How to Brand Your Online Business
How we did it and what we can share.
Being a branded business and being some random site is the difference between consistent income and just a paycheck.
People always ask how we did it? The funny thing is none of it was easy. We watched so many videos. We downloaded audio books. We took training, paid courses and coaching seminars. Even doing all that you would think we just had success after that. WRONG!
We Failed miserably, Wasted so much money on advertising, Found products and tried to brand them our own. By that time, They were either out of style, or it wasn't what the customer wanted but they were buying into the hype created around them.
We came up with valuable tips and the right things that did work, Problem is if your just looking for a easy income your not going to find it here.
You hear of people advertising all types of get rich schemes or build your business like this for success. There is 6 of us here that tried every avenue and realized you got to stick out, It takes time and most important you will live, breathe and eat your business for the first few months.
Here is the good news, It took us 2 years to figure out what worked, weeding out anything we wasted time on and found value. These steps make it a little easier.
Step 1: Find a need and fill it.
Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second.
To boost your chances of success, start with a niche or market. The trick is to find a group of people who are searching for a solution to a problem, but not finding many results. The internet makes this kind of market or niche research easy:
Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they're trying to solve.
Do keyword research to find keywords that a lot of people are searching, but for which not many sites are competing.
Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of what they're doing to fill the demand. Then you can use what you've learned and create a product for a market that already exists-and do it better than the competition.
Shout your value on a product or products in what we call a 7 day stretch, Find something you would purchase and do it. See what the value is, What are you willing to pay? How would it benefit you or someone else. Shoot a you-tube video about it, write a review on it. Be transparent. People see through the crap.
We tested products, found vendors and contacted them to build relationships to give our customers the best experience shopping on our website. A great source we found was Salewoo. This was buying products wholesale and being able to talk to the actual vendors to find out what they have sold and if it's a good fit for you. This eliminated research that was useless, Someone already did that and wants to share it with you.
Step 2: Write copy that sells.
There's a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:
Excite interest with a compelling headline, Talk about how your service or products benefit them and you. Include news current to drive traffic free. Example: Building A branded business online.
Describe the problem your product solves or how it will benefit their style.
Establish your credibility as a solver of this problem, This means sharing what you believe and why your vested in it. People including you want products that they know whoever is selling loves as well, They want your thoughts. Why or how you did it.
Add testimonials from people who have used your product Even if they are bad. Transparency is what we all look for.There is not one product that is just perfect for everyone. If there was we would already have it.
Talk about the product and how it benefits the user. Don't just write some description and hope it sells. Talk about what your experience with that product is, what others liked or will like about it. Explain if they use or just wear it once what the value is.
Make an offer. To get started the offer has to be good enough or free to get word of mouth actually going. If that product or service really is what you say it is, Watch it take off and put your faith in it with a investment. Giveaways help, But make sure they are really interested and you have something they are willing to share with everyone.
Make a strong guarantee and stick to it. People will love you if you are willing to work with them and tell them to write a review on your page even if their experience was bad.
Create urgency, If people feel they have time to do it anytime they will take their time and just forget about you, the product or service. They found something else that peaked their interest. You had no urgency or timeline of what your product or service and what they could save buying now. Could be as simple as shipping free or get it by date, buy this and get that, percentage discount for buying in that period of time.
Ask for the sale. Sounds simple right? Most businesses forget this because they explained features and benefits and just thought they would buy. nope. You got to ask this is done by saying hey you checked out this and we look forward to your purchase and what it did for you. OR Lot's of features and benefits and your still here? Add to cart to see the real benefits and don't forget to tell everyone where you got it.
Throughout your copy, you need to focus on how your product or service is uniquely able solve people's problems or make their lives better. Think like a customer and ask "What's in it for me?" We were even guilty of this. We just thought putting it out there on the world wide web we would be making money in no time....
Funniest thing as we spent a lot of money we stumbled across Patrick chen and his book was free! This book helped us gain some insight to what copyright was and proper strategy.
Patrick Chen <---Get his book free while you can.
Step 3: Design and build your website.
Once you've got your market and product, and you've nailed down your selling process, now you're ready for your small-business web design. Remember to keep it simple. You have fewer than five seconds to grab someone's attention--otherwise they're gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:
Choose one or two plain fonts on a white background. Going bright and loud sounds like the right way to do it. It usually drives people away.
Make your navigation clear and simple, and the same on every page. That 5 seconds to grab their attention is tried and true. Most people probably left this blog before getting this far because they think they have it all.We were guilty of this too, We just got excited first five seconds. Tested and wondered what went wrong. We never read all the information.
Only use graphics, audio or video if they enhance your message. People like to throw a picture up because they feel it does something or keeps the interest. Wrong. It usually creates a page break and people move on. It needs to be relevant to what you are speaking at that moment.
Make an opt-in offer so you can collect e-mail addresses. People just think writing or selling a product is it.What keeps revenue going? What is free advertising? E-mail. People read or saw the product and got interrupted this is life. Make sure you can connect with them later or be forced to retarget later paying to do so gets expensive.
Make it easy to buy--no more than two clicks between potential customer and checkout. Websites always want to up sell, drive transactions. and see if they want to buy more. They say people already have their credit card out they are inclined to buy more. WRONG. Let them try your product, Let them do their own add to cart, do not scare away people already willing to buy.
