Selling on Amazon for Dummies: How to Get Started Selling on Amazon

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |selling on amazon for dummies |Selling on Amazon for Dummies: How to Get Started Selling on AmazonWant to make your own business without the stress of an office or employees? Why not start selling through Amazon?

In fact, there are already 8.7 million sellers on the Amazon marketplace worldwide.

By establishing an Amazon FBA business, you can reach customers around the world. Then, you can market your business, attract buyers, and start generating sales.

Not sure how to establish your new Amazon FBA business? With this selling on Amazon for dummies guide, you can give your new business a strong start.

Read on to learn how to sell stuff on Amazon!

Draft a Business Plan

Before you actually start selling, it helps to have a plan. Drafting a business plan will help you chart the path ahead. It also gives you a chance to recognize any obstacles that might stand in your way.

Before reading this selling on Amazon for dummies guide, sit down and consider your business. A strong business plan starts off with a mission statement. What are you trying to accomplish?

What promise are you making to your customers?

Next, you’ll need to determine which products you sell. You’ll also need to develop a marketing, sales, and financial plan.

Once you know what you want to sell, try to gain an understanding of the current marketplace. A market analysis will help you recognize the latest trends. What are consumers looking for right now?

Don’t forget to research your competitors, too. Which strategies are they using to reach customers? Are those strategies working, or falling flat?

Try to use a SWOT analysis to determine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Recognizing these factors can help you sell through Amazon successfully! Otherwise, your weaknesses and threats might slow you down.

Define Your Target Audience

In order to reach your target audience, you need to determine who your customers are. If you’re focusing on a broad target market, try segmenting your audience into buyer personas. You can define your buyer personas based on demographics such as age, gender, location, or household income.

What products are your ideal customers already buying? What interests and hobbies do they have?

Learning more about your audience will help you appeal to their interests. Once you understand your audience, you can develop a marketing strategy to spark their interest. A strong marketing strategy will help you boost sales and retain long-term customers.
It can also help to determine how COVID-19 is affecting sales. How are your customers shopping on Amazon? What trends could help benefit your business plan?

Know Your Niche

There are millions of products you can choose to sell online. When establishing your Amazon FBA business, don’t split your focus. Instead, try to build your business around a niche in the marketplace.

Choosing a niche will help you create a more focused marketing plan. It will also help you reach a smaller target audience. Dedicating your time to a smaller target audience will make it easier for you to appeal to customers who need your product.
You can also use personalized messaging to connect with these consumers.

Meanwhile, having a niche will help you stand out from the hundreds of competitors selling similar products.

First, make sure the niche product you choose is profitable. You might need to research the latest market trends for your niche. You can use tools such as Google Trends to determine how often people search for the product you’re considering.

If the search volume is low, consider choosing a different product.

Don’t forget to choose a product you’re interested in. Otherwise, you might not feel passionate about selling through Amazon or helping those customers.

Once you decide on a product, learn as much as you can about it. Don’t forget to look at competitors for your niche.
Which consumers are already using that product? What unique value can you offer consumers that your competitors can’t? Highlight that value proposition in your marketing to stand out from the crowd!

Find Suppliers

Now that you have a product, you can start selling it! First, you’ll need to find an online product supplier. Head over to one of the B2B platforms to find a supplier who has your product.

You might need to compare a few different options to find a supplier you want to work with. Once you have a few options, contact each one. Ask for a sample of the product to compare quality and costs.

How much is the minimum and maximum for each order? Is the price within your budget?

Once you find your supplier, you can place your first order!

Place Your Order

You don’t have to place a giant order the first time. Instead, place a smaller order and give yourself the chance to test the market.
Your first few orders give you chances to gather feedback. You can add a note with these purchases to encourage shoppers to share their thoughts. Then, use their comments to make improvements to your business.

Ask people to post their reviews, too. Five-star reviews will show potential customers you have a high-quality product.

Take the time to manage your inventory regularly. If you don’t track your sales, you could run out of stock sooner than expected.

