WDTalk

Does your brick and mortar store depend on referrals or walk-in traffic to sell your product or service? Online stores allow businesses to reach a wider range of prospects than they could ever imagine reaching on-site. Let’s face it, the majority of prospects today begin their shopping experience doing research online – comparing companies, products, prices – the works.

The Good News
And the good news is that you don’t need a huge server or an $80,000/year IT guy to make an online store work. The majority of eCommerce stores are Mom & Pop shops, selling everything from diet supplements to shoes, and processing their payments through PayPal – on a shared hosting account that probably costs less than $35/month. Compare that to ONE ad (five lines) in a local newspaper that runs 3 days in print and 30 days online – for a whopping $395.00 !!

The Nuts and Bolts of eCommerce
It all starts with a professional website, meaning its design is attractive to the eye, it’s easy to navigate, there are no spelling errors or broken links, and the solution you propose (along with its price) is relevant AND compelling. Beyond that, you’ll need a shopping cart and a payment processor. If you’re collecting credit card information on your site (directly), you’ll also need an SSL certificate, gateway and merchant account AND be PCI compliant. If you use a service like PayPal standard, and are not processing credit card information on your site – meaning your clients are passed off to PayPal’s servers to process the actual order, these don’t apply.

Attracting Visitors
Ok, sales begin with prospects. If no one walks through the door, it’s tough to move inventory. Online, if no one visits your site, the end result is duplicated. Building a site and hoping prospects will flock to your store overnight doesn’t work. Getting them there requires implementing a mix of online and offline marketing. The tried and true stuff still works – word of mouth, referrals, networking & direct sales staff. The new stuff could be Google Adwords, advertisements in forums or social media networks, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), podcasts and so on.

The Importance of Niche Marketing
Let’s start with the prospect as they enter a search query on Google, Bing or Yahoo. If that query is too broad, for example, recipes – the results returned will number in the gazillions, leaving them to find you somewhere among the masses. Aside from the benefit of branding, narrowing your focus on what makes your product or service (in this case – recipes) different is key. If you specialize in cupcake recipes, your competition in search queries for “cupcake recipes” will narrow their search results considerably. Taking this one step further, keying in on specific cupcake recipes, like strawberry cupcake recipes or apricot cupcake recipes, will help define your niche and FINDABILITY. This online marketing principle applies cross industry. Extended keyword PHRASES help narrow and funnel your prospects search to YOU.