8 Practical Ways to Reduce Costs in Your E-Commerce Operations

Worldwide, as e-commerce retail sales increase, so are its attendant costs. This is typically on account of the fact that e-commerce businesses attract a large number of visitors every single day. The increase in costs is attributable in the main to rising operating costs, particularly as related to shipping expenses, transaction fees, supply and logistics costs, and marketing costs. Many e-commerce businesses struggle online because of these costs and stiff competition. So, the only way your e-commerce business can really survive and grow is to explore all ways to implement practical strategies that help to cut down costs.

Following are eight practical ways e-commerce businesses can reduce operating costs and still be able to maintain good customer experience and satisfaction.

1. Optimize Your Supply Chain Operations

When supply chain costs are high, they can directly affect business revenues and profit margins. With less revenue after accounting for expenses, the ability of businesses to invest in growth or other strategic initiatives is severely limited. Rising expenditures usually occasion lower revenues. This can hinder operational efficiency because it holds up capital for unnecessary expenses or inefficient processes. What to do? The best way out is to optimize your supply chain operations and cost control. This is absolutely necessary for businesses to stay agile, grow steadily and be profitable. If you want to optimize your supply chain operations therefore, you may wish to outsource non-core activities to third-party logistics providers, leverage technologies like inventory management software, consolidate shipments to lower the number of deliveries and maximize truck utilization, establish strong partnerships with suppliers, distributors, and logistics providers, all in a bid to cut down effectively on your supply chain costs.

2. Use Dropshipping Options

As a product merchant, you can use a dropshipping model to directly ship your products to customers. That way, you are not required to hold any inventory. All you do is to simply accept customers’ orders then pass them on to the dropshipper for fulfillment. That helps to reduce your operational costs since you don’t hold or buy inventory. Additionally, dropshipping does not require a huge investment and can therefore save your business a lot of costs. Dropshipping allows your business to offer a wide selection of trending products to your customers, the business can be easily scaled, makes it easy for you to operate your business because there are only a few restrictions on your location. A dropshipping business is comparatively easier to start because you don’t have any need to invest in the payment for a warehouse or directly pack and ship orders yourself.

3. Control Your Inventory Management Costs

Controlling your inventory management costs can directly benefit your business. This is because inefficient inventory management can quickly exhaust your valuable resources. For instance, excessive stocks can hold up vital capital, while insufficient stock results in lost sales opportunities. This can directly affect customer satisfaction. Huge storage costs can strain profits. This is more so for businesses that pay high rent or utilize third-party logistics providers. So, if you tightly control your inventory management, your business can reduce storage expenses associated with excess stock. This helps to minimize the impact of expired products. For effective inventory control management, you can consider reducing supplier lead times as it can help you to reduce the size of your warehouse and overall inventory, conduct regular inventory checks to compare your products to the demand, adopt a minimum order quantities framework for wholesalers, eliminate excess inventory to reduce additional storage space, all in a bid to cut costs.

4. Explore Ways to Minimize Products Returns

Online shoppers do return products for various reasons. Excessive products returns can directly affect the fortunes of any e-commerce business. Sometimes, in addition to the costs you’ve already incurred delivering a product, a product return pickup can almost double your expenses. You may even incur more costs if you are required to repair the product if it is damaged. Minimizing product returns therefore is one great way to bring down operational costs. What to do to sort of guarantee this? You must try to encourage product exchanges instead of outright returns, optimize products and visuals with accurate details and high-quality images or videos, try various angles and include detailed sizing guides in your displayed products, display your products with detailed product use and maintenance guides to enable buyers receive the vital and necessary information, encourage product reviews and feedback.

5. Use Automation to Accelerate Business Processes

Most e-commerce stores usually involve numerous manual tasks in their operations. This is more so for the processing and inventory management. By this arrangement, there is always the risk of human error and inefficiencies. This necessitates constant supervision which can significantly inflate operating expenses. It can even hinder scalability and profitability. You can go around this huge cost inducing practice by deploying marketing automation software. These tools can help you to automate most of your routine business activities. The tools are effective to minimize human error, monotonous manual work, and process completion time while boosting productivity and efficiency. You can in addition depend on these tools to get automated data analysis and valuable insights into customer behavior and e-commerce trends. Now, where exactly can you automate in your business to help cut costs? You can consider automating inventory reordering, returns and refunds processing, answering common customer queries and guiding customers through the shopping process using AI or Whatsapp Chatbots, customer support meetings, personalized product recommendations, fraud detection and prevention and so on.

6. Review and Streamline Your Vendor Contracts

In most e-commerce business arrangements, vendor contracts usually outline in clear terms and conditions what businesses and vendors must adhere to. These contracts ensure clear expectations and reduce the risk of misunderstandings or disputes in the business arrangement. They clearly and adequately define rights, responsibilities and obligations of all parties. These agreements also provide a strong foundation for a mutually beneficial working relationship. If well crafted, these contracts can be very crucial in nurturing trust and collaboration between e-commerce businesses and vendors because they leave no room for poor coordination or even mishaps that can lead to avoidable losses and increased overall costs. It is best therefore to periodically review your vendor contracts to ensure that they clearly:

• Establish ownership and usage rights for intellectual property rights during the business-vendor relationship.
• Detail the process for resolving disputes between the parties and the circumstances in which the contract can be terminated.
• Define pricing and payment terms with transparent agreed-upon prices, payment schedules, and any penalties related to timely payments.
• Outline delivery schedules, performance metrics, and quality stands to ensure compliance and satisfaction from both ends.

