The first steps to selling online are of course buying a domain and a webshop. Set up your website, with the help of a professional. You need it to look very good and appealing to potential clients. Very important! Set up a Google Analytics account to be able to track the visitors coming to your website. This topic will be addressed in a later issue. Your website administrator knows how to do this.
For any successful online business, you need to have a very strong online presence. I will address a few ideas related to Social media in this article.
After setting up the website and purchasing a web shop, the first steps are to set up a Facebook page and a twitter account connected to the Facebook page.
Facebook.Facebook is growing all the time and it is very important to be present there if you are planning to establish a strong online presence. It’s probably the most important part of social media. You need to set up a business page. It can be done quite easily: scroll down to the bottom of any page on Facebook and click on “Create a Page”.
Set your name, a profile picture, your information, contact information of your business. A short description is also important. The next step is to try to get people to LIKE your page. The easiest way to start this is by telling your friends about it and asking them to LIKE it.
You can also suggest it to your Facebook contacts and they will receive an invitation to LIKE your page.
It is important to write updates to your page, thoughts, ideas, share links to your products, advertise special offers and discounts, post images, videos, whatever represents your business or you think people will find interesting. Keep being active and interact with people.
Twitter.
Next step is Twitter. Set up an account, preferably using the name of your business as your twitter name. Your twitter account needs followers. The first thing to do is, once again, to ask your friends to follow you and recommend you to their friends.
You can then grow your list of poeple you follow by searching for similar businesses and starting to follow them. From my own experience, Twitter is not yet so popular here in Finland, but it is getting more and more popular than it used to be. So I would say it is a service worth using and building an audience as well as read what others have to say.
Share thoughts, offers, ideas, interesting links that you found. You can connect your twitter account to your Facebook business page. In this way, what you post on Facebook will show up on Twitter. This will save you a lot of time.
Interaction is important. So read what others are saying, comment on their tweets, retweet if you find something interesting. Slowly you will notice that people will start following you in return.
StumbleUpon.
One of my personal favorite ways of browsing is by using StumbleUpon recommendations. StumbleUpon is a very useful resource where you can select your interested and browse random websites connected to those interests from all over the world.
After you create an account, you are free to add new web pages to the service. I have added byVellamo a few weeks ago and I am discovering that the number of visits coming through StumbleUpon is constantly increasing.
Pinterest.
Another new and very interesting way people browse online is a website called Pinterest. Here you can PIN items, photos, anything you find anywhere on the internet.
You create boards for your pins. I use it mostly for creating collections of things I am interested in, beautiful places, artwork, products I would like to buy in the future. Here also you can connect to other people by following their boards, repinning interesting things you find there and commenting on their pins.
A Blog.
If you like to write, a popular solution is also setting up a blog. There are a few free solutions for setting up a blog, such as Blogspot or Wordpress. You have very many templates to choose from and you can customize your page to look pretty much as you want.
You can publish information about your products, how-to’s and all kinds of other things you believe people might find interesting. Of course, you can also use your blog as an advertising place where you can feature other shops. This will increase the number of your readers.
You can interconnect your blog with Twitter and Facebook using an online tool, called TweetFeed. You can set up your Facebook page and Twitter account to scan your blog and if it finds any new posts, it will update your Facebook and Twitter including a link to your latest blog. Very useful tool.
Facebook is the best social media website, probably the most popular place online where people talk about products and visit websites their friends recommend. It has huge potential to help your business and I have discovered that only few businesses (at least in Finland) try to make use of this enormous potential to reach out to people.
At the time of this post, byVellamo (which is my online brand on which I am testing and improving all these marketing techniques) has 1700 fans on Facebook.
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