agency. They should have a number of employees in different specialities from social media to link building, this avoids being stuck with a “jack of all trades” character. There will usually be different plans available but most people go for monthly “pay as you go” type option as its ideal for a small start-up business. The main downside that I can see is there’s no real investment going on from your own knowledge or training point of view.
- You can hire a wiz-kid SEO to work for you. Sounds simple as you could have someone working for you on a full time basis who will probably be cheaper than a marketing agency. However finding them might not be easy and they might not have as much reputation as you would like so the safety net might not be there. Also since they have to be good at everything they do need to be bit special as it takes a lot of skill (and organisation) to pull off all the aspects of net marketing.
- Learn it yourself? Sounds daunting as internet marketing is a constantly shifting landscape, do you have the time to stay up to date? If you have some IT experience then it may not be too hard to learn but others from a completely different field could struggle. Of course even if you do pay someone else to do the work it always helps to know the basics.
As you can see there’s 3 main options when it comes to increasing your sales (and hopefully money) via internet marketing but they do all have their downsides and plus points. Still internet marketing is never an overnight thing so you will probably have time to (and have to) go with all 3 methods at some point. Until next time.