7. Use Minimal Product Packaging

If excessive, packing and materials costs can also lead to high operating costs in e-commerce business. In addition, if you use poorly designed or ineffective packing materials, it can cause damage in transit. That is why it is hugely essential to identify ways to optimize packaging without compromising quality and product safety. For effective minimal packaging arrangements, you can cut shipping costs by using smaller boxes to package your products, ensure proper packaging of the products, use different packaging materials for various types of products, buying only a small quantity of packing materials then assess how it holds up in different conditions to ensure minimum loss.
 
8. Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost is one of the major cost elements in e-commerce marketing. It is simply the approximate total cost required to acquire a new customer for the e-commerce business. This cost encompasses salaries of marketers or salespeople, time spent on marketing campaigns, advertising and other related business costs. So, if you are able to significantly reduce customer acquisition costs, it will help your business retain more profit, increase marketing ROI, and allow scalability. Here is what to focus on if you want to considerably reduce customer acquisition cost.

• You can re-target customers who leave incomplete actions on websites and applications.
• Provide meaningful content, educate customers, and build trust with your e-commerce business.
• Improve customer retention by utilizing strategies like customer feedback loops, customer education programs, and loyalty programs.
• Deliberately tailor your content for appropriate audiences by segmenting them.

Last Line

It is not enough to always try to earn more revenues in your e-commerce business. Cutting costs in addition to earning more revenues is the best way to profitability. These here cost-cutting tips come in very handy to help your e-commerce business earn more revenues and ultimately more profits.

8 Vital Elements Your E-commerce Business Website Should Have

If you run an e-commerce business, the main function of your business website is to help attract and convert the right customers to your business. The website serves as your first point of contact with potential customers. Because it is often the first thing a potential customer will see, creating a solid and attractive website is hugely important to the success of your e-commerce business. If the website has the right elements, it helps to establish your business’s credibility and showcases its products and services in the best light possible. Here are 8 of these vital elements your e-commerce business website should have if you expect it to effectively serve the purpose for which it was created.

1. Website Hosting Platform

Reputation and versatility play a vital role in deciding the platform to host your e-commerce business website. When building your e-commerce website, you can consider the following solutions:

WordPress.com: This is a longtime blogger favorite because of its free plan, versatility, customization and monetization options.
 
Wix: This is particularly useful because of its scalable solutions for retail and service industries, the reason it is a top pick for small businesses. Wix supplies lead forms, marketing tools, and built-in web chat among its small business attractions.

Whichever platform you decide on, what matters most are the customization and personalization options available in the platform and its ability to align with your skills level and business goals.

2. Homepage

As a vital element for the effectiveness of a website, the homepage is your first opportunity to tell your website visitors all about your business and why they should care. To make this happen, your homepage should be sufficiently attractive and welcoming to visitors. It should start with a compelling headline that speaks to your ideal customer. Your home page should have good aesthetic appeal with high-quality photos, videos and graphics that visually explain to visitors what your business is about. It should include a more general description of your business offerings. The page should be well set up as to be able to create a lasting impression on your website visitors and capable of helping someone new to your business to begin to really know, like, and trust you.

3. About Page

If well set up, About Page is one of the most visited pages on a website. Before people agree to do business with other people, most really want to know exactly who they are doing business with. Many want to get a sense of your business story and the people behind the business. The About Page readily provides this info. So, the page should ideally outline how your business started and your business mission. Short bios of the people behind the business are usually some ideal provisions in the About Page. The page should briefly explain the types of customers you serve and the benefits your business offers them. Your bragging rights and how your business stands out among others should ideally be included in your About Page.

4. Services/Products Page

This is the page that outlines the products/services your business offers. It should ideally include product/service descriptions and which consumers they are best suited. You should include pricing information and clearly explain how customers can make a purchase, vital info that encourages potential customers to take the next step forward to do business with you. If you are selling physical products, it is advisable to include high-resolution photos of each product to allow your customers have a vivid idea of what they’re buying. Good products photos on a website have been known to help convert even first time website visitors into customers.

5. Contact Page

This is readily one of the most important elements on a website. Your contact info on the page helps to make it easy for current and potential customers to get in touch with your business any time of the day 24/7. Vital contact info you need on this page is, your business address, phone number, social media handles and email address. You may also like to include your business hours so people know when they can expect to hear back from you and when to have a live chat with you.

6. Invitation to Join Email List

On your e-commerce business website, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with potential customers and grow your business. You must therefore endeavor to give your website visitors an opportunity right on your website to sign up for your email list by making a provision on the website to encourage all visitors to sign up. Giving away a highly informative free eBook is a great way to get visitors to sign up with their email addresses if they want to receive the eBook. Using your email, you can start sending out regular marketing messages to people on your email list. Email is ideal marketing tool you can rely on to quickly notify customers and potential customers about new products arrivals, discounts, promos and price adjustments.

