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I hear this thousands of times in my game, and I should I guess because I build online shops for a living. I've built many shops for excited eager new entrepreneurs who agonise over every little detail to get it 'just right'. Who dream up amazing ways to launch their shop, sometimes spending lots of money on launch marketing and possibly get a moderate amount of sales on the first few days, only to see their traffic slide and sales dwindle. They feel disheartened, despondent and don't know what has gone wrong. After all they have an awesome looking shop sitting there.
The best way to get things to a profitable state quickly is to already have an audience that trusts you and wants to buy things from you before you launch your shop. I'm not talking about your neighbours and handful of friends (because with all the love and good will that they bring, they will not buy from you every single day and keep you afloat). I'm talking about a large audience of thousands or even tens of thousands of people (yes you really do need that many).
This type of audience takes time, effort, energy and persistence to build. It requires consistent efforts on social media and blogging utilising your unique voice to add value to your audience's world.
Now if you think about the Entrepreneurial process, first you'll have an idea, and in this case we're referring to entrepreneurs that will go on to sell products and/or services online. Then you need to sit down and make a solid to-do list. Here's a simple one below to get you started...
Once you have your light bulb moment it will take time for you to:
Now what I normally see is that people power on checking off things on the to-do list and forget about one crucial thing - THE AUDIENCE/CUSTOMERS.
Realistically the above ‘to-do list’ will take you anywhere from 2-6 months or in some cases even longer to get through, this gives you an amazing opportunity to build an audience that you can utilise to become the stampede of customers that you need to burst through your virtual doors on opening day.
Given you are going to be selling the physical or digital products that have come from your light bulb moment, ideally you'll set up a blog on Shopify (given that is where you are going to house your shop). By utilising shopify early to host and run your blog you'll be building that all important SEO credibility (I'll explain SEO in further topics) from traffic coming for one of the following 4 reasons.
Yes that's right every post, tweet, blog article, insta pic should fall into satisfying one of these categories to build a quick and engaged audience that can lead to your shops success. Content is a big subject and I’ll cover that off in other articles for you.
To get you started here is a list of simple things to do to maximise your opportunity for success whilst working on the bigger picture:
All of that will only take you a few hours but when it comes to launch day you'll personally thank me that you went ahead and did it as it paves the way not only for the audience that you will build but will also start to give you organic rankings on google searches before you launch your shop.
Once this is complete (and please feel free to message me with any questions you may have about the above list) spend an hour a day on audience building activities, post and blog your heart out to incrementally build your audience each day. Set your goals high on audience numbers. I've personally seen people hit an audience of over 10,000 real engaged followers in less than 90 days and go on to superstar store successes because of it.
I have a lot more info to come on many many subjects including expanding on the things I've glossed over in this article. I hope you have enjoyed this little snippet into why you should blog and post your heart out to build an eager audience while you attend to your grand plans of world dominance in online retailing.
Stay tuned more to come....
Ben
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