Sourcing for Independence! Getting Started [2]

June 27th, 2017
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This is the second post in our Sourcing for Independence series! Welcome back! Did you miss the first one? Click here to check it out.

Getting Started:
Whether you are doing this part time of full time, the main thing to remember is that you need to be a legal business.

That’s right, whether it’s a hobby or a full time effort, if you aren’t legal then you can’t legally work with genuine wholesale suppliers. It doesn’t matter where you sell either, it matters WHO you work with.

If you truly want to buy wholesale products, if you aren’t a legal business, these wholesalers will simply turn you down for an account. Why? Because they need to have a record of who you are for their tax reporting.

When you buy wholesale products from a wholesale supplier, they aren’t charging you sales taxes. They have to report to the government WHY they didn’t charge sales for your orders and your tax ID number is what they supply to show proof of that.

Remember:
If a “wholesale supplier” doesn’t ask for a tax ID, they are usually doing something bad for your business. They could be sneaking the sales tax into the “wholesale price” and that just lowers your profit margin. Or, they’re not a TRUE wholesale supplier and just a middleman passing the orders to the real supplier and providing the supplier with THEIR tax ID information. Either way, your profit margins are lowered because a middleman always increases prices so they can make more profit and that leaves your business struggling to compete and the middleman is succeeding.

Now, this doesn’t apply to EVERY wholesaler out there. Some wholesale suppliers are in tax exempt States and others are overseas. But use that as a general rule of thumb when looking for suppliers to use or you can use a Directory like ours where we have already verified the suppliers are REAL wholesale suppliers and work with retailers that sell online.

Getting Legal:
Becoming a legal business is not hard and many States make it really easy with online forms and low costs.

1. Determine the business entity & name your business:
Whether you decide to start a corporation or a fictitious name or DBA (doing business as), you have to file this with your state. Many states have these forms online, so you can do a search for Register a Business in ____ and fill the blank with your state name. Look for sites that end with .gov or .org in the search results for government related sites and not other sites pushing you to buy their service to do this. You can set up many types of entities on your own. If you decide a Corporation is the way to go, you may need to consult a lawyer for help. But your State website will give you the forms to do it yourself. The Fee for this can run anywhere from $25.00 to $200.00 or more depending on the level of business you start.

2. Get a Tax ID:
A Tax ID is called different things in different States. Sometimes called a Sales & Use tax ID, or Seller’s Permit, or Reseller Certificate and etc. Basically it’s an ID number that allows you to buy wholesale products without getting taxed and to charge sales tax to customers in your State. Do this after you get your business name registered. You can find the forms for this your State’s Department of Revenue site. So just do a search for that to locate it. The fee for this can run anywhere from $0.00 to $50.00 in most States.

Once you get legal, then you can legally work with REAL wholesale suppliers, get REAL wholesale pricing and you are on the right path to success.

Don’t want to spin your gears trying to find real wholesalers on your own? It takes a lot of time and effort to find suppliers that work with online retailers and even more time and effort ensuring that they are real wholesale suppliers. So get our Directory!

We are running an Independence Day Discount, so now is great time to join!
One-time fee for a lifetime membership and new wholesale sources added every business day!

Check it out here: http://www.worldwidebrands.com

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Posted in Online Business, Online Business Advice | No Comments »

Sourcing for Independence! [Introduction 1]

June 26th, 2017
by

The United States Independence Day is fast approaching and we wanted to share with you some great ways to “Source for Independence”!

This is the first post in a series, so make sure to check them out as they get delivered to you! This is the introductory. The following posts in this series will contain a lot of helpful information for your business.

So what do we mean by Sourcing for Independence?

To Source means;
Obtain from a particular source or to find out where (something) can be obtained.

Independence means:
Freedom from the control, influence, support, aid or the like from others.

So Sourcing for Independence means finding reputable suppliers, to help your online business become successful, so you can be financially independent!

Most people start an online business to supplement their income as a part time job or they want to own their own business and work on it full time to be their main source of income.

However, you decide to do it, you need genuine reputable supplier sources for your chosen selling platform. Whether that is eBay, Amazon or on your own website, you need REAL wholesale sources supplying you with genuine wholesale products and real wholesale prices.

