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Thanks to technological innovations, selling online has become easier than ever. And because it’s scalable, it’s precisely the type of business that entrepreneurs need to get themselves into. Instead of trading your time for money, you can just increase the number of units you shift over time, generating massive returns.

If you’re currently selling on Shopify or any of the other platforms, this post can help you. Remember, flogging goods is about more than setting up a website. It’s also about putting the systems in place that will allow sales to happen.

Here’s what to do.

Choose Where You’ll Sell

The first thing you’ll need to do is choose where you want to sell. There are lots of platforms out there, each with advantages and disadvantages.

Remember, if you choose one of the larger e-commerce vendors to host your goods, you’ll have to pay them a commission every time you make a sale, so your margins will always remain depressed.

If you go down the hosted route and sell independently, you’ll get bigger margins, but you’ll also have to do more marketing. Thus, it all comes down to where you think your competencies lie.

Choose How People Will Pay

Payment systems are the most complicated aspect of setting up an ecommerce business. Just displaying goods and writing descriptions is easy. But connecting your site to POS and banking is much more challenging.

Fortunately, most platforms now provide tools that do this automatically for you. For instance, the Shopify FFL checkout allows you to sell restricted goods safely. Other services use their own methods.

Where possible, you want to offer a variety of payment methods. Try to include PayPal if you can, as people who haven’t been to your site before are much more likely to trust this method.

Start Marketing Your Online Store

The next step is to start marketing your online store.

This is more challenging than you might expect. You can have a great ecommerce platform. But if you’re failing to reach out to the community, you won’t get anywhere.

Social media is perhaps the best place to start drumming up business. It’s relatively inexpensive and a great place to begin getting people interested in your services.

Work Out How You’re Going To Do Shipping

Shipping is one of the most challenging aspects of e-commerce. Finding a system that allows you to deliver the right goods to the right customers on time is a notoriously challenging process.

The best option here is to simply outsource the task to a fulfillment provider. These services store and then distribute your goods on your behalf when customers order them.

Please note that these solutions aren’t just “cutting into your margins.” For many new companies, they’re a necessity. You simply don’t have the systems to bring distribution in-house, unless you’re selling just a couple of dozen items a day (and even then, it can be a hassle).

In summary, selling online has never been easier, but it requires a degree of patience and strategy.

There are many different reasons why people set-up blogs today. Some people establish blogs as a way of facilitating their business website and driving more traffic to their online store. There are then people who start blogs because they are passionate about certain subjects and a blog enables them to share their voice and opinions. You can also monetise your blog. However, you are only going to be able to achieve your goals if you get a lot of traffic to your blog. Keeping that in mind, we are going to take a look at some of the different ways that you can drive blog traffic.

Make the most of social media

When it comes to online marketing, all of the different channels are very much integrated. SEO, social media marketing, and blog writing all work together to help you to build your online presence. Therefore, it makes sense to build an effective social media presence for your blog in order to attract more traffic and followers.

However, one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to social media is trying to establish a presence on every social network site. When you consider the wealth of social media sites that are available today, this is simply not possible. Your efforts will be diluted because it will not be possible to give every platform the amount of effort and attention that is required. As a consequence, one of the most important things that you need to do is determine what social media networks you should focus on.

This means that you need to figure out where your target audience is. What sort of social media networks are blog readers most likely to use? For example, if your blog readership is predominately females who are of college age, Pinterest would be a wise social media network to integrate into your strategy. This is because the Pinterest demographic matches up with this. You can grow blog traffic with Pinterest if it is the right social media platform for your audience.

Focus on delivering quality content

Not only should you think about your approach to social media, but quality really is everything when running a blog. You cannot expect to put out poor quality content and have a successful blog. Your content needs to be original, exciting, and informative.

If you do a quick search on the web, you will see that there are so many different blogs out there today. Competition is fierce. What is going to make people choose your blog over other blogs? The answer lies within the content you create. If you create high-quality content that is different from the norm, you are more likely to have people following your blog. However, if your content is low quality and it does not provide anything new or helpful, no one is going to read your blog. It is as simple as that.

Make sure you have a consistent posting schedule

Yes, your content needs to be of a high quality. However, it also needs to be consistent. Posting several times in one week and then disappearing for a few weeks is no good. It is much better to post once or twice per week than it is to have an erratic posting schedule.

People like to know what to expect. They want to know when they are going to receive new content from your blog. This is the only way you are going to build up a following. If you post on an erratic basis, people will lose interest when you do not post on your blog for quite some time. The best thing to do is create a calendar for your blog so that you can schedule content.

Create guest posts that link back to your blog

To boost the power of your own blog, you need to post content on other blogs! If you have other websites that point back to your own, it can help to boost your social media ranking. This will give you more visibility online, which can result in more viewers for your blog.

However, we must stress that it is imperative to only link up with premium quality blogs that are relevant to your blog. If you were to run a sports blog, for example, linking to a blog about unicorns wouldn’t help you to climb up the search engine rankings. There is no relevance. This is why you need to make sure that you carefully consider the blogs that you post guest posts onto. Make sure you check their domain ranking so you can be sure that the site has high authority.

Be patient

We know that it can be hard to be patient when you are desperate to build your blog. However, we are sure you have heard the saying that Rome was not built in a day. You cannot expect any blog or website to be a smash hit overnight. It just does not happen. Instead, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

Slow and steady truly is the best approach when building your presence online because it will help you to create a natural and organic ranking, which is much more likely to last. If you try to take shortcuts, you will only end up hurting your blog in the long run.

So there you have it: an insight into some of the different ways that you can drive more traffic to your blog. If you try the different strategies and techniques that we have discussed above, you can give yourself the best chance of increasing the traffic to your blog. From focusing on your social media marketing efforts to ensuring that your content is original and engaging, there are lots of different tactics that are important when it comes to increasing the visibility of your blog. Try out the approaches above and remember that you need to be patient to see results.