How to build an online store

Shops are Easy to Setup

To start, making the shop isn’t the problem it was previously. Nowadays the “development part” is fairly simple. There are hundreds of web hosts that provide built-in shopping cart software when you sign up with them.

Our favourite is Shopify, which you can try free for 14 days because they have an awesome trial.

Heck, you may also use Paypal.com at no cost! Whatever you do is register and insert some HTML into your site and voila. you’ve got an instant online shopping cart.

Paypal handles the credit card purchases while adding the earnings into your bank account. (They take a small percentage of every purchase, of course).

And if you are using WordPress to build your site, there are plugins you can use to setup your shopping cart software.

So hopefully you can see that really creating the shop isn’t the difficult part anymore.

BUT… don’t spend any time setting up your shop with some of these sites before you read on…

The Greatest Hurdle

The real problem to making an online shop successful is finding enough traffic to turn a profit. After all, what’s the point in spending time and money creating a shop if you don’t have a plan for how to generate traffic from the web?

Ninety nine percent of the people who attempt to create online stores struggle simply because they don’t know how to generate enough traffic to their shops.

It’s not as simple as submitting to Google, Bing and Yahoo and then having your site appear on the first page of results.

So people spend all this money on an extravagant web site and storefront and have no idea how to make their site rank high with Google. which is the best source of free traffic on the Internet.

Why would somebody search for Luke’s Shopping Site to buy anything when they know they can visit trusted businesses like Amazon, Overstock, Yahoo and lots of other popular online stores to purchase the same things you want to sell?

In other words, how are you going to get your shop noticed among all of the vast amounts of online stores already out there?

The answer is… you probably can’t if you’re pursuing universal terms like “shopping” or “online store”. Unless, of course, you’re ready to spend huge amounts of money in advertising each month like Yahoo, Amazon and some of the others did years ago.

Not to be discouraging, but until you have a huge amount of cash for marketing, you’ll go broke trying to compete with the gazillion online shopping web sites.

Big name businesses like Amazon have spent years and huge amounts of money in advertising to develop their brand recognition and it’s difficult to break into this market share if you’re just getting started.

But don’t worry… there’s a way to get noticed. And the good news for you is that many people never figure this next part out. You’ll be light years ahead of your competition and you’ll be profitable if you do it right.

So if you can understand and apply what you’re about to read, you’re way ahead of the game already! Congratulations in advance. :)

How People Shop Online

Many people shop online by going straight to their favorite store websites. They don’t search for generic items unless they’re buying a very specific kind of item that may not be available at popular shops.

Since you know this, can’t you see how hard it would be for your shop to compete with all the popular brand stores? So what should you do?

The answer is to build a niche store.

What’s a Niche Store?

Before you even build your shop you have to decide your niche. So rather than trying to build a shopping site that offers everything under the sun, start small and capitalize on a niche you’re familiar with.

Let’s say you crochet blankets as a hobby. It would be much easier to generate traffic to a shop that offers a specific kind of blanket than to try to start a shop that offers everything like Amazon. This way you can capitalize on people searching for very specific keywords about blankets.

Why Niche Websites Work

1. They have much less competition. Compare what happens when you search “online shopping” versus “handcrafted quilts” in Google.

Sure, “online shopping” is a far more commonly searched phrase, but you’d have a difficult time getting traffic since you are competing with so many other webmasters who want their sites to be #1.

2. One of the keys to getting traffic from Google is content, content and more content. If you build your site around a hobby, you can create pages and pages of information on that topic to help funnel in more traffic.

The more pages you have on your site, the greater the opportunity the search engines will find your site, thus bringing you more visitors.

More traffic can hopefully mean more revenue for you in the long run.

Balancing All The Way To The Bank

My favorite example of a successful niche shop is jugglenow.com.

Rather than trying to create an ABC web store that offers everything, the owner Jim Nelson built an information site about juggling that links to his online shop.

Notice when you visit jugglenow.com, there’s much more than just shopping to be done there. Jim has loads of information articles about the art of juggling.

These pages are extremely important because they attract traffic from the search engines. So rather than promoting his online shop alone, these content pages help do the marketing for him.

This is why I say attract traffic to your main site first. Although Jim’s money machine is the actual shop, he drives traffic to this shop by offering loads of information for the search engines to index.

Jugglenow.com is an excellent example of building a successful niche shop. You can find loads of websites like his but with different subjects. You can do the same with the topic or niche of your choice.

Build Your Main Website First

Lots of people don’t actually get this, but the key to making your shop popular and successful is to build your main site and have it act as a gateway to your online shop. I can’t stress how important this is.

In other words, focus on getting traffic to your main site via the search engines and then link your shop to this main website.

The reason is, it’s much easier for the search engines to find your well-crafted, content-rich site than it is to find a single standalone shop.

In reality, most search engines won’t even include your shop in their index on its own, but they will list your main website that links to your shop. That’s why you have to concentrate on that main site first.

So if you want to sell your knitting needles online, you would first build a content-rich site about sewing. Provide loads of tips and ideas on that topic to help attract search engine traffic.

Then from these search-engine-friendly pages you’d link to your online shop. This is far more effective than simply trying to promote a standalone shop.

Using a platform like Shopify, you can start by developing a content website and easily list products when you are ready. They take care of everything. the blog, the store, inventory management, integrating with email marketing software and more.