The basic supply chain is:
1. Manufacturers make the products and a lot of manufacturers will sell wholesale to retailers and others send their products to Authorized Distributors and never to retailers directly.

2. Authorized Distributors have large warehouses and offer products from different manufacturers. So you can get variety of products and brands with a distributor that you can’t get with working with the manufacturer directly. Authorized Distributors will sell to retailers and to wholesalers.

3. Wholesalers sell to retailers and also to other wholesalers, creating sub-wholesalers.

As you move down the supply chain, the wholesale prices increase. These companies have to make money too! So getting to the highest tier of the supply chain is where you find the best pricing.

It’s difficult to find genuine wholesale sources if you search online. Search results are full of middlemen, fake and fraud suppliers and they are GREAT at getting their sites to the top of the search engines because they are marketers, not wholesale suppliers. So don’t use keywords like wholesale products or dropshippers when searching online. Most legitimate suppliers do not go after these keywords, and rely on trade shows and Directories to get their names out there to retailers.

We have had many members of the years give us horror stories about companies they thought were genuine wholesale suppliers, but ended up being a middleman constantly upselling other services that they just NEEDED to have or a fake supplier that just ran away with their money.

So where do you find REAL wholesale sources willing to work with online retailers? Trade shows is a great start and that’s where we get most of the wholesalers in our Directory.

You can do this yourself of course! But there is a lot of legwork involved. Not all suppliers will work with online retailers and not all will dropship. So be prepared for a lot of NO’s.

Cut out all that extra work by getting a membership to our Directory of WBI Certified Wholesalers and Dropshippers. We have already done this work for you, and as everyone knows, Time=Money.

Not a member yet? We are currently running a $50.00 discount! Get your membership today!

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Posted in What's New | 4 Comments »

Making Your Online Store Stand Out from the Crowd

June 6th, 2017
by

It has become increasingly difficult for online retailers to stand out from their competition, due to all the new online sellers. As an online seller, you need to stand out from the crowd and here are some suggestions on how to accomplish this.

  1. Try to sell products that you know well, or educate yourself on them:
    The more you know about the products you are selling, the better you can talk about them. When selling online, expertise and knowledge sells. The more you know = the more valuable information you can provide about the products.I have talked about the dangers of datafeeds (API’s, RSS, XLS, CSV and etc) a few times in this blog, and I really want to drive this home for you. So perhaps I need to be more blunt about them, since we get asked often through customer service if we have suppliers listed with feeds.Datafeeds, are online store killers. Yes, they are convenient to load a large variety of products and descriptions onto your store with the click of a button, but you are HURTING, not helping your online store succeed if you don’t then go through and then carefully craft the descriptions and information about those products.Search engines such as Google, like UNIQUE content and will push down sites or not show sites that have the exact same content on them. They call this duplicate content. Duplicate content will impact your search engine rankings because it confuses the search engines as to which relevant sites to show their user. This will cause your store to either not show in the search engines, or greatly lower your potential for ranking high in the search engines. Search engines will rarely show sites with duplicate content. They will generally pick a popular site that pays for advertising or gets a lot of traffic to show instead of your store. So you need to cater to your chosen demographic by writing the descriptions for the products yourself.
  2. Have an About Us Page and Make a Statement:
    An About Us page helps customers know who they are buying from. Personally, if I’m looking at a website I have never purchased from, I will take a look at the About Us page to see who I’m buying from, to help instill shopping confidence. I will also look at their return policies, and shipping times so I’m an informed consumer in case any issues arise. With all the internet scams STILL running rampant today online, as a consumer you have to be careful about who you are providing your credit card information to. So make sure to give customers your story, ensure them that they can be confident buying from you, and include how you are different from your competitors & all of that can  help to incite a sale.
  3. Offer Free Giveaways:
    Freebies are great ways to get attention and obtain loyal customers. Social marketing platform users like on Twitter and Facebook LOVE contests and free things and it’s a way to garner attention, and get a bunch of followers that you can promote to.Giveaways don’t have to be free products or free shipping, it can also be educational giveaways, or gift certificates that the consumer can use when shopping at your store. Things like “submit your name and email address” for a free drawing for a $50.00 gift certificate. Doing this once a month or every couple of months, will get eyes on your store and what you have to offer. Customers may see something that they like and even buy from you while waiting to see the results of the contest.Consider this, $50.00 gift certificates or less or more, whatever you can afford, may be scary at first because that is out of pocket expenses for you, but that customer turns into a loyal customer once they order, because they know they are getting what you promised. Plus, the BIG upside, is all the new followers you will get to market and promote to and as a new online store owner, the more traffic you can get and quickly, the better. So $50.00 or so a month, as a cost of acquisition for thousands of new customers to market to, is a big ROI (return on investment) for your online store.
  4. Niche Marketing:
    Yes, we have talked about this numerous times too. Just do a search on the right for Niche and you will see all of our article about it. Niche marketing is highly important. Don’t try to be a solution for everyone by offering everything. If you do that you dilute your online store, and you have to manage TONS of keywords for SEO and the search engines to make every page of every product relevant for the search engines.Niche marketing is where you choose a set of products, all under the same category. Like Cupcake Decorating Kits for Boy’s Birthdays as mentioned in another blog post or like different types of Archery Releases. Search engines LOVE these types of sites, because your SEO keywords are repeated on practically every page of your store because you are talking about the same types of products over and over. In the search engines eyes, that makes your site an authority on those products and will rank you higher in search engine results.Need to find niche products to sell? Take a look at our Directory!