Build A Buzz

For your shop to succeed, you need to get people to want to shop with your store. The best way to do this is to market yourself online, using various SEO and marketing techniques. One great way to get interest is to run discounts and deals, as this adds extra value and builds excitement and hype that can get people to talk about your store.

Something that you must do is market alongside holidays, especially Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday. Black Friday is especially important for businesses to earmark, as this is where the appetite for online goods swells, so learning about black Friday marketing ideas can help you get the edge during this competitive period.

When you build a buzz and get your store known, you can expect a steady stream of revenue.

Register Your Account

Before you start selling, you’ll need to register your Amazon FBA business.

You can become an individual seller or pro seller. Once you’re set-up, create your product listings.

About 23% of consumers look to Amazon for inspiration. To inspire them to shop, make sure your product images are high-quality.

Make Adjustments

As you gather feedback from your customers, make sure to adjust your selling strategy accordingly. Using this selling on Amazon for dummies guide is only the first start. Improving your marketing strategy and adding new products to your store over time will help you expand your business.

You can also use this guide to learn how to win on Amazon!

Selling on Amazon for Dummies: The Top Tips for Sweet Success

Remember, this article to selling on Amazon for dummies is only the beginning. These tips can set you on the path to success. Then, keep expanding your business plan to generate more sales and regular customers!

Looking for more ways to establish your new business? Explore our latest guides for entrepreneurs today!

The Best Marketing Strategies for Young Companies

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Marketing Strategies|The Best Marketing Strategies for Young CompaniesYoung companies should have only one thing on their mind: growth. Growth is almost always achieved by getting new customers, and new customers are almost always achieved by reasonable, effective marketing. That’s why marketing is such an essential thing for startups to nail. When looking for funding at any stage, a strong customer base will make the whole process infinitely easier. Here are some strategies your company needs to be considering getting customers at that early stage.

PR

PR can be much cheaper than advertising and is perfect for establishing credibility and getting new potential customers to hear from you. Good PR needs to be creative and involve exploiting the brand niche that you occupy (if you haven’t identified your niche and done solid branding work do so before you do any marketing at all, it’s essential). Take the case of Patrick Finnegan. He was a 17-year-old who wanted to do venture capitalism in New York City, so he went to the PR and marketing company Big Machine Agency. They realized that they could position him as the business face of GEN Z, somebody who was young enough to know about all the youth trends that many consumer companies want to hop on. After spinning this, they paired him up with a celebrity photographer to build a story for him that caught attention in lifestyle and finance blogs.

Email Marketing

This is at the other end of the spectrum to an exciting PR campaign, but email marketing is still essential because it’s still so effective. It allows you to boost customer loyalty and attract customers to your startup for almost no money at all, especially if you’re a good writer. You can gather email addresses from people who visit your website by offering incentives or by directly asking potential customers you meet for their emails. It’s essential to offer more than just free advertising – offer free guides, infographics, content – whatever you think will bring potential or existing customers value. You should also make it easy to unsubscribe, as that way, only those who are genuinely interested in your niche will attend to the emails, becoming more loyal customers, and focusing your marketing efforts.

StrategyDriven Online Marketer & Website Developer Magazine


Online Content

Start a blog. If you are dealing with customers and 99% of businesses (unless you’re sure they won’t find you online), you need to start a blog or offer some form of content regularly. Bill Gates said it in the 90s – content is king. It’s the reason that most people use the internet if not to look for a solution to a problem. Make sure that those interested in your niche have access to both by making your site as valuable as possible to them. Regularly posting fresh, engaging, and original content is essential for modern SEO, too, as Google is changing its algorithms frequently with the end-goal of delivering valuable content to customers. That means relying on keywords and SEO ‘tricks won’t last you very long and will have an opportunity cost as instead of bothering with those, you could be attracting real readers with good content.