7. Testimonials Page

Many buyers usually rely on the testimonies of previous buyers to make their own buy decisions. This is why a testimonials page is a very important element to have on your business website. On your Testimonials Page, always include testimonials from happy customers. These testimonials showcase how well your product/service had helped solve a problem for previous customers. If feasible, it is advisable to include a name and photo with each testimonial to prove they are real people. Doing so usually helps to create more social proof.

8. Other Purposeful Site Elements

If your website is a multi-page site, each component opens on a separate page. Whereas if the website is a single-page site it takes visitors direct to the appropriate section of the website. But you can add additional elements to add additional information to the site. Doing this can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, enhance customer experiences, and reduce operational costs. You can always leverage your business website’s purpose to provide this additional information. If you have clearly identified goals, it can help you determine how adding more website content supports your objectives. It is for this reason you may choose adding additional pages to your business website. Pages like:

Blog: Since some Content Management Systems, CMS and e-commerce platforms offer text editing tools, you can blog effectively on your website. To attract good traffic, you must however commit to a consistent and manageable posting schedule of high quality customer-centrist posts on your blog.

FAQs: On this page, you can compile a list of frequently asked questions into a user-friendly online document. This can be quite helpful to your site visitors and restricts them from contacting you directly. You should regularly update your FAQs based on customer support and survey responses.

Shipping Information: This element helps you to explain timelines, fees, tracking information, and relevant details so shoppers can feel confident and comfortable making purchases from your business.

Press Mentions: This element helps your business with good public relations. You can thus use it to showcase media mentions, upcoming speaking events, charity drives, community service or local awards.
 
Return and Refunds: To avoid negative reviews and back-and-forth emails, you must have a transparent return policy and step-by-step details how to go about it on your website. This helps good customer relations and retention.

How to make your E-commerce Website Work for You

Technically, your e-commerce business website is the front door of your e-commerce business. It is where internet users first get in contact with your business. It is practically the first point of call after someone Googles a keyword related to your business. Your e-commerce website is where potential customers first learn about your business. It is where they get to learn first-hand who you are, what you do and how the products/services you offer are better than anyone else’s. That’s where business owners get to build their online presence that will determine whether they succeed or fail in the business. 

Your e-commerce website is thus so significant to the success or failure of your e-commerce business that you cannot afford to treat matters related to it with levity if you want your business to succeed. Therefore, if you are desirous to make your website really work for you, you must carefully choose a platform and host, get a suitable domain name and choose a template making sure it is search-friendly before launching the website. These here user focused design tips can help your out when planning the website:

Know Your Audience: You can only do this by way of research. You should try to conduct a thorough research to understand the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. This way, you’ll get to know what type of website you can design to meet their needs.

Design and Aesthetics: In the website, you must ensure that its design is consistent with the brand identity of your business. You must use size, color, and spacing to highlight important elements in your website to guide users through your content. Choose legible fonts and appropriate font sizes. Try to maintain good contrast between text and background to enhance the appeal of the website.

Functionality: A functional website is always user-friendly. The functionality of your website can therefore not be overemphasized. You must regularly test your website for bugs, broken links and other functionality issues.

Accessibility: Ensure your e-commerce website is accessible by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Doing so helps to make sure your website is accessible even to users with disabilities.
 
Mobile Friendly and Responsive: These days, over 60% of internet users do so via mobile devices. If you don’t want to miss out from this huge data, you must design your website to be mobile-friendly and responsive.

Performance Optimization: A fast loading website is a user friendly website. You must therefore design your website to have fast loading times. You can ensure this by optimizing your images, use efficient coding practices, and leverage browser caching to reduce loading times.

Analytics and Feedback: Be sure your website has real time performance measurement tools to enable you know how well your marketing campaigns are going at all times. You can use popular analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior and site performance, real time.
 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): If you take care to use well researched and selected relevant keywords throughout your content, it will be SEO compliant. Try to avoid keyword stuffing though because the website can be penalized by search engines for keywords stuffing. Always provide valuable, well-written fresh content that answers users' questions and engages them. You can then use meaningful meta titles and descriptions for each page to improve search engine visibility for the content.

Compliance: Because the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, if for instance you are operating in the EU or dealing with EU citizens, you must ensure full compliance with GDPR and other regulations particularly as they affect use of ads and consumer data.

Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): CTAs are great marketing gimmicks. You must ensure the CTAs on your website are visibly clear and compelling enough to drive user actions.

Legal Compliance: Since the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, legal requirements are rarely uniform across countries and geographical regions of the world. For this reason, try to always ensure your website has clear, accessible privacy policies and terms of service.  

Security: Since hackers and other cybercriminals operate freely everywhere on the internet, you must think security at the design stage of your website. Always make sure your website uses HTTPS to protect user data. Make sure to improve its search ranking with SSL Certification.  