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Posted in Marketing, Online Business, Online Business Advice, SEO, Website, What's New | 5 Comments »

April 2017 – Wholesale Suppliers Added

May 5th, 2017
by

Just a quick note to let you know what we added to the Worldwide Brands Directory of Certified Wholesalers for the month of April 2017 for our members!

We added suppliers, that together, offer a total SKU count of over 170,000 SKUS!

The newly added suppliers offer:
Wholesale Tattoo Clothing
Wholesale Leather Business Bags
Wholesale Smartphone Cases
Wholesale Sublimation Blanks
Wholesale Medical Supplies
Wholesale Bedding Sets
Wholesale Pickleball Paddles
Wholesale Souvenir Merchandise
Wholesale Home Decor
Wholesale Survival Kits
Wholesale Collegiate Rain Wear
Wholesale Auto Parts
Wholesale Aftermarket Truck Parts
Wholesale Women’s Loungwear
Wholesale Stationary Sets
Wholesale Swimwear
Wholesale Color Changing Clothing
Wholesale Home Linens
Wholesale Gadgets
Wholesale Women’s Fashion Clothing
Wholesale Weightlifting Gear
…and more!

Our members at WorldwideBrands.com, can setup notifications when we add new suppliers to categories that interest you. So take a look in your My Account area to set those up and then every time you login, you can see the newly added suppliers assigned to that category on the right side of the Directory.

If you are not a member yet, check us out today!

Posted in What's New, Wholesale Product Annoucements | 2 Comments »

The Best Products For Dropshipping

April 13th, 2017
by

keep calm with worldwidebrands.comDropshipping is hugely popular with online sellers. That’s why we focus a lot of our time and attention locating and Certifying new Dropshippers every week. As you know, our Directory of Certified Wholesalers lists thousands of Certified Drop shippers (and grows weekly) giving our Members fresh new exciting products to choose from all the time.

Dropshipping offers a lot of conveniences to sellers such as low upfront costs, no inventory requirements and low risk. However, the flip side is that YOU have to do some extra work if you want to make drop shipping work for your online business. So if you plan on using a Dropshipper, then you need to plan on being more selective when you’re deciding what to sell.

So how do you pick the best products to sell for Dropshipping?

We asked the product research folks at Sell-Niches.com to put together a few tips to help answer this very important question.

Here’s what they said…

Tip 1: Don’t be stubborn with your product choices.

You can’t walk in with the mindset that “I’m only going to sell product x” or you’ll probably be disappointed pretty quickly. You’d be surprised how many new sellers have their heart set on selling (what turns out to be) highly competitive products for their first time selling online or products you simply cannot get as an online seller.

Here’s how it usually goes down…they have an idea for a product they really want to sell. They don’t do any research they just jump right to finding a Dropshipper, contact them, get their wholesale price and then their jaw drops to the floor when they see their wholesale price being higher than other people’s retail price they see online. They get upset, confused and then usually give up without ever considering any other products. That’s a huge mistake.

