If you're thinking about starting a business this year it is a great time
to do it Be Your Own Boss being controlled your
life and make your own money,
but here are five things you need to do before you make your first sale.
Hi, my name is Mei Pak and I help makers artists
and designers make a living from selling their handmade products online.
Now. I'm not going to talk about taxes accounting
or anything legal related
because I am not licensed to do that nor do I know enough to talk about it confidently,
so I definitely recommend you seek out professional counsel.
If you need it. This video is going to be more about the business
and marketing side of things like how you set up your own online shop.
There are a million things you need to do, right?
And I just want to highlight that you don't need to have all your ducks in a row
and have everything be perfect before you launch your website
and put your beautiful awesome handmade products out there
for the world to see my goal for you is to launch ASAP.
The sooner you get out there the sooner you can start making sales.
You really only need these five things to get ready before you launch.
And this is the exact list my husband
and I used to start our new shop selling print-on-demand art in late 2000.
We're in the first month. We made five figures sales and in 2020,
we made over 900,000 dollars in sales.
So this list works. If you follow it.
The very first thing you need to do is validate your product.
You need to have 100% certainty that strangers will pay your price for your product.
A lot of creatives who get into starting an online shop without doing this really struggle
and that was my experience when I started out to it will make making sales for you so much easier.
Iran, if you invest the time initially to do this carefully and to do it,
right so get feedback from people about your product.
Ideally from people who can give you an objective unbiased opinion.
That's what I did. When I started making things.
I will go on to message boards online and share photos of my work.
It wasn't really for the intention of selling it to promote
it but to ask people what they thought about it
and if they were willing to buy it
and I knew I was onto something
when people saw me out to say hey I saw you A post a photos of these cool things.
I want to buy it. Another thing you can do is spend some time researching.
The question you want answered is are other companies selling something similar
and doing well with it.
If they are you have the proof that your product will sell.
Well as well competition is a good thing and you can use it to your advantage like that.
You don't want to be the only person in the world selling some sort of proprietary product
because it takes a lot of resources to make a business like that.
Work and it is not easy. So just do what already Works some places you can do research our online.
Just Google it go onto Instagram
and Facebook check out at Sea
and even pick up some magazines to get a good sense for what's out there number two,
you need to have great product photos a great brand and website people shopping online.
They can't touch feel smell or experience.
You have product like they could if they walked into a gift store down the street.
Eat that means we have the pressure to make sure that despite not
having that benefit that we are still communicating.
What our product is what size it
is what it feels like what it smells like in the form of pictures and words.
So it is imperative that you do a good job with this
because it is the only way people will ever buy from you.
I'm not gonna lie. This is a time-consuming step but it is part of building out your shop.
So take your time to learn how to do product photography to set up your website get a good logo.
And branding colors things like that.
It is easier now than ever to do all of those things
because there are countless resources right like my YouTube channel
or my paid a say Leti program that teaches you how to do that.
And if you don't want to learn then pay someone to do
it for you because it is so easy to do these things now,
it's become a lot cheaper to hire help Fiverr is a great place to start looking for help.
Check out my fiber playlist over here to get a good sense
for how they work number three email marketing.
Marketing is going to be a huge asset for your business.
So you need to set up the foundations for it.
Now from the very beginning don't wait
until you get popular and become famous because you would have lost out on a lot of potential sales.
So all you need to do is setup sign up forms on your website to make it easy to
capture your website visitors email addresses.
That way you can continue building that relationship with them over email.
Otherwise, if you don't do this after they leave your site,
they're gone forever and Just have to hope they remember you enough to come back again later.
That's called. Hope based marketing
and you will not build a consistent income or living off of that.
Then you want to have some sort of automated emails written out designed
and loaded into your email service provider.
So you can have a reason to show up in a person's inbox say hi
and start building that relationship with them.
You want them to get to know you
or your shop in your products
while your products are special
what or who they should buy your products for and why they should choose you.
It's like any other relationship right like dating someone or making new friends.
Number four do a campaign of influencer marketing
so send your product for free to influencers and it can be even smaller influencers.
The goal here is you want to get their feedback
so you can put it on your website
for social proof so that new customers visiting your site in
the future feel that they can trust you.
The second goal here is to potentially get ugc user-generated content that can either be photos
or videos of your influencer with your product.
Yugi sees are so powerful
for your marketing and it's a great way to build trust and social proof as well.
You want to use these videos
or photos on your website
and your product listings
and in any of your marketing where it makes sense
and the cool thing about all of this is you don't have to pay the influencer any fees to do this
or at least I don't frame your email to them as an exchange your product for their time.
If they love your product enough the right influencers will say yes.
Number 5 social media is such an imperative part of online businesses these days
and even though I am not a fan of it it's important
for you to set up your Instagram and Facebook accounts for your shop.
The only reason I suggest is this
because you want to have some sort of social presence in case you get that
small percentage of people who go to your site,
but they're just not sure if they trust you enough to buy from you
and they go to your social media to check you out there as well.
You want to give them a reason to to feel comfortable buying from you.
So have your profile set up and load it up with some content and schedule future content.
So you're staying active on there.