8 Effective Tips to Outsource Good Product Description Writing

If you want to make appreciable sales in your eCommerce store, you must ensure the store benefits from good product description writing. These descriptions must be well optimized to attract organic traffic to the store. You can get this done by outsourcing the service to reputable and professional product description writers. These specialized writers usually have the expertise to create SEO-friendly, tailored product descriptions that align with a brand’s identity. If you choose to outsource this service to professionals, it benefits your business immensely but mostly in the following ways:

 
1. Adherence to Guidelines: Most eCommerce platforms usually have specific guidelines and requirements for product descriptions. Most professional writers are well aware of this. The reason they always ensure they adhere to these guidelines. Doing so ensures that the product descriptions they write meet the criteria set by the platforms where they will be showcased. This helps to enhance their acceptance and effectiveness.

2. Time-Efficiency: If you outsource product description writing to professionals, it can significantly reduce the time and effort you spend on content creation. It frees up more time for business owners to focus more on core operations of the business even while ensuring product descriptions are professionally crafted and optimized.

3. Revision and Editing: Most professional product description writing services often include revision and editing as part of their offerings. This ensures that the final product descriptions are polished, error-free, and optimized for maximum impact. This frees up more time for business owners to concentrate on other core aspects of their businesses.

4. Consistency across Catalogs: Professional product description writers know that consistency in product descriptions is critical for brand identity. This is why they ensure uniformity in tone, style, and messaging across product catalogs. This helps in no small measure to contribute to a cohesive and recognizable brand image for the business.

5. Expertise and Specialization: Technically, product description writing services always employ skilled and experienced writers who specialize in creating engaging and effective product narratives. Most of these writers are well-versed in the nuances of eCommerce and possess the needed expertise to highlight the Unique Selling Points of a product.

6. Tailored Approach: Any reputable product description writing professional always takes a tailored approach to each client. They invest valuable time in understanding the brand, target audience, and unique selling propositions of the products. This enables them to create product descriptions that align with the overall marketing strategy of the eCommerce business.

7. Scalability: In a typical eCommerce business, as the business expands its product offerings or enters new markets, the demand for product descriptions increases. Professional product description writers know this. So, they offer scalable services which allow businesses to meet varying content needs without compromising standards and quality.

8. Search Engine Optimization, SEO: A deep understanding of SEO principles is part of the good qualities of professional products description writers. This is why they usually conduct thorough keyword researches before seamlessly integrating the relevant keywords they select into product descriptions. Doing this contributes immensely to increased search engine visibility for the product. The eCommerce store itself benefits from increased organic traffic as a result.

Online Business Ideas with Good Earning Capabilities

If you want to do business in the digital world, you can simply launch an online business. By doing so, you can be your own Boss, work any which way you want, where you want and any time 24/7 that is convenient for you to work. Out there on the Internet, business opportunities are limitless. Just launch a good business idea and boom you are in business. You have a very wide range of online opportunities to earn income with a good business idea. This however depends on your skills, talents, enthusiasm, inclinations and the resources at your command. Find below some tested and proven online business ideas with good earning capabilities you can try your hands on.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very simple business model. It is performance-based. You just need to help product merchants to market their products and earn a commission when a sale is made. Simple! All you need do is to offer a product to consumers online by promoting a unique affiliate link. If a buyer clicks this link and purchases the product, you earn a commission. You can promote this link any which way that suits you. You can do it through your website/blog content, social media posts, blog comments and any other way many people will get to see the link online. Many people prefer to join reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, promote products and earn commissions.
 
Blogging

You can make money through blogging if you blog on a good niche and your blogs are of high quality, informative and educating enough. Once you are able to grow your blog audience appreciably, you can monetize the blog and earn good money. Google AdSense monetization code is about the most popular way to monetize your blog. But, you can also make money through a mix of advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsored articles, and selling e-products like e-books and online courses.

Virtual Assistant Services

Our fast-paced world is now producing very busy executives and business persons. These people require assistants to handle most of their routine chores. That is where Virtual Assistant jobs become relevant. Many busy executives now hire people to help them manage their to-do lists, their calendars, their emails, their social media handles, and perform other routine administrative duties on their behalf. Virtual Assistants are now very much in demand for reports production services, editing, uploading of videos, basic bookkeeping services, typing and transcription of meeting minutes and notes, creating and editing reports, gathering unpaid invoices, setting up and administering webinars and suchlike services. Virtual Assistant fees are lucrative depending on your skills and versatility. Online job placement sites are good places to look for Virtual Assistants jobs.

SEO Consulting

This is quite a technical job that requires good training and experience to excel. It pays well and the demand is high particularly now that many more people are taking their businesses online. Many online business owners will readily pay you for your service if you can help them to set up a good SEO on their websites. In online business, competition is really quite high. This is why every business wants to get noticed online and ranked by search engines. A good SEO helps out with that. The job of a good SEO consultant therefore is to help business owners enhance their websites to enable the websites receive better search rankings on the SERPs of search engines. SEO consultants routinely evaluate their clients’ websites and advise them on what they can do through SEO to improve their websites’ positioning in search engine rankings.

Graphic Designing

If you have the requisite artistic gifts to produce eye-catching visuals and graphics, you can become a good graphic designer and earn good money online. With new websites and new businesses being launched online daily, the demand for graphic designing is really quite high. It is some kind of business you can successfully do at home and at your convenience. If you are able to quickly make available to customers a variety of high-quality work and design alternatives on time for them to choose from, you get good patronage. You earn as per your pricing.