It’s imperative to understand that with Dropshipping, you get wholesale on 1 item. So in highly competitive markets, where other retailers are buying in volume to get deeper wholesale discounts, it’s not uncommon to see a dropshipped wholesale price be MORE EXPENSIVE than the other sellers retail price. For some products you have to buy in bulk quantities to really compete online. It’s not like that for ALL products though…

If you plan on using a Dropshipper then you need to be prepared to RESEARCH A VARIETY OF PRODUCTS. In fact some of the best products will be ones that you may have never considered selling before. Most new sellers tend to look only at products ‘they like’ or products they see advertised on TV and as a result, all they see are dropship wholesale costs that offer no profit margins because those types of products are competitive products with volume buyers and sellers.

If you’re a Member of Worldwide Brands you really have an advantage here that most other sellers don’t have. Worldwide Brands has got one of the biggest Dropship Directories we’ve ever seen with more dropship product choices than any other Directory so use that to your advantage. Start to include some products in your research that aren’t products you thought about selling when you started. Be open to selling products you may not know much about yet. By breaking away from ‘common mainstream products’ you’ll start seeing products you can dropship that have wholesale prices you can profit from.

Tip 2: Look for products with “Lower Demand”.

Sounds odd but it’s true. “Lower demand” products work better with Drop shipping because lower demand products typically have less competition from those big retailers.

You might be thinking…but doesn’t a low demand mean I won’t get many customers? Not at all. The online world is big. I mean…REAL BIG. So what’s considered “low demand” online can still mean hundreds or even thousands of customers a month. To a big retailer, only getting a few hundred customers a month isn’t enough to sustain their company, employees and other business expenses. However, to a small home-based online seller with little overhead, hundreds of customers a month add up really fast.

So when you’re doing your demand research, don’t be so quick to dismiss a product that you may think has ‘low demand’. It may just be a product worth researching further.

Tip 3: Focus your research on “Niche Markets”

As you may have guessed, at Sell-Niches.com we LOVE NICHE PRODUCTS. Why? Because we’ve found (like many others have discovered) that selling to niche markets is a great way to build a business as a NEW online seller. If you plan on using a Dropshipper, niche markets are *ideal*.

Most big retailers don’t mess around with niche products because big retailers have big overhead so they need to attract a lot of customers as fast as possible. They need to sell mainstream products that attract millions of shoppers. So for them, niche products are considered a waste of time. That’s great news for small home-based businesses!

When you start researching niche products you’ll start seeing what you’ve been hoping to see. You’ll start finding products with better profit margins, you’ll start seeing your dropship wholesale prices LESS than other retailers prices in that space, you’ll see cheaper advertising costs and the list goes on. So why isn’t everyone selling niche products? Simple. Most people don’t know how to do product research. They just know how to look for products they know, have used or see commercials on TV. When those products turn out to be too competitive for Drop shipping, they don’t know what to do next and like I said before, they just give up hope.

There are millions of products and tens of thousands of product niches you can research. There are so many untapped niche product markets waiting to be sold by online sellers. We often have people ask us “have all of the good products been taken?” The answer is NO. When you avoid common, mainstream product markets, you start to see an entirely new landscape of opportunity for online sellers. So when you hear people say “dropshipping doesn’t work” it almost always means they tried to sell a product they didn’t actually research first. Dropshipping does still work but you need to spend more time researching. If you don’t know where to start, here’s what you need to do…

First, make sure you have a REAL Dropshipper to ensure you are getting true wholesale. If you need help getting a real dropshipper look no further than www.WorldwideBrands.com. They are the most trusted source for Certified Wholesalers for a reason.

Second, make sure you understand product research and start researching niche markets! If you need help, we invite you to check us out at: http://www.SellNiches.com

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Posted in dropshipping, Online Business | 14 Comments »

March 2017 – Wholesale Suppliers Added

April 6th, 2017
by

Just a quick note to let you know what we added to the Worldwide Brands Directory of Certified Wholesalers for the month of March 2017 for our members!

We added suppliers, that together, offer a total SKU count of over 9,000 SKUS!

