How to Start an Online Store That Drives Sales in 2019

Author: Lars Lofgren / Source: Quick Sprout

And the single decision that completely determines if you’ll generate sales quickly

There’s a bunch of steps that go into starting an online store.

What tool do you build your store with?

What do you name your company and how do you get a domain?

Do you dropship or not?

How do you deal with taxes?

All of these are important decisions. For now, one thing matters more than anything else to get your first sale.

What’s that one thing?

Your marketing.

That’s right, how you choose to market your store completely determines how much money you’ll make. Get the marketing right, everything else falls into place. Get it wrong or neglect it, you’ll spend years on your store without selling a single item.

Before you open your online store, you want to pick your marketing strategy.

Most online stores use one of three strategies:

• SEO
• Paid marketing
• Platform marketing

Let’s go through each.

SEO for Online Stores

This marketing strategy is pretty simple: find keywords for products that you want to offer, then get your site to rank in Google for those keywords.

If you get this to work, you can make a lot of money with your online store. SEO has a few benefits that are ideal for a businesses:

• The traffic streams are very dependable, which means dependable revenue for your business.
• Search traffic usually has the highest volume of traffic of any traffic source.
• Even at scale, search traffic can be enormously profitable.

Dependable, high volume, and profitable. It’s everything you could want.

There is one major downside: SEO takes a lot of time and effort. Even if you’re pursuing a product category without any competitors, it can still take a good 3–6 months to see your site appear on the first or second page of search results for a keyword. The traffic volume will be pretty small until you get your page into the top 1–3 rankings on a keyword. If your category is even modestly competitive, it can take years of effort to get to that point.

If you go this route, you’ll focus on three things:

1. Optimizing your product pages for product keywords.
2. Building useful and engaging content for non-product keywords that are also in your category. This helps your product pages rank.
3. Making your content so good that people will link to at as a resource.

When playing the SEO game, there are only two things that matter: content and links. So that’s where you’ll spend the bulk of your time.

Paid Marketing for Online Stores

Some online stores do exceptionally well with paid marketing.

My general rule of thumb: paid marketing is a great option if your product is the type of thing that could be featured in a mall.

Why?

The biggest paid marketing channels right now are Facebook and Instagram. Instagram in particular has gotten very popular for online stores in the last few years.

But think of the frame of mind that someone has while scrolling through a Facebook or Instagram feed. They’re relaxing for a few minutes, laughing at a few photos, and leaving quick messages for a few friends. They’re enjoying themselves. It’s a lot like how people shop at a mall. Sometimes, people are looking for a particular item, but a lot of people go to the mall to enjoy themselves. Malls have known this for a long time and stores have optimized around this browsing experience.

So products that sell effectively in a mall are also likely to do well with a paid ad in Facebook or Instagram. They’re typically:

• Consumer products. Business products have a much harder time in these channels.
• Highly visual and eye-catching. This is why apparel companies do so well in malls and why apparel companies have been really aggressive on Instagram the last few years.
• Simple to understand — the offer needs to be understood within 3 seconds. If you have a more complicated sales process that requires more explanation, people will have scrolled past your ad long before you have a chance to make the sale.
• A price point that works with an impulse purchase. If the price is too high that people need to carefully think through the decision, they’ll skip your ad and quickly forget it.

If your product meets all these criteria, you should seriously consider going the paid marketing route.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is one exception to this. Since you’re bidding on keywords within Google, you put your ad in front of people who are already actively searching for that type of product. As long as the keyword has enough search volume and the ad bids aren’t too competitive, it’ll work very nicely.

The biggest downside to paid marketing is that you’ll have to invest a bunch of money up front before you know whether or not you can turn a profit. Many of us don’t have those thousands of dollars to invest without a reliable chance of getting it back.

Most paid campaigns don’t turn a profit initially; they usually take a lot of iteration and work before they start making a profit. Most professional paid marketers need 3–6 months before their campaigns become profitable. So be careful and make sure you don’t invest more than you can afford to lose here. If cash is too tight for you, choose one of the other marketing options.

Platform Marketing for Online Stores

This is a completely different direction than the two methods above. Instead of creating your own store and using a type of marketing to acquire traffic, you’ll leverage one of the main ecommerce platforms:

• Amazon
• Etsy
• eBay

It’s definitely possible to be successful at any of these three. We recommend that most folks go after Amazon. Amazon’s audience is much larger which gives you more upside and just about every product niche already exists on Amazon.

The main exception is if you’re doing a craft business of some kind, like making your own bookends to sell to people. In that case, Etsy is a better fit since the audience expects more craft-oriented products.

eBay is still great if you’re doing a bunch of buying and reselling. But if you’re producing the same types of items consistently, the potential on Amazon is much higher.

You treat whichever platform you choose as your marketing channel. First you’ll create your store on that platform and list all your products. Second, you’ll optimize your store to the best of your ability so the platform wants to feature your products. This usually involves focusing on two areas:

• Targeting your product pages to specific terms searched for within the platform
• Getting as many 5-star reviews on your products as possible

As you improve your search terms and reviews, more people will see your products on that platform, which will produce more sales for you.

How to Choose the Best Type of Online Store for You

Again, there are three types of online stores you can open:

• SEO
• Paid marketing
• Existing platforms like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay

I strongly recommend that you pick ONE of these and build your entire business around it. That’s right, just one.

“Why can’t we do more than one? Wouldn’t we want to use multiple marketing channels for our store? More marketing means more sales right?”

I’ve made this exact mistake so many times myself. After a decade working in online marketing alongside some of the most well-respected marketers out there, I’ve noticed one overwhelming trend: folks that are good at one type of marketing are generally pretty bad at the others.

Why would this be?

A couple of reasons:

• Every marketing channel is completely unique. While some marketing principles apply across all channels, you’ll have to learn all the tactics from the ground up. Constantly trying to learn new channels really slows you down.
• Online marketing channels constantly change. What works right now won’t work in 12 months. Even though I’ve…

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