 
Photography and Videography

This is yet another great online business idea that requires good training and skills. With the right equipment and skills, you can habitually document your day to day experiences and observations with graphic images and videos. If you are convinced about the mass appeal of your skills and images, you can either display them on your personal Website, YouTube channel or sell them outright to photographic websites online. To earn good money from this business idea, you must have the habit of traveling frequently to wild, iconic and exotic places where you can record good videos and take exciting photos for exhibition and sale.

Websites Flipping
 
This is one business idea where good webmasters make good money. What they do is to buy a URL that is undervalued and under-optimized. Next is to retouch and possibly redesign the website and optimize it to improve its value before selling it for a higher price than they paid for it. Doing this frequently and profitably is “website flipping.” In principle, this operates like what happens in real estate business. The main difference however is that when flipping websites, instead of selling physical and tangible real estate, you are selling intangible and virtual digital assets all for profit.

E-Commerce Store

E-Commerce store is an online store where you can sell physical and digital products. You may choose to sell your own products alone or in combination with products from other product merchants. On this store, you can sell any product that is selling well and in great demand. If however you are faced with the concerns of physical logistics, you can concentrate on selling digital products that are quite simpler to handle and manage. Some of such digital products that really sell well are eBooks, software, images, worksheets, training materials, movies, games, auto-files, and suchlike digital products.

Summary

An online business idea is as good as the skills, experience, abilities, capabilities, and the personality of anyone who wants to earn money from the idea. Your ability to earn good money from any of the foregoing business ideas therefore depends on how you can market your own unique skills online to attract patronage. Most of these ideas are based on skills and performance-oriented services. Doing things better than anyone else by providing high-quality products/services is what enhances your earnings. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication to business to accomplish.

5 Tips to Market your E-commerce Website

It is not enough to just set up your e-commerce website. You must effectively market it to attract business online. If you market your website well enough, you can significantly grow your business online. These days, more and more people are increasingly taking to online shopping, but if your e-commerce store is not easily accessible on the internet, clearly you are losing significant online business. If your e-commerce store is properly registered on the web, it must have a domain name and reputable web host. It is through this domain name that internet users can use to reach your website. That means, it is your online business address. This is the address together with its link you must market online to enable internet users find your business and possibly do business with you online. Following are some excellent tips you can effectively use to market your website.

1. Social Media Marketing

With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market and an effective way to promote businesses online. Promoting your website on social media is fairly easy. Just explore all ways to create visibility for your business website on some of the most popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the likes. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, you can promote your website by way of social media ads. Creating good quality content consistently and sharing it on the platforms is one great way to grow your website traffic. As your website traffic grows, so is the popularity of the website.

2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you want your website to be noticed, indexed and ranked by search engines, explore all ways to make it SEO-friendly. This you can do by making sure the content you share on the site, all the existing pages and info on the web pages all carry select keywords to make the website SEO-friendly. To remain in this condition, you must check out your SEO regularly with online SEO tools to be sure it is doing what you expect it to do in terms of website performance. This ultimately helps your website to rank high on the SERPs of search engines. If your website ranks high on these pages, it benefits from higher organic traffic. This means it is increasingly popular and reaching wider audiences online.

3. Offer Educational Services

One other great way to market your website is to offer free educational courses out of the site. Depending on your skills and inclinations, you can offer quality webinars and podcasts to promote your website. Blogging out of the website by sharing high quality educational and informative content is another effective way to market your website. You can select any topic you blog about and get an expert to teach how-to techniques through free podcasts. This can help you to market your website and grow your business.

4. Write Email Newsletter

If you already have a responsive email list built up, writing and sending a valuable newsletter to this email list is a great way to market your website and business. You may decide to send this newsletter weekly, bi- monthly or monthly. If it manages to get to your email list audience, your customers and even visitors to your website, it can help promote the website.

5. Guest Blogging

Aside blogging out of your own website, guest blogging is also a good way to market your website. Through these efforts, you can write regular guest posts for well-known relevant and reputable websites with a link back to your website on the content or in your author bio section depending on what the guest blogging website permits. By this arrangement, finding a quality website to write quality content for as a guest blogger is no doubt a great way to market your website.
 
Wrapping Up

Content marketing is generally acceptable to most online marketers and business owners as crucial to growing and promoting their businesses online. Either in combination or used singly, digital marketing techniques like search engine marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, email marketing, teaching free webinars and podcasts come in very handy in this quest to effectively market your website and grow your business online.

SFI Time-Tested Tip: Do Something to Grow Your Business Every Day

You will not create a successful business by thinking about it. You will create a successful business ONLY by DOING...by TAKING ACTION every day. Every day, no matter what, make sure you're doing SOMETHING to further your business. If you're not, you're not even in the game, you're kidding yourself. No business becomes successful without daily focus and action.

