If you run an online business, naturally, you will want to make as many sales as possible to maximise your revenue and ensure that your venture is a success. But how do you do that?
Here are my top tips for effectively selling more stuff online:
Give each product its own page
First things, first, if you haven’t already created an individual product page for every single one of your products, you should do that now. Products that have a page dedicated to them, which is filled with all of the information a customer could ever possibly need to know about said product, are not only more helpful to potential customers, but they will boost your SEO juice and help your website to rank higher up on Google and other search engines too.
Make sure every product has a unique description
Oh, and if you’re thinking you can save time by copying and pasting a description for similar products from elsewhere, think again. This may be convenient, but it will not help your search engine ranking one little bit. Search engines like to see unique content, so if you copy, it will not work in your favour and you probably won’t get a traffic boost that could help you sell more stuff at all.
Take your own pictures
Oh, and try not to use stock images for your products either. They may be more convenient, but again, they won’t do much for your rankings and many customers will be wary of buying from you because scam sites use stock photos, and it’s really easy to tell when a photo is a stock image. These days, all you need is a smartphone and a pleasing backdrop to take great photos, so it need not cost you a lot to do this.
Encourage user reviews
People are hesitant to buy a product or service, especially from a small business, if they don’t have any idea what it is like or if it’s good quality. That’s why, if you want to sell more stuff online, it’s a really good idea to do whatever you can to encourage your customers to leave a review whether that means offering them a discount on their next purchase for doing so or allowing a review to gain them entry into an exciting giveaway. The more good reviews you get, the more new customers will be encouraged to make a purchase too, providing you can get them to your website in the first place, which brings us to…
Video marketing
Video marketing has been shown to increase sales online with 64 percent of people saying they would be more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it, according to Animoto. This is hardly surprising because when you use the medium of video for marketing purposes, you can actually show the customer your products and demonstrate what they do in great detail. Not only that but it takes the consumer less effort to watch a video than read a long article, so you’re likely to convince more people to hear you out when you use video marketing too.
Make buying something easy
It’s bonkers but so many online businesses have such convoluted selling processes in place that it actively puts the customer off making a purchase. If you want to sell as much stuff online as possible, you need to do the exact opposite and make it as easy as possible to purchase something from you. Use simple shopping cart software to ensure that all a customer needs to do is click buy and enter their details and you should see more sales. Oh, and if you really want to maximise the number of customers you have, you should also ensure that you accept as many forms of payment as possible from Paypal to Bitcoin – the more choice the consumer has, the more convenient it will be for them to buy something, after all.
Add a guarantee
If you’re a new business, people will understandably be wary of using you for the first time. One thing you can do to convince them otherwise is to offer a money-back guarantee on purchases. That way, they have little to lose by giving your business a try, and actually, they might find that they love what you do, which will be a win-win for you both. It won’t convince everyone to go ahead and make a purchase, but it should convince enough people to make it worth your while.
Optimise your website
It doesn’t matter what measures you take to drive traffic to your website, if the site itself is sluggish, constantly crashing or set up in such a way that it is not exactly intuitive for the customer to use, you will probably find that any traffic you do receive drops off pretty quickly. No one is going to water huge amounts of time and effort trying to get your website to work for them when chances are there are a million other websites they can buy similar products from too, are they?
Engage on social media
Social media is one of the best tools you have at your disposal if you want to sell as much stuff online as possible. Ideally, your business should have a significant presence on all of the major social media platforms, and by significant, I mean that you should be posting content each day. That content should be of a high quality and not just salesy, but also fun and informative if you want to convert as many customers as you possibly can.
Running an online business is an excellent way to make a living in 2021, but there is a lot of competition out there, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the sea of voices all vying for the same attention. However, if you implement all of the above, and make your business as attractive to your target audience as possible, chances are you will not only succeed but also make more sales than you ever imagined possible.
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