The newly added suppliers offer:
Wholesale Vibration Plates
Wholesale Djembe Drums
Wholesale Small Kitchen Appliances
Wholesale Hot Sauces
Wholesale Fashion Purses
Wholesale Kitchen Products
Wholesale Insulated Cups
Wholesale LED Lights
Wholesale Natural Skincare
Wholesale Pet Supplies
Wholesale Housewares
Wholesale Costume Jewelry
Wholesale Magnet Frames
Wholesale Ready to Assemble Furniture
Wholesale Bakeware
Wholesale Fashion Jewelry
Wholesale Hypoallergenic Skincare
Wholesale Brazilian Activewear
Wholesale Bean Bag Chairs
Wholesale Italian Leather Belts
Wholesale Inspection Cameras
Wholesale Condiments
Wholesale Nasal Filters
Wholesale Neckties
Wholesale Personalized Jewelry
Wholesale Handmade Home Decor
Wholesale Christmas Craft Kits
Wholesale Bath & Body Products
Wholesale Animal Baby Booties
…and more!

Our members at WorldwideBrands.com, can setup notifications when we add new suppliers to categories that interest you. So take a look in your My Account area to set those up and then every time you login, you can see the newly added suppliers assigned to that category on the right side of the Directory.

If you are not a member yet, check us out today!

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Posted in dropshipping, What's New, Wholesale Product Annoucements | No Comments »

Tips to Advertise Your Online Business

March 30th, 2017
by

Getting the word out about your online business is an important part of success. How can you expect  customers to purchase from you if they don’t even know that you exist?

Here are some of the top ways to advertise, some are free and some are paid:

SEO: Search Engine Optimization (free)
SEO is where you place special tags in your HTML code called Meta Tags. These tags allow you to write descriptions about each of your pages online, enter in keywords for that page and create titles.

Search engines crawl your meta data for these keywords so they know what to serve up to searchers who are using their search engine. You must use careful consideration for these descriptions (keep them under 160 characters) make sure to include information about what the page is all about and write unique descriptions for each of your pages. Don’t repeat words. This is considered keyword spamming, and some search engines, like Google, will penalize you for it.

Let’s do a quick example, say you are selling scented candles. First you would do some research to find out the keywords people are using to find other stores offering similar items. Those are the keywords you want to focus on for your meta description and meta keywords. Your home page would have your main navigation, brief information about your business and what you are selling. So your meta description could say something like this: Shop here today at Candles N More for the best scented candles, soy wax candles, home fragrances and potpourri scents. Highly scented soy candles for your home burn cleaner and have more concentrated fragrance oils than your standard wax candles.

See what I did there? That description contains the word candles 5 times. There is no mistaking that’s what is being offered. Then I threw in some additional keywords that are probably be used to find those products like scented candles, soy wax candles, home fragrances and etc. So you will craft your descriptions something similar to that and use your own found keywords that people would use to locate you.

Ads:
 Advertisements come in several forms. Whether it’s paid advertising in the search engines called PPC’s or banner ads that you can put on other websites.

PPC of course means Pay Per Click advertising. You create a text banner ad (usually three lines of text) for a search engine, and pay that search engine company a set amount per click. This can rack up quickly, so if you are new to selling online, you will need to make sure that you create a budget and stick to it so you don’t all of a sudden get a thousand dollar invoice from the search company that you would have to pay out of pocket.

Backlinking Directories: (free)
There are also websites out there that will allow you to place an advertisement on their websites. These are called Backlinking Directory’s.  So just do a Google search to locate those. These Directories will allow you to place your company name, brief description and a link back to your website. Be careful though, there are good ones and bad ones. So make sure that you do your homework about the Directory before posting there. Google considers some of these spam sites, so just be picky about it & don’t try to just post your company information all over the place. Carefully choose the ones you think would be a good fit, and ones that Google wouldn’t have issue with.

Forums, Blogs and Other Websites: (free unless you want a banner ad)
If there are blogs or forums out there that are talking about products that you offer, then you can join these sites to comment on other users messages and include a URL to your store (if allowed). Some of these sites also allow banner ads on their pages that they may allow you to pay to display there. Most of these banner ads would be paid ads unless you have an affiliate program and you can reach out to the blog owner or website owner to see if they would like to join your program so they can earn money for the valuable website space.