How to Maximize Your Online Visibility

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Online Visibility|How to Maximize Your Online Visibility There are very few businesses without some kind of presence on the internet nowadays, but that does not necessarily mean that all of these businesses are getting tangible benefits in return. It is easy to waste a lot of time on digital marketing with no real return on the investment, but that is not a reason to shy away from it altogether. Whether you are trying to establish your brand, attract inquiries, or boost profits, you need to maximize your online visibility. This guide outlines effective marketing activities you can adopt to ensure you stand out from the crowd in a digital marketplace and attract the perfect customers.

Write a blog for your website

One of the best ways to increase your online visibility is to ensure your website has a blog. The blog is your space to show existing and potential customers your expertise, experience, skills, personality, and value. Your blog posts should be unique, helpful, informative, and/or entertaining. Every blog post you create is an exclusive page which adds to your website’s presence on the internet and increases the likelihood that you will rank for keywords relevant to your business.

Blogs should be posted regularly but avoid posting content for the sake of keeping to a schedule if you have nothing new or useful to add. All the content should be of high quality, even if that means you only publish once a month. If you are concerned that your writing skills are not up to scratch, consider hiring a freelance writer to create content for your blog, which you can check for accuracy afterward.

Share and curate relevant content

You can also share content which other businesses or individuals have published, (as long as you acknowledge your source) you could add you own points of view or commentary to add value, or simply direct your followers or visitors to useful content elsewhere on the internet. If you find helpful content that is relevant to your business, try commenting, and starting a conversation. By sharing useful content, you are not only increasing your visibility but also showing yourself as an expert in your field who is in touch with the industry and customer needs.

Invest in search engine optimization (SEO)

There is no denying that SEO is a complex topic with many digital marketing agencies devoted to the practice. Essentially, it involves applying specific techniques to the design of a website and the creation of content to boost your website in search results. This can include, but is not limited to:

  • Writing high-quality content which is centered on keywords and phrases relevant to the business and searcher intent
  • Using descriptive and unique page titles which include the desired keyword
  • Include keywords in anchor text when linking internally
  • Writing a descriptive alt tag for images using the keyword or phrase
  • Writing a high-quality meta description for each page to encourage searchers to click on your page rather than your competitors.

SEO can be a time-consuming task as the goalposts are constantly being moved in terms of what search engines are prioritizing. This is why so many companies turn to specialist SEO companies such as serendipity-online-marketing.co.uk to stay on top of SEO trends and maximize their visibility.

StrategyDriven Online Marketer & Website Developer Magazine


Encourage customer reviews

Customer reviews have never been so powerful. Whether the review or comment is left on social media, an official review site, or on your website, positive and negative reviews can make or break a business’ reputation. Unfortunately, most satisfied customers do not go out of their way to praise a company, but customers with complaints are much more likely to voice them. The more positive customer reviews you can attract, the better for your business, so it is essential to have a strategy for acquiring them. For example, you can ask customers for reviews by email or put a feedback form on your website.

You may get negative reviews, but these are not the end of the world. In fact, if you can respond and try to resolve the issue, it will show that you are committed to excellent customer service standards. Also, a company rarely has an entirely positive set of reviews without customers suspecting that they are fabricated, so some negativity is natural and healthy if you deal with it appropriately.

Embrace social media

It is true that not all social media platforms are right for every business, but rarely, a business does not find at least one to be useful – if used correctly. Social media profiles can appear in search engine results, boosting your visibility, so your profiles must be branded and professionally written. When your social media profiles include links to your website, you are also increasing traffic, which will again boost your rankings. You should be focusing on posting high quality and engaging content that encourages interaction – it is not necessarily about how many likes or followers you have.

Competitive Marketing Strategies of the Digital Era

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Competitive Marketing Strategies|COMPETITIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES OF THE DIGITAL ERAIn the booming era of the digital revolution, technological trends are no surprise to anyone. It continues to thrill audiences with exciting and mind-blowing features. From being able to order food online to footing your utility bills – everything is a few clicks away. Likewise, it has hit the business industry, bringing some tech-savvy innovations, especially for the marketing department.