What can you do daily? Here are just a few ideas:

• Follow up with recent prospective members.
• Review your SFI Building Blocks every day
• Send out some E-Cards.
• Try out a new SFI Marketing Aid.
• Send out some postcards.
• Review the LaunchPad Lessons.
• Read the latest ecommerce articles at ECommergy.com.
• Send out a newsletter to your PSAs.
• Read an SFI training article you haven't read yet (or review one you have).
• Contact your sponsor, and let him or her know what you're doing.
• Go to Google and search for articles on how to become a better marketer.
• Browse the Zing Network for new products and services you can recommend to your customers.
• Review the latest posts on the SFI Forum.
• Review your Genealogy and Member List.
• Review the Hit Tracker page to maximize your marketing efforts.
• Start a co-op and invite your PSAs to join.
• Add some prospects to your Rewardical ECA database.
• Review your "My Movers" report (on your BUILD Building Block).

BONUS TIP: Don't forget to use your SFI Power Tools (https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/)! Put the power of key codes, hit tracking, your own advertising co-op, the PSA Mailer, the CSA Mailer, reassignments, and more to work for your business. To not use these best-of-the-best tools is to operate your SFI business with two arms tied behind your back!

"Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day. It is the cumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgements that leads us to either fortune or failure."
-Jim Rohn

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum

Tips to Grow Your Online Business with a Blog

Most online business owners now rely on blogs to grow their businesses and blogs are really proving very useful in growing many of these businesses. Intermediate parties may not be able to promote your products as much as you would prefer, so blogs come in very handy to fill that gap. No matter how competitive the internet appears to be for business owners, a good blog can help make a real difference. Blogs can help to effectively popularize your products on the internet even in today’s highly competitive market. This is why business owners rely on blogs as superb resources for branding and for creating general awareness for their products on the internet. Blogs are a great resource for letting people online know how excellent the products you’re offering are that they would love to use. Below are some great tips on how to use your blog to grow your online business.

 
 
Post Only High Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. A good blog is all about crafting and posting quality blogs regularly to attract readers. Therefore, to attract more visitors to your blog, you need to post quality and compelling content regularly that people find interesting, engaging, and relevant to their needs. The reason they’ll keep coming back to your website for more blog information. If your blog content is well optimized with relevant keywords, it can help you with the digital marketing processes necessary to promote your blog and get it on top of Google SERPs. This is why the better the content you post, the higher your chances of attracting leads/buyers that could transmute to customers if well nurtured.

Build Email List

A credible email list is an excellent digital marketing asset for marketers. It however takes quality time and efforts to build one. Here is what expert marketers recommend to build a good email list. Make sure your blog has a contact form you use to capture the names, location, and email IDs of persons that comment on your blog through this contact form or comments section. To get your website visitors to part with such vital personal information about themselves, you must try to offer something of value to them in exchange for the information. You can for instance offer free newsletter, research information, eBooks, prize winning quizzes as well as promos. Offering such values is quite effective even though many visitors will freely part with their personal information if your content is attractive, has quality, useful, and relevant to their needs. Over time, the list will grow and become a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities. You can segment your email list for effective marketing and also use it to nurture leads to become customers.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

If you have accounts on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others, you can easily share information about your new blog posts to your followers. Your followers could in turn share this information to their own followers if they find the information useful. That way, your blog post can easily go viral thereby attracting many more people to share your posts if they find them interesting enough. On social media, you can seize the excellent opportunities the platforms provide to easily interact with potential buyers or others who may be interested in products. From these interactions, you can acquire some leads, prospective customers and even customers provided you are able to handle their queries and suggestions or comments correctly. If you do, your chances of converting some of them to buyers of your products are greatly enhanced.

Optimize for Digital Marketing

Every marketer wants his business to be visible online. Getting your business well ranked on search engines like Google is a great way to go about it. That calls for SEO, Search Engine Optimization techniques on your blog content and even your website. If you know how to, you can deftly use keywords relevant to your products on your content to make it visible to search engines. Because SEO is hugely technical, you may choose to hire the services of a good digital marketer to do various digital marketing processes on your blog. If well done, SEO can help your blog to rank in the topmost searches of Google SERPs. That is how your blog can get to attract more attention online and benefit from quality organic traffic.

Blog About Your Industry

Blogging about your industry or business niche is one great way to show expertise which in turn attracts readers. You can through your blog provide news, breakthroughs, research findings, trending issues and views about the latest happenings about your industry. That somehow helps to keep readers and other stakeholders in the industry interested in your blog. This is also one great way to increase your business blog following. Such readers will relate to you as a dependable authority in your industry and that could enhance their loyalty to your brand.
 
Provide Affiliate Links

Many buyers trust blogs more than online ads when buying products online that matters to them. Bloggers always latch on to that opportunity by providing affiliate links to the products they are selling in the content of their blogs. A click on these links takes buyers directly to where they can find the products. A great blog about your industry with the right affiliate links to your products is always a great idea. Providing affiliate links to your products is like an invitation to your website users to take a look and possibly buy from you. If links provide the real opportunities for you to make sales online, they help your business to grow.

Wrapping Up

A blog is a vital resource marketers rely on to make sales online and to grow their businesses. If your blog is of high quality, informative and educational enough, it serves this purpose very well. If you run a business online and you are not blogging for business yet, the time to start is now. The foregoing tips are very handy. When it comes to marketing online, you will never regret doing so with a good blog.

