Looking for advice for first online sale

[Madeleine_Papillon]

Hi Entrepreneurs Community!

I am new to the forum but I can already see that it is exactly the place I was looking for! I am looking for advice from business owners who opened their online shops. I currently started up new business which offers very unique wedding stationery and services. I launched my website almost 4 weeks ago and social media channels etc. I get clients through word of mouth but not really via my website. I read that it takes time to get first sales online but I am wondering what I could do to get more traffic to my website for people to see the products? I haven't realized at the beginning how challenging it is going to be I would very much appreciate all advises how I could promote my website more effective?
It is my first steps as an business owner and there is still a lot of questions going on my mind so thank you very much in advance to answer one of them

 

[PaulBappoo]

Yes, you are right, online competition for "eyeballs" or attention from customers is tough! People usually search online because they want to solve a problem. In your case the problem (or one of the problems) will be that your customers need or want something different for their wedding but dont have ideas. So, you could publish ideas on social media and especially in wedding and relationship type forums (like this forum but for your industry!) where the posts will stick around for a while. You can also post articles to places like ezinearticles and other similar places and even go as far as to use a paid newswire PR distribution service to get your articles out there. The important thing will be to ensure the information you publish is designed to generate interest enough to bring the reader (or viewer if you publish some videos) to specific landing pages on your web site. Those landing pages should be designed to get the user to submit their email address, rather than to get them to buy something. Once you have their email address then you can send them information on a regular basis and eventually turn them into buyers. We have a saying in the internet marketing business, "The money is in the list" which means if you can build a large list of highly motivated people who are interested in your product, then that list will be worth money as you can sell offers into it time and time again. Like everyone gets married at least 4 times nowadays right

 

[Madeleine_Papillon]

Thank you for your advice Paul! I actually didn't have anywhere on the website where people can add their email address! I will fix it this week! I also have few friends who own wedding related business so I asked them to do a guest bloging on my site Thank you for your time to answer!

 

[RickyD2411]

If your looking to set up something to collect your visitors email addresses use mail chimp its free for the first 500 mails.

 

[Nochexman]

I get clients through word of mouth but not really via my website.

Have you contacted all your past customers to advise them of your new website, and advised them of the competition you are running on your website when people leave their email list on your newsletter list? You need to generate online word of mouth to generate footfall and ultimately trade. Good luck!

 

[Richard Ashton]

To get more people to your website, make your website a SEO-friendly website. And initially, if you have a budget you can take it to the advertising through PPC (Pay Per Click). And look into more quality link-building for the website.

This is good advice! just to add to it, i would say its worth getting a digital agency to get your site off the ground, Consider using Facebook Ads i think this will be good for your business as your in a very specific niche! the good news for you is that Facebook Ads have extremely powerful targeting options, if you run an add for a special offer you can target people who are interested in wedding fairs for instance this will defiantly get you some traffic.

Going back to wedding fairs, i would research when and where they are happening and then target an ad to that specific location. Mention the name of the wedding fair in your ad (adds a little bit of shock value)

 

[Paralabs]

Perhaps you should pay attention to search engine optimization, it will always be a positive influence on your orders through the site.

 

[TLMartin]

This has been great info as I've had a similar request recently... I'm investigating Gleam (anyone know of any others that do competitions and capture email, maybe cheaper lol)

How do those Gleam type places work with "Sharing requests" on competitions as they are against facebook rules... or as I have interpreted it... if I say you can only enter the competition if you share is against facebook rules.... but I've been moaned at a few times for following the specific letters of rules recently and not applying common sense

 

[tombuckland]

Id recommend reading Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. This will give you some great actionable ideas about what you can implement yourself at a relatively low cost (both online and off.)

In terms of the online sales I'd recommend setting up a PPC and SEO campaign. If you don't have any budget then find some actionable tutorials for these, if you do then hire an agency to do it for you. Running both at the same time is advantageous as you can get instant results from the paid traffic (as well as testing if the market actually wants what your buying) and build the longer more sustainable traffic with the seo campaign.

 

[deniser]

If you haven't done it already, you need to get listed on the wedding planning websites such as Easy Weddings, Bridebook, Confetti etc. They then link through to your website.

 

[Karllacey]

I am actually going to go against pretty much everyone here. Reason being is that, you need to budget very tightly on the basis of your customer base.

I absolutely got sick of people trying to sell me SEO/PPC/Social Media marketing and so on about 3 years ago and so much, that I got my head down and did it myself.

