Store: TheLiquorBaroness
Joined Small Revolution: May 2014
Key To Success: Launched immediately without spending any money
Platform: Weebly
TheLiquorBaroness launched in early April 2014 and has already made thousands of dollars in sales. Lisa, founder and the brains behind the concept, built the store on an inexpensive and ‘rough’ platform but has already made her store a success.
Minimum cost. Minimum amount of time. Already making sales!
Despite Lisa’s rocky start, she is keen to invest further in her store but without the overheads related to expensive eCommerce developers. Small Revolution offers a clear path as to the next steps for The Liquor Baroness in terms of building, maintaining and marketing.
Watch the screencast to learn more about Lisa’s story and follow along with the how-to guides she’ll be using next.
TIP: Subscribe to Small Revolution for full access to all the how-to guides.
Next Steps For The Liquor Baroness
Step 1: Add Introductory Text to the Home Page
Lisa, you ought to balance the volume of backend code on the home page with a bit of search engine friendly text. Weebly is very ‘code heavy’ and Google doesn’t have ‘time’ to read through all the code to find out what your store sells.
Make it easier for Google to categorize and index your store.
Write around 200 words broken into at least 3 paragraphs (one idea per paragraph) that sells the story behind the store. Include links to other parts of your store to help with indexation.
Step 2: Add Tempting/Aspirational Text Labels to Photos on the Home Page
Combining text with the great photos will help people, at a glance, understand what they’re looking at.
Step 3: Improve Your Product Titles
Write product titles that help Google categorize your product and store. The how-to guide will step you through why this important and provides lots of examples. You can either do this yourself or outsource it to your team.
Step 4: Improve Your Product Descriptions
Write product descriptions that sell the product, and also help Google to categorize it more easily. You need at least 150 words for each one, possibly more. Some ideas to include:
- Best paired with …
- How rare is this drink? Sell its unique story.
- Celebration ideas. The drinks would make perfect gifts for special occasions. Remind customers of important dates such as Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Anniversary dates and more.
The idea is to use your product pages as stand-alone sales pages. The reader should feel compelled to buy your product and that this is the best purchasing decision they can make. Help them to believe in your product, and to trust you.
Time Saver: To save time you can use screencasts to hire a Writer to ghost write on your behalf. Make a recording of your voice talking about your product and ask your Writer to turn this into beautifully written prose.
This process can then be repeated every time you add a new product to your range.
Or you can follow the Write Product Descriptions process and write it yourself!
Step 5: Improve Your ‘Free Advertisements’ in Google
Learn how to write product meta title and descriptions so Weebly is not simply repeating your heading and generic store description.
Your meta title and description tags will act as a ‘free’ advertisement in Google’s search results. The key is to ensure that every product page in your store has a unique title and description – no repetition.
Step 6: Set Yourself up for Success
In a few months, you will reach the stage where you’re ready to promote your product online to other people’s audiences.
For example, you will find a fine dining blogger who appreciates your concept and your products. Imagine that you reach out to this blogger to tell them about your products and they, in turn, look through your store to learn more about your offering.
If you have a few well-written articles about your product then they will be more likely to engage in a conversation with you. Your articles will give them a sense of your style and point of differentiation.
So, it’s important to start preparing yourself for this type of community outreach now. Lay the groundwork!
Learn how to create a blog editorial schedule. Or, what this really means is … we’ll teach you how to churn out 100 blog ideas that you can then outsource to writers. It’s a quick and easy process that you or your writers can follow.
In the Blogging section of Small Revolution, we’ve got a stack of templates that will teach you (and your Writers) how to create high-quality articles.
For example, you can learn how to newsjack Sullivan’s Cove’s success to promote your own products. Ideally, you want to be found for their keyword phrase and sell related products.
If you don’t have time to do this yourself, then hire a good copywriter. You need to aim to produce at least 2 articles per week for a few months in order to gain any momentum in the search engines. Each article should cost you around $15 to $20 to produce if you use a writer via oDesk.
This will set you up nicely for Community Outreach activities. Prospects will be able to learn more about your store and products before they decide to connect with you.
Step 7: Your Store Is Missing Basic Trust Cues
Trust is incredibly important for creating online sales.
Create a compelling About page that sells your story. Puff yourself up. Look bigger. Grab testimonials from current customers and show how happy they were with their purchases. This will encourage more people to buy.
Check the Store Content Pages section over the next few days and you’ll see new how-to guides published that will help with this process.
While you’re at it you could improve your Contact page to make it look more professional and imply that you are an established business. This will help with both offline and online sales.
Over time you’ll find that your Contact page is one of the most visited pages before people make a purchase.
Let me know how you go,
Katrina, Founder of SmallRevolution.com
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