Your website is your online storefront, so make it customer-friendly. Pretend your website is your building and people walk past it daily. Clean up trash, use attractive offers, no spam. Clear high resolution photos clearly drawn to what you are selling or doing.
For email collection this can be time consumption and hard to do. The service we used was great and used by amazon and other services that had fast results. It was a investment but well worth it. If your good at email skip this.
Trafficblast <-- They provide the emails and targets for your products and service and do this effectively. Not terrible price either and comes with free paid advertising for other things as well, we saw a pretty good gain by the 3rd day and easy conversions which is tough online.
The paid traffic method works just for getting you a jump and you choose where it comes from. Don't expect sales but it is helping your ranking.
Reference: Paid traffic-
Step 4: Use search engines to drive targeted buyers to your site.
Pay-per-click advertising is the easiest way to get traffic to a brand-new site. It has two advantages over waiting for the traffic to come to you organically. First, PPC ads show up on the search pages immediately, and second, PPC ads allow you to test different keywords, as well as headlines, prices and selling approaches. Not only do you get immediate traffic, but you can also use PPC ads to discover your best, highest-converting keywords. Then you can distribute the keywords throughout your site in your copy and code, which will help your rankings in the organic search results. Do not try this unless you got at least 100 dollars to spend a month. You will burn through the first month fast, This is just normal and called figuring out where to place you and why. Don't think you just set up your adwords and you got traffic. It's expensive at first until you learn exactly what to target and what keywords cost less with conversions for your click cost. This took about two months to figure out. Keep in mind we have been around since 2015. You may have heard of us but nothing came to mind. We were still learning. People trust us know and associate us with great quality products, clothing and fast shipping.
While your waiting on google to crawl your pages and get more exposure with your campaign you need to build landing pages, blogs, maybe a video channel. This creates back links and gets you to rank in search engines much faster organically. There is too ways to do it one is just above and hoping your keywords stick. The second is driving traffic paid. A little unorthodox and you would think no one would say this but you got to get rankings higher to get into a search engine. These are the best at doing it and fast. Tools like funnels, landing pages are easily built and affordable by using Pprofit builder. If your a beginner or even a expert this is just a time saver in general, creating landing pages with templates and providing you with analytics that show what you can do to improve. This is a tool, you still need to do work. We tried alot of sources and got little to no results. This could be just us but that is what we saw. We started using a program called Magic Submitter This is expensive yes. We don't recommend anyone try this until they have the money to do it. But what this tool does is incredible and saves so much time and advertising cost. The ability to rank on google fast for any new product or service and then, be ranked on twitter, face book, pinterest and you-tube and link to your site is the real goal to SEO. This I would say is 60% of our sales now using that tool. This lead to step 5.
Reference: pproft
Step 5: Establish an expert reputation for yourself.
People use the internet to find information. Provide that information for free to other sites, and you'll see more traffic and better search engine rankings. The secret is to always include a link to your site with each tidbit of information.
Give away free, expert content. Create articles, videos or any other content that people will find useful. Distribute that content through online article directories or social media sites. The more you share and the more others do the value becomes a actual monetary value. Something you can charge for because you have a reputation. People sometimes say, "why are some of your clothes expensive?" If you felt them, IF you wore them, IF you had them You would know. See what happened there. I created a value and shared it through a feeling and a style and created a need instead of a want.
Include "send to a friend" links on valuable content on your website. The social proof has to be there for alot of people. A lot of people will take a gamble yes. But if social proof is there everyone will just do it conversions are higher.
Become an active expert in industry forums and social networking sites where your target market hangs out. If you are not good at social media this will be incredibly tough, You don't have to have a huge following that is not needed. Just a page on each platform. I suggest no paid sites, followers, likes! This is bad if your in business, your advertising will target fake people when you pay for ads on those platforms. Regardless of what people say this is the biggest part of the deal in building a brand. Your pixel or advertising agency is going to target those who like your page or follow first. You will spend at least 100 dollars trying to get real interactions and clicks due to this first. Plus it really does nothing, Paid shout outs do work and people talking about your brand will do enough regardless of how small it is. People actually feel like they are part of something when it starts and builds from there and one point will feel inclined or entitled for the deals they receive. We even get people that message us for a bigger discount because of this. "I followed you when you had a 100 followers and liked your posts do you have a discount I can have?
You'll reach new readers. But even better, every site that posts your content will link back to yours. Search engines love links from relevant sites and this will help you throughout the process of branding. To keep collecting emails across your ads the number 1 source we found was solo. They will run your ads free if they don't get you at least 500 emails. Look at each email worth about 2 dollars.
NOW knowing all this does it sound easy? I hope not. There is reasons why so many fail, People get paid to tell you it's easy and buy there junk knowing you got some info is good enough for them. There is no liability, You often feel like it was your fault by the time you were throwing in the hat. We understand! It took 6 of us and family to hold our hands to make sure this would work, There was alot of dark moments. But we found out later it was due to the work we were putting in it was slowly climbing in sales! We had to change multiple ways of doing business. Funny how being honest, transparent and asking people will give you the answers to a successful branded business. Feel free to try what we did and see your outcome. It takes work, Plain and simple. But that is the price you will pay for real freedom and real success.
Hope that helps get a start on the REAL idea about branding your business. It's not free, Not cheap but it is your investment and doing this your investing in yourself. If your not ready to start your business but found this imformative head back to the website and buy yourself a shirt and see why the comfort is so good with our statements. Thanks!