Sure, I am not amazing at it - but I definitely get by with what I know and I know that there is a fair few SEO vultures who will get your claws into you because you have no idea what they do....New technology brings its own people who want to do nothing for everything.

Anyway, this is all free:

Register your website on Search Engines (dodging the paying ones)
Register your website on multiple search directories (yell, thomweb so on so forth)
Get keywords in your sight
Set up Social Media links and update them regularly (Twitter / Linkedin / Facebook)
Get a YouTube video in your website and linked up

If you haven't set up a website you can do this with the likes of 1and1 or something to this affect.

A lot of people here will probably hang me out to dry for this; I do not have massive amounts of knowledge but have set up maybe 20 businesses this way and none of them have been a cash drain on the company and when you are starting up - the less the leakage the better.

 

[tombuckland]

I am actually going to go against pretty much everyone here. Reason being is that, you need to budget very tightly on the basis of your customer base.

I absolutely got sick of people trying to sell me SEO/PPC/Social Media marketing and so on about 3 years ago and so much, that I got my head down and did it myself.

Sure, I am not amazing at it - but I definitely get by with what I know and I know that there is a fair few SEO vultures who will get your claws into you because you have no idea what they do....New technology brings its own people who want to do nothing for everything.

Anyway, this is all free:

Register your website on Search Engines (dodging the paying ones)
Register your website on multiple search directories (yell, thomweb so on so forth)
Get keywords in your sight
Set up Social Media links and update them regularly (Twitter / Linkedin / Facebook)
Get a YouTube video in your website and linked up

If you haven't set up a website you can do this with the likes of 1and1 or something to this affect.

A lot of people here will probably hang me out to dry for this; I do not have massive amounts of knowledge but have set up maybe 20 businesses this way and none of them have been a cash drain on the company and when you are starting up - the less the leakage the better.

That's a solid start. I'll add a bit to the middle too:

- Register your website on Search Engines:
--- Create and verify your site through Google search console.
--- Create a Google analytics account and verify.
--- Same for Bing webmaster tools.
- Business directories:
--- Register to the major ones but avoid low quality ones.
--- If you're a local business make sure you keep your phone number, business name and address constant throughout each submission.
- Keywords.
--- Create a list of keywords with the search volumes you'd like to rank for.
--- Use the "Google Keyword Planner" for this, its free and will do for now.
--- Follow the basic on-page optimisation steps - http://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
- Social.
--- Set up and optimise your major social accounts.
--- Post at least once a day to help indexing.
--- Create an IFTTT network too (if you can).
- Video.
--- Video helps conversions so get one up on the site.
--- Use keywords in the video title, desc and tags to help people find it on youtube.
- Other things to do:
--- Get a press release, about £50 and are great for distribution and some branded links to your site.
--- Potentially set up a Google Adwords account and set up your first ad, you can usually get £75 free credit for new accounts (just search around for a voucher code)
--- Same for Bing, you can get a £150 voucher code if you contact them directly.

That should give you a good start.
Sincerely,
SEO Vulture.

 

[Alan]

If you are not active on Facebook, then get on there.

For some reason, Facebook is fantastic for wedding businesses.

It might just be the demographic, that women (they are the decision makers here) of a certain age are the Facebook generation and now getting married.

You can do this yourself set a up a Facebook business page and start posting pictures of your stuff, let everyone know about it and pay a few quid to boost your posts.

I don't sell this service, I just know it works from personal experience with three people that run wedding based businesses.

 

[Gecko001]

Have you contacted all your past customers to advise them of your new website, and advised them of the competition you are running on your website when people leave their email list on your newsletter list? You need to generate online word of mouth to generate footfall and ultimately trade. Good luck!

I smiled at this. Repeat custom from customers of a wedding stationary firm? Well I know the divorce rate is high, but........ Sorry I could not help that one.

 

[Hayley Copland]

Have you considered using Ebay for your wedding stationary? Its a fantastic for SEO and also is a great way to drive repeat business through to your website.
I find that if you create an incentive which you send out with any orders through Ebay such as 10% off your first order you will get a good deal of repeat business not to mention word of mouth for your site.

 

[Amit Shah]

If you focus on the conversion, want to check it out response on the website, you have to choose paid marketing channel for it. I just want to inform, that if you fail to set up the right campaign to a targeted audience, you will not get enough conversion.

There are many paid channels available for the online marketing ex, google Adwords, Facebook paid ads, social media paid campaign, affiliate online marketing, etc. You have to research your industry market or product market, find out the best one. Start investing small amount it, analyse the sales, impression etc.

if you have any queries, feel free to reply me.

Thanks.