Are you planning to launch a new line of products? First read how we do it as a clothes maker and wholesaler.
There we go again with all these T-shirt drawings you've made and those shattered dreams of being your own boss. And apart from these drawings?
What do we have? The thing is these services, products and the way they are designed might be very popular with a certain population and not so popular with another. So the designs, logos, colors and all aspects of the product (or service) do not seem to be the most important part of the business.
Here we are talking of launching a business, not necessarily a t-shirt business. And from the day you start your business, it may take a couple of years to become a solid fully operational, self standing money making machine.
Focusing on the product may result in neglecting the other important parts of the business, the cash flow, the composition of your dream team, the way you lead the company.
The cash flow is really important, it is the blood of the business, and without it nothing happens.
The day you run out of cash, you are out of business, so it's important:
- To keep your customers happy and returning to you for more products or services.
- To find new customers who will enjoy a pleasant buying experience at a competitive price.
Why re-invent the wheel? You are a customer too, so you already know what is a pleasant buyer's experience, just don't forget to put yourself in your customer shoes. I strongly recommend that you take inspiration from the successful business and businesspeople of this world.
If you are running a manufacturing business, why not read about Henri Ford, the most successful manufacturer ever. When it comes to advertising your products and selling them, reading Zig Ziglar or listening to Nightingale Conant tapes will make a difference in your copy writing.
At the time of writing this article (May 2009), the internet has definitely taken its place in our everyday life. If you are selling your products in Ebay, you are probably surrounded by competitors, same goes if you are one of a million showing products on a large shopping website, whatever it may be about wholesale T-shirts, electronics or anything else.
My feeling, and also the fact that I have tried such platforms as a way of advertising my products, is that it is difficult to stand out of the crowd on someone else's website. The reason for this is that you are not in control of the design and the general structure in which your product is presented.
Since running a business from a concrete and mortar shop would mean higher entry and fix costs, and because doing so might result in focusing on a limited location, why not avoid these pitfalls by owning your own shopping website? Sounds brilliant, no? Right but, how will making my website stand out of millions of websites will be easier than making my products stand out in the middle of EBay? Well, here, we are talking about taking control of your website and its ranking. This can be done by getting education.
By getting education I mean obtaining the power of using useful organized information which you actually apply to make your website come up in the best results of the search engines' research. You can get there by learning and testing by yourself or get someone else do it for you.
Also, you might want to make it big. A great way to achieve this is by accumulating power. Set up a customer base and an auto responder! Can you have this on someone else's website? I don't think so, but this is something that can easily be set up on your website. Control is power, control of organized information will take you to an higher level.
Because of the huge benefit of a good ranking / good qualified traffic (with the credit card at hand), you can imagine that outsourcing this website optimization will be equally big a budget.
So let's learn and do it by ourselves! Just like our grand grand fathers built their house, their shop, their farm with their own hands when there was no one to do it for them. What do we have to loose? Not much, really: A domain name costs less than usd 20. It only takes a few minutes to build your website from scratch with free templates at autoweb-creator.com
The difficult part, the one that you cannot buy (because nobody can guarantee such a thing) is the positioning of your website in the search engines results.
However they are ways to put Good Luck on your side:
- Purchase a domain name that is keyword rich,
- Key in a quick description of your business.
- Make sure that your homepage is full of text with little code.
- Put a link from your website to an other (quality outbound link)
- Offer web-surfers to sign up for an alert, so that you can contact them as soon as your shopping website is fully functional.
- Submit your website to the 10 major search engines for indexation.
- Set up a Google Cost per click campaign with a very small daily budget.
Do the above early to gain a bit of profile history. After that, just let your website's homepage alone for a few months.
Now, you have time to:
- Become an expert in analyzing websites titles, body text, bold text, Meta descriptions, H1 headings, links texts.
- Study your competitors website and their link popularity in directories and search engines (Alexa, Google, and Yahoo) as well as in the social marketing websites (facebook, digg, delicious, YouTube).
If you want your shopping website to be amongst the most popular, then you need you website to be of the same caliber than these websites. Do what they do and you will have what they have. Remember this: "It is possible if you work hard at it."
On the side of all this, and while your website is automatically collecting email addresses from your prospects as they sign up for an alert, you are setting up your shopping website in a secret sub page of your website. Make it easy for yourself, choose a freeware such as oscommerce platform which is user friendly, easy to install and offers the right options for payments, products pictures etc...
When your website is completely ready, send an email to your email list to let them know the shopping season is opened. That's what I call a good launch for your line of products.