Hosting Directories: (free)
Some hosting providers will have store directories that contain pages of all the sites that are hosting on their platform. Yahoo is a good example of this; https://shopping.yahoo.com/stores/ This is a good way to get more backlinking for your online store. So if you cannot find a store directory for your hosting provider by looking in your admin area or searching online, you can ask them if they have one.

Social Marketing:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… these are just a few of the platforms that many businesses use to gain more business. Facebook and Twitter allow for purchasing ads, which are used for highly targeted audiences based on what those people are liking as well as demographic marketing. If you don’t pay to advertise on these sites, you must be seriously active on them. Posting things daily, following people with the same interests, being clever and hope that things you post will get shared and etc. Social marketing should be fun! So be as silly as you dare to be if you are offering fun products and show the lighter side of more serious products.

Whether you choose free methods of advertising or paid methods or a combination of both, always do your homework and use the best keywords to get the most bang for your efforts.

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Posted in Marketing, Online Business Advice, What's New | No Comments »

Customer Service and Your Online Store

March 24th, 2017
by

customerservice_sizedBy helping your online customers, you are helping your business too. That’s only if you are offering quality customer service.

Good and helpful customer support is at the front lines of your operation. So making sure that is on point, will help to build customer loyalty and credibility. By the way, good customer service is an excellent way to compete with big online retailers. These larger companies are not equipped to offer personalized customer support and do not go above and beyond for their customers. They have an in and out mentality. Get the customer in and then get them back out after they buy something.

Small business owners have the capacity to offer exceptional customer service and that will in turn convince customers to purchase from you. Here are some tips:

  1. Share what you know:
    Sharing your knowledge will make your customers more likely to buy something from you either immediately, or down the road. One way to accomplish this is a newsletter. Not only will you be able to create a list to market to, but if your articles in your newsletter are compelling enough, it’s also a form of marketing if customers were to share the information online. Pointing customers to sign up for your newsletter is easy, and you can usually get a nice pool of customers simply by giving a one-time discount if they sign up.
  2. Be an Email Expert:
    Email is the most important tool that you will use for your online business & it’s important to stay on top of it. Using a great email program, like Microsoft Outlook will help you to keep everything organized, along with scheduling, tasks, flagging important items & drafts so you can write template answers and more.  It’s important to check your email as often as you can, and respond immediately. If you have set hours for your business, then make sure you are working during those set hours and respond to customers within those hours. When you are first starting out, you might not have set hours to respond to customers, and you will answer when you check your emails. But as your business grows, having set customer support hours will give you some breathing room and the chance to carefully craft your responses.
  3. Practice!:
    It’s amazing the amount of emails that get sent that don’t even have a hello or your name attached to the email. Our founder and CEO wrote in his free eBook, “Starting Your Internet Business Right” about proper communication, and so many online businesses fall short and that’s who contacts us here at WorldwideBrands.com since we offer a service to online retailers! Being rude or incoherent with your questions is not a way to properly communicate. I have emailed online stores before to ask questions as well and depending on the reply and how quickly I get a response will help me to determine if I want to buy from that store. But if I ask a question like.. Hi There! I really like the dog bowl with the paw prints on it. Does it come in blue or can you get any in blue? and I get a one word response like “NO” or a response like, “The color options are right there on the page”. In my mind I’m like thanks, but no thanks and will go somewhere else, because they obviously don’t care about their business, so why should I?

Customer support is a vital part of your business and should not be handled poorly. The more you go above and beyond for your customers, the more they are willing to purchase from you.

Photo attribution: Business image created by Pressfoto – Freepik.com

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Posted in Customer Service, Online Business Advice, What's New | No Comments »

Building an Online Store – Compelling Content

March 16th, 2017
by

brain-gearsA website is pretty important for any online business (obviously!) and fortunately websites are a lot easier to create than they were before. You don’t have to know HTML or CSS or PHP when building sites these days. Many online store providers give you easy to use store building administration areas and you just click the color, the font, load your images in the right spots and enter in your information.

Just because the site is easy to create and you can get one going on one day, doesn’t mean that it’s instantly going to make sales or receive traffic. That takes time.

