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You may look at Facebook and Twitter, then look at your online business and think; what's the connection? No doubt you will have heard that social media can be beneficial to your business, but you may not be 100% sure how to go about reaping those benefits. 

 

There are a number of different ways that social media can be an effective tool for your business. The biggest and best thing that social media can do for you is to raise awareness about business. You should set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account for your business and then set about losing all of those preconceived ideas about Facebook being a place to put your holiday photographs and Twitter being a place to let people know that you are in the kitchen making a cup of tea. Who cares?

 

Well that is kind of the point, what do people care about, and want to know about? If they choose to follow your business because they're interested in what you sell or what you do, they're going to want to know about new products that you have, special offers that you are running, if you are going to appear at a specific trade fair or are looking to recruit new staff. If there is some important industry news that pertains to your products, they might want to know about that. They might want to see photographs of new products or they might want an easy way to let their friends know about what you do, which is the aim of the game with social media.

 

Once you have mastered the art of sending useful information to a group of interested customer and potential customers, the hope is that the network of people who know about your business will start to expand through the social media network. Friends of friends of friends will see updates about your business on someones page and become interested as well. You might end up starting a dialogue on Twitter that brings people to your site to find out what all of the fuss is about.

 

Another key factor in social media is blogging. Ideally you should have a blog on your own website where you can write about anything and everything pertaining to your business and your industry. Think outside of the box; write about things which your audience would be interested in outside of the products that you sell. The blog shouldn't really be a place where you whole-heartedly plug your products. Sales should come as a result of the right kind of audience finding your website and seeing that you really know what you're taking about. 

 

Social media is about broadening the horizons of your business by increasing awareness and building interest. If people don't know you exist then there is no point in being online. Let people know that you are there, let them know what you have to offer, and let them know that they can trust you to know more about your industry than anyone else out there.

 

Shipping can be a complex task in itself. Packaging up the goods and making sure they get from A to B in good condition and on time, at a fair price is a challenge that all business who ship for themselves will face.

 

There are a number of strategies that you can implement when it comes to charging your customers for shipping. The effectiveness or your strategy will really depend upon what sort of items you are shipping, who your customer base is and what sort of margins you are able to make on the products that you sell. 

 

Here we will go through a few really basic approaches that might work for you:

 

Depending on your product, you might already be making great margins on the sale price alone, so you may be able to offer free shipping in the hopes that offering your customers a deal will encourage sales. If you don't have particular large margins on the sale of the products alone, you might want to consider increasing the prices slightly and then offering free shipping, again in the hopes that your customers will see free shipping as a bonus, even if they have to pay a little more for the item in the first place.

 

Working on the principle of a flat rate of shipping, no matter what it is that is shipped, lets your customers know that you are willing to be reasonable when implementing pricing. This can increase confidence in people buying on your site, both in the fact that your shipping policy seems very fair, but also in the fact that they might feel that they are getting a deal if they purchase more items. 

 

This is a favourite amongst many online retailers, and you should be able to easily set up a variable shipping policy very easily with your ecommerce store platform. This works on the basis that shipping will start of fairly cheap for low cost and low weight items, or if there are only one or two items in the basket. As the price, weight or number of items increases, so does the shipping price. The best way to do this is to have a base rate, and then set an additional incremental price structure that lets you cover your costs, but doesn't weight to heavily on your customers wallet or purse. 

 

Based on your products, margins and customer base, you may already know which of the above methods would be best to suit your online business. If not, don't be afraid to test and evaluate different strategies. Making a success of an online business can be a case of trial and error until you get everything just right. Treat the experience as a learning process so that, like any business, you can aim to grow and develop, making good choices along the way.

 There are some fundamental, and simple, steps that you can take to improve the ranking of your site and just as importantly the product pages within your store. The following are ten tips that we recommend

 

 

You might think you know what your customers will search for to find your site and to find your products, but guesswork should not be a tool that you use.  If you don’t already have one, set up a Google Adwords account and use the keyword tool to find out what keywords people actually search for. This way you know the keywords and phrases that you should use on your site.

 

 

The page title is single most important factor in your on-site optimisation, so it is critical that you have your keywords and phrases within this tag.  We suggest a maximum of 65 characters for the title tag, so you need to be concise.  Also, try to include the keyword towards the start of your title tag and ensure that each page is unique.

 

 

Meta information is hidden information that does not appear on the web page itself.  A meta description tag, for example, is usually used as part of a search engine serach result.  It is therefore important to include your keywords within the description.

 

Images within your pages can have ALT tags. These are hidden tags that the search engines view and are also important in on-site optimisation.

 

 

Use H1 Headings on a page to emphasise the most important keywords for your page.  For example, put your product names into these. You can also use H2 headings for secondary terms.  We would suggest that all your content should have unique title tags and headings, targeting 

 

 

Ensure that that your ecommerce system can handle keyword-friendly URLs. Often sites have a URL that could look similar to this:

 

https://www.domain.com/catalogue.html?product_id=147&back=search&category_id=549

 

The following would be better:

 

https://www.domain.com/kitchenaid-k5-planetary-food-mixer-d147.html

 

 

All sites should have a sitemap to help both the search engines and site visitors to navigate a site.  It is also possible to create a sitemap that is easy for the search engines to catalogue a site and these are called XML sitemaps.  In conjunction with a robots.txt file, sitemaps are a powerful way of providing the search engines with 

submit it. Link to your sitemaps from a from a robots.txt file.

 

 

Google Base is an online database provided by Google that provides a mechanism to store structured data and for it to be searchable.  It is ideal for uploading product information and our experience is that it can drive good search volume to a website

 

 

Although writing blogs can take time, they are a great way of creating keyword-focused content that search engines like.  For an ecommerce site, create a blog on your site and write about topics such as new products added to the database, industry information or tips on how to use some of your products.  Keep the information fresh and genuinely interesting and the search engines will like it.

 

 

Optimising titles, meta tags and URLs are all important, but creating content on your pages is also key to show the search engine what the topics are about. Consistency in the keywords, in the tags and content is very important.  We also suggest that you try to ensure that your keywords are as close to the top of the page as possible.

 

 

The search engines visit your online store on a regular basis looking for new content and often they make the assumption that newly added content is the most worthwhile.  Updating your site regularly, including your blog, new products and updating your product information keeps the search engines visiting, catalogue and ranking you.

 

There is no magic bullet here, but each and every one of the tips above when used in combination are very powerful. Ensure that the keywords used remain constant on each page to maximise the effect.