In today’s tech-savvy world, escaping the advantages of digital marketing is impossible. But do you think running after those old-school strategies are of any good now? Surprisingly, the new decade brings a whole bunch of new competitive marketing strategies. Marketers using black hat SEO practices, deceptive advertising, and content scraping – the time is up!

2020 demands an authentic approach to marketing, and you can make this possible by leveraging the latest tech tools and emerging channels. Experiment with new media formats, take a closer insight into changing purchase patterns, and brace yourself to make some digital noise. Are you wondering how? We are here to help you with the competitive marketing strategies of the digital era. Have a look below.

1. Bank on Video Marketing

We are far past that time when people enjoyed reading long paragraphs of text-based information. These days, most people prefer visuals in the form of images, infographics, and especially videos. Alongside increasing engagement with customers, videos are a great way to put your brand message across.

With increasing popularity, the two enormous marketing giants, Facebook and Instagram, have allocated 44% of their budget to videos. If you haven’t given a thought or you believe it is not your cup of tea, search for digital marketing in Newcastle to help you get started. Since users are obsessed with videos, this trend is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.

2. Build Communities

In the 21st century, social media forums are a lot more than entertainment tools. It has become the ultimate marketing platform where corporations with deep pockets are allocating a hefty budget for social media advertising. On the other hand, the pay to play model is not working for small businesses. Instead of trying to compete, try to innovate better solutions.

Start building communities on social media using the ‘native group’ features. It lets you develop healthy relationships with customers, giving a sense of exclusivity to group members. Utilize this one-on-one level engagement forum to engage and interact with audiences. You can address the audience’s queries, complaints, and regularly host live sessions. You can bring like-minded people together, allowing them to have a dialogue.

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3. Aim for Position ‘Zero’

Have you seen a featured snippet right on the top of the search engine results page – SERP? Marketers call it the position zero as it appears before all other organic listings. Thus, instead of aiming to bag a spot on the first page of SERP, you have to aim for position zero. It significantly boosts your click-through rate – CTR, while helping you become visible to a broad audience. Unsurprisingly, there is plenty of competition out there, but moving ahead can be easier for you.

  • Create content that focuses on problem-solving – what, when, why, who, where, and write headlines accordingly.
  • Focus on creating instructional content ‘how to’ since people find it more appealing.
  • Structure in a list format to promote understandability.
  • Answer questions through your content.
  • With the rise of voice search, create conversational content around simple things.

4. Focus on All Stages of the Funnel

Sometimes, businesses make their way through the top results of SERP but encounter high bounce rates and low session duration. Unfortunately, this happens because of expectation mismatch, meaning you are targeting the wrong audience. The user lands on the website with an intention, but your content doesn’t meet their expectations. That happens when you spend days creating the top-of-the-funnel content but pay no attention to the bottom or middle content.

Diversify your content by bringing engaging topics and different formats. Create infographics, podcasts, along with text, to improve the versatility of your content marketing initiatives. Likewise, focus on addressing queries that are not on the top-of-the-funnel. Diversity and in-depth content allow you to convert visitors into prospects and then customers.

5. Micro-Influencer Marketing

Previously, we witnessed a rise in celebrity marketing, but in 2020, the wave is ebbing down. Customers now prefer trust and expertise over the clout, making brands realize that it is a wise choice to invest in micro-influencers. Therefore, they are no longer running after celebrities but look for someone they can relate to personally.

Micro-influencers act like role models for many people and have a potential reach of 10,000 to 100,000 followers. Pick an influencer of your niche – for instance, if you have an apparel brand, look for influencers who follow fashion. They will expose your brand to the right target audience without costing you an arm, as their charges are far below what celebrities charge.

6. Inspect Programmatic Audio

With the rise of new marketing tactics like podcasts and audio streaming apps – marketers have more avenues to connect with their audience. Are you wondering what programmatic audio is? It is not as complicated as it might sounds. It lets users place ads in the audio content – podcasts automatically, meaning you can advertise through audio streaming programs.