This blog post is going to talk about content when you build & grow your store.

Content is the MOST important part of your store. It’s not the product images, or discounts you offer, it’s the content. The more useful your content, the most visits your site will receive. It’s a no-brainer. Content is KING on a website. Not only does it help customers FIND your store, but it needs to be engaging enough to KEEP them in your store and incite them to BUY. So carefully crafted content, placed in the right areas will do just that. We are talking about headings, product descriptions & informational pages.

Compelling content can be done in many ways. But here are the top things to remember to include:

Call to Action:
Words like CLICK HERE or BUY NOW. These words tell the customer what to do. When you put call to action words like CLICK HERE on your site, explain what they will get when they click something you want them to click. Example: CLICK HERE to receive $10.00 off your first order and lead them to a page to sign up for your newsletters. This is a great way to get a pool of customers to contact from time to time that could lead to repeat customers.

About Us:
When I see an online store that doesn’t have an About Us page, and I don’t know that company, I won’t buy from them. It’s important to explain who you are, what your business is and what your mission is. Since the customer isn’t meeting you in person, you have to convey to them who you are and what you are about to make them comfortable buying from you.

Write your OWN Product Descriptions:
Everyone want to use datafeeds that load this information automatically on their websites. But this “time saving” method only hurts your business, not helps it. Carefully written product descriptions that cater to your chosen demographic not only will engage the customer, but it will also help in the search engines.

Search engines don’t like duplicate content. So if you and hundreds of other retailers have the exact same written information about a  product on pages of your website, this confuses the search engines. You must write your own content to separate from the pack.

A great way to come up with ideas for your content is to take a look at your competitors. Just don’t copy them! Be unique and stand out. It will help you in the long run.

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Posted in Copywriting, Creating Content, Marketing, Online Business Advice | No Comments »

Do I Need a Business Plan?

March 9th, 2017
by

Pen and PaperWe get this question from time to time. Some of our members comment that other websites and tutorials tell them to write up a business plan, but we don’t talk about it. So, let’s talk about it!

Is it necessary to create a business plan? It depends!

Let’s start with what a business plan actually is. A business plan, is a formal statement about your new business. What your goals are, reasons why they are attainable, and your plans for reaching those goals. It serves as a roadmap for your business that you can follow to help you reach your goals.

To get started with your business plan, you ask yourself specific questions like:
Why do you want to start a business?
Why do you want to sell online?
What do you want to sell online?
How do you plan on selling those products?

Don’t ask your friends and family to answer these questions. They can only be answered by you!

Write answers for each of those questions, and then start digging into the details.

For example, the answer to your first question might obviously be: “I want to make money.” But take that and add more details once you really think about it. For example, it could be that you have a fantastic idea & want to sell products that cater to a specific demographic, that you have found is missing and be as detailed as possible.

The last question, how do you plan on selling those products; this is where you would list out your marketing strategy and the services you plan on using to accomplish that.

You would also research costs to get an idea on how much “Facebook ads” would cost per month, or if you sell on eBay, what is the cost associated with that.. if you need legitimate wholesale suppliers then you would also list out WorldwideBrands.com and the cost associated with our service. Listing your costs is important. It will give you an idea of what you will need to spend per month or to get started to see if your ideas are feasible with your current budget.

As you write up your business plan, you research at the same time so you can truly be detailed with your answers. So a business plan can be something that takes quite some time to create, and of course you can modify it any time.

Now, let’s get to the answer for is it necessary?

If you plan on having a buisness partner, or want to take on investors for your business or even a business bank loan, a well thought out buisness plan is essential and is usually required. This will let all parties know what they should expect with your business and help them to determine if they want to work with you or not.

If you do not have plans on taking on a partner, inventors or a loan, it’s not an absolute necessity. However, a business plan can also be used internally by you, and anyone that you work with, for YOU & them to understand what your goals are and how you plan to reach them. Think of it as a written detailed vision board 🙂

So is a business plan a necessity? If you are not going to seek outside monetary help, then no.
Should I write one anyway? If you need something to follow to make sure you don’t forget anything, then sure, you can write it up grocery list style, or go through the process of writing a detailed one.

photo by: kdinuraj

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