How to Scale your Online Business for Global Market

For business expansions and increased revenues, many online businesses are going global. That warrants sudden growths in some instances. These sudden growths come with their own unique challenges. The reason marketers now pay more attention to scalability. Global expansion calls for an appropriate scalable strategy of business development. Such strategy ensures your business can manage a substantial increase in demand without a critical drop in quality of service. If your business is scalable, you can manage exponential growth over time even with sustained quality of service. Good management is key to guaranteeing that. With good management, you can effectively combine a high-demand product/service with solid support and production possibilities by scaling essential elements of the business. Some of these elements may be business-specific but you’ll do nicely if you can first fulfill these here universal requirements.

Make Comprehensive Plans

You must plan long term and comprehensively. That is very essential in global business expansions. Have substantial market research before drawing up a plan. This plan must include how to seamlessly reach and serve your customers anywhere they are in the world. Essentially you must plan for your teams, online ads, delivery systems, resources, including financing, international trade, tariffs, taxes and so on.

Automate all Processes you can Automate

To enter a worldwide online market and be able to make some impact, you need to have quality time and resources at your disposal. Both may not be readily available. That calls for automation. To save time and resources, you need to automate certain aspects of your business. Characteristically, automation allows for more efficient use of time and resources and it contributes to a positive customer experience. You can automate emails and deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, generously in your marketing activities. AI can help in automatic language translations, currency conversions, customer service and many other activities that you would otherwise have needed personnel to handle.

Provide Universal Solutions

One great way to scale your business for global audience is to provide products/services that are universally acceptable. What that means is that you can scale your online business worldwide by offering something that is needed across the world. If the product/service you are offering helps to solve a problem for different people from around the world, you can do profitable global business with it. No matter how effective your marketing campaigns are and how great your business funding is, you cannot successfully scale your business on the global market without a substantial demand for your product/service. Providing solutions with universal appeal helps to address that challenge.

Endeavor to Rank Well on Google SERPs

You can hardly market successfully online to a global audience without the help of search engines particularly a major search engine like Google. Google must like your content and rank it high enough for it to reach a global audience better. That calls for a good SEO on your website. A good SEO will help Google to rank your website well enough to send free organic traffic to it from anywhere around the world where keywords/phrases related to the site are used to make searches on Google.

Partner Reputable Logistics Companies

Unless your product is a virtual or digital product, you must arrange to have it delivered as is to any corner of the globe. That calls for partnerships with reputable logistics companies with global delivery experience. Damaged goods, pilfered goods, lost parcels and delivery delays are very bad for international business reputation. Partnering with reputable business services with extensive shipping, handling and storage capabilities can help with scalable growth for your business no matter the surge in future demands.

Fund your Business Adequately

Sudden and rapid business expansion that global reach may require has to be funded adequately. All sources of funding must be on the table at all times. You can get funded by investors, through bank loans or government funding agencies’ grants or a combination of two or more of them. Whichever you use, be sure it is reliable enough to be stepped up when demand suddenly surges. Doing international business successfully is near impossible without adequate funding and adequate funding helps the scalability of your business.

Take Advantage of Outsourcing

Outsourcing certain components of your business helps to bring down costs without lowering standards or outputs. No matter how efficient your business team is, a global business surge may task it to breakable limits particularly when the surge is sudden. So, outsourcing comes in to help out. Because there is a limit to the tasks your team can efficiently handle, you can consider enhancing human resources or outsourcing tasks that are beyond their field of expertise. If your business experiences sudden growth that overstretches your team, to avoid compromising on quality, you can outsource tasks like customer support for instance and still be doing great. Thus, you can always do well to avoid overburdening your team with any work that can be outsourced as and when needed.

Keep a Keen Eye on your Business Analytics

If you market online, without the benefit of analytics data, it is like marketing in the dark. Whatever marketing results you can measure online by way of analytics data should be carefully measured and analyzed. Your analytics data will give reliable info about inbound traffic, sources of traffic, sales growth, trends, conversions and other key performance metrics. The analysis of such data will allow you to develop predictions, attract investors, plan ahead, react to challenges, and make projections/forecasts. That gives you the much needed business confidence about the future of your global business. A good scalable strategy assumes that with such vital knowledge at your fingertips, you are willing, able and ready to take on any business issues as they arise even if occasioned by sudden business surge.

Concluding Thoughts

Even if you are experienced in your business, scaling it online should be deliberately systematic with good planning. Expect challenges like disappointing sales, sudden and unexpected growth surges that may induce loss of quality if adequate care is not taken. There are hardly any of these challenges you cannot handle well enough if you planned well. With a scalable development strategy, you can easily make adjustments as you go along. For so long as you have a good idea what you are up against, you can always take the necessary steps as needed to grow your online business reputation and for your global business to prosper in the long term. That no doubt demands from you quality time and efforts.