Explore ad formats such as ad pods or companions to get an insight into the benefits they are offering. Besides these formats, even Google, Soundcloud offers programmatic audio advertising features. Thus, give your social media followers a break from routine content and tempt them towards audio streaming platforms, helping you gain an edge.

7. Invest in Artificial Intelligence

Although digital assistants and chatbots are nothing new, still many brands are missing out on them. These tech-savvy tools are capable of delivering content and helping users with their purchases. They provide 24/7 customer support, dealing with customer queries around the clock without any coffee or tea breaks.

Likewise, digital assistants are smart enough to understand user needs, helping customers book tickets, and make reservations. With the increasing trend of voice search, marketers must leverage conversational artificial intelligence tactics, letting people talk to them. Moreover, artificial intelligence systems come in different variations and pretty affordable price, leaving you with no excuse to miss out on it.

Final Thoughts

In the changing dynamics of the digital era, there is so much you can do with marketing strategies. Despite the competition getting intense, technology continues to bring new tools and tactics to keep the users hooked. Hence, don’t be afraid to try new marketing techniques because you never know what works for your brand and always keep up with the competitive strategies.

How to Use Website Design to Drive Digital Marketing

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Design|How to Use Website Design to Drive Digital MarketingWhile the majority of business owners are aware of the importance of digital marketing, many lack the technical know-how to fully comprehend the extent to which a successful digital marketing strategy relies upon website design. A well-designed website is one that can be trusted, not just by customers, but by search engines too. Without this trust and navigability, the potential of any digital marketing campaign will be severely limited.

Why Web Design and Digital Marketing are Inextricably Linked

There seems to be an obvious answer to this question: customers won’t want to spend time on a poorly designed site. While this is true, there is much more to it. Awareness of the extent to which a website affects marketing comes from focusing on how a customer arrives at the site. Of course, a website design must facilitate an enjoyable customer experience, but in order for this to happen a website must be accessible, otherwise, all efforts are futile.

While there are some tweaks that can be performed in-house, consulting a website design company that specializes in marketing, such as The Gist, is the best way to ensure a site is fully optimized and complements your wider marketing strategy. Optimized design has a big impact on the website’s potential search engine rankings. The list below outlines some areas of focus.

Loading Speeds

Search engines are businesses looking to provide the best product to their users. This is particularly apparent when considering loading speeds. Take Google as an example: their research has shown that the average user expects a site to load in less than three seconds… otherwise they consider leaving.

Google has repeatedly stated the importance of loading speeds for high search engine rankings and they are set to continue prioritizing websites that have fast loading speeds. A good agency will know how to compress code, use the right images and make little tweaks to boost speed and retain users.

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Navigation

A study from the Stanford Technology Lab found 46.1% of participants judged a website’s credibility on factors such as visual design, layout, typography, font size, and color schemes. While the overall aesthetic of a website is very important, there is one particular aspect that is necessary to achieve a high search engine ranking: navigation.

Navigation links inform search engine crawlers which pages are the site’s most important and provide them with an easy way to access these pages. There are many different navigation tools available: drop-down menus, double navigation bars, and single navigation bars being the most common. Having descriptive titles a good robots.txt and a site navigation map will make a site more crawlable.

Mobile Compatibility

In the first quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 52% of global website traffic, making mobile users an important market to cater to. Specifically tailoring a website for mobile devices can include cutting down long bodies of texts, simplifying the navigation system and reducing the size of images and videos to improve loading speeds.

Crawlability

Websites must have the human experience at the forefront; however, this needs to be carefully balanced with crawlability. Search Engines use bots to crawl websites as well as download and index information to determine if the site can be trusted and if they should recommend that site to their viewers. If a website’s architecture cannot be processed by the bot’s algorithm, then they will be automatically classified as suspicious and may be penalized.