Effective eCommerce Business Tips

If you market online, particularly eCommerce, be prepared for stiff competitions because of the millions of others online doing similar things you do. You can succeed though if you listen to experts who are always willing to give some business tips to eCommerce stores owners. Many eCommerce stores are usually individualized. They require no costs to set up their stores and start selling from popular and reputable eCommerce platforms. Others can set up their own online store and sell out of it if they have the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to do so successfully. If either or both of the situations arise, business tips from experienced marketers are always very helpful.

Here are some four tested and effective tips to help you succeed in your eCommerce business.

Diligently Build Your Online Reputation

In online marketing particularly in the running of eCommerce store, online reputation matters a great deal. You can take quality time to build your online reputation diligently when you start marketing online. By posting quality content regularly and spreading it widely on many channels particularly social media channels, your posts will stimulate robust reviews online. Many customers first read reviews of businesses before purchasing from them to ensure that the businesses are legitimate and trustworthy. That becomes a plus for your online reputation. Your online reputation is a very essential part of the process of converting ordinary online surfers to leads and even customers of your eCommerce store. Satisfied customers never fail to tell others and the reputation grows exponentially from there.

Create High-Quality Product Photos

In eCommerce business, high quality photos of the products you are selling are very important. By having them on your website or store, they help to attract traffic to the store. The better the photos, the more the attention they get and the more traffic they attract. Some eCommerce stores now use 3D photos showing all sides of the products they are selling in rotation. Such rotations can even be 360 degrees thereby allowing the potential buyer to see every aspect of the product on display. Such views play a significant role in their buy decisions. 

 

Get a Good Brand Logo
 
Every business needs a good reputation to do well. Branding helps that reputation a great deal. A good logo is a very essential piece of your brand. If it is attractive and memorable, it helps you to build brand awareness fairly quickly. Online, when people see your logo, they easily remember you what your business is and what you do. If you do not have the skills to design a good logo for your eCommerce store, there are online services like fiverr.com or upwork.com you can use to get a good logo.

Highlight What Makes Your Store Unique

This is part of your eCommerce store identity and online reputation. You can skillfully identify what sets your store apart from others and put it into words. If well drafted, this statement can conveniently serve as an essential value proposition for your business. It helps to tell customers at a glance what you do and why it matters. If it is quick and compelling, it will be good to get quality traffic to your eCommerce store.

7 Tips to Rescue Your Business from Tough Times

These days, when we admit a business is going through tough times, it simply means it is experiencing cash-flow problems. There is some evidence to suggest that many business owners often meet very serious cash-flow issues in their businesses. These issues in some cases do threaten the real survival of these businesses. When times are tough for any business, it takes real struggle to keep the business afloat. That is when the managerial capabilities of the business owner get tested to the fullest. Below are seven tips which can help your business stay afloat when funding is tight and times are tough.

01. Cut back on your working capital. When times are tough, the most logical thing to do is to embark on cost-cutting here and there. You can cut your working capital if you freeze increases in your inventory. That is because inventory usually ties up cash which you need freed up for use elsewhere in your business. In addition to reducing your inventory, you can also be more diligent in collecting your debts. That helps to improve your cash-inflow.

02. Suspend spending on capital items. In many businesses, spending on capital items is always a long-term investment. When the times are tough, it is simply prudent to suspend spending on capital items altogether. That frees up your much-needed cash for other vital areas of the business. When your business is struggling to pay salaries and meet other essential overheads, embarking on capital spending is not a very smart thing to do.

03. Closely watch your expenses. In very difficult times, it makes economic sense to cut operating expenses. Keeping a close watch on these expenses enables you to know what to cut and what to keep. Whatever you cut, but sure they do not completely cripple your business. Keeping your business alive through reduced operations is clearly better than allowing it to go under if you fail to act prudently.

04. Keep a tight control on your inventory. Be sure you have very good and up-to-date records of your inventory. That is one vital way to avoid undue leakages through losses and thefts which your business can least afford. Use due diligence at verifying all claims from your creditors and pay only for items your business actually needs on the short run.

05. Renegotiate your main concessions. When times are tough for your business, you can ask for new business concessions or you renegotiate better terms on your existing concessions. For example, you can ask for waivers on interest charges, fees, rates which your business has already been assessed on or you ask for extended terms to pay. These actions can give you temporary respite when you have cash-flow problems. Going bankrupt is neither in your interest nor in the interest of your creditors. That is why your creditors need real flexibility to help keep you in business through tough times.

06. Explore every way to grow your sales. One of the most sensible reactions to a cash-flow squeeze is to grow sales. That is because getting more cash-inflows into the business is what makes real sense in tough times. To sell more, it is good to explore ways to produce on order if the customer is paying cash in advance. What your business needs in tough times is real cash and if your sales bring in cash when you supply or before you supply, that is better on the short run for the business.

07. Explore viable ways to refinance the business. In tough times, be ready to negotiate any and everything which can help your business to ride out the storm. For instance, if you can negotiate and restructure your debts, it is capable of lowering what you pay out regularly to service the debts. Refinancing usually frees up some cash for you to use elsewhere in the business.

From the foregoing, it is clear that when your business faces tough times, it is best to focus all your managerial decisions on limiting cash-outflow from your business and increasing cash-inflows. That is how best you can quickly ride out the tough times. These 7 tips come in very handy in that quest.