HOW TO DO MARKETING AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

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1. Learn the importance of ‘packaging'
When choosing between two different brands, what are your criteria for choosing? Usually, you would likely pick the one with the ‘better packaging’. How does this apply to online business? In an online setting, the ‘packaging’ will be the appearance of your website. When selling products online, it applies to the photographs, text descriptions, and overall page presentation of your products. Therefore, it is important that you invest a lot of quality into 1) the appearance of your website, 2) the photos of your product/s, 3) the text description that comes with your product/s and 3) the overall presentation of your products in your website.

2. Promote your website through submission sites
These include article submission sites, video submission sites, and image submission sites among others. By submitting articles, videos, and images that tell about your website, your services, and your products/services, you are effectively promoting your business the World Wide Web. It makes you ‘more visible’. Hire someone to do this for you.

3. Acquire meaningful customer feedbacks
If you get good feedbacks from some of your customers, make sure that you post their feedbacks on your website. This is ‘evidence’ that your products/services are good. But here is the dirty secret that most online entrepreneurs will not tell you: you can fabricate these feedbacks and no one will know.

4. Make your website ‘appealing'
If your website is ‘appealing’, people will likely visit again. How do you make your website ‘appealing’? Well, there are many ways. The most common is to make sure that the website layout and graphics design is top notch. You can also add some extras which your specific target niche will love (ex. If your target customers are teenage girls, you should probably use a graphics design that will appeal most to this group)

5. Establish a ‘name brand'
This is the dream of every entrepreneur - they want the name of their business or the name of their product to become iconic. Examples of iconic brands include Google, Windows, Colgate, and such. When you achieve ‘name brand’, you will become the first choice of customers despite the presence of competition. How do you do this? By maintaining good service consistently and unfalteringly, people will soon recognize you.

6. Hire ghost blog writers
Look for blog sites and forum pages that talk about the industry you are in (ex. If you are selling stuffed toys, you should look for blog sites and forums where enthusiasts of stuffed toys share info with each other). Then hire ghost writers to post positive comments as though they are satisfied customers of yours. This way, other readers of those blog sites and forums might just be convinced to buy from you as well.

7. Offer discounts once in a while
This is a good chance to gain new customers. If you offer a discount, new people will buy from you. This way, you are giving them the chance to see your products and your services. If they like it, they will surely come back. Also, offering discounts will make your current customers happy.

8. Offer promos once in a while
Promos are different from discounts. The most common is the Buy 1 Take 1 promo. Just like discounts, promos are also designed to attract new customers and keep your current customers happy. Of course, you have to make sure that your promo offers are known to your target customers. Advertise in advance that you will be offering a promo offer.

9. Obtain email address of current customers
When a customer buys from you, always give them the chance to provide you their email address. This can be included in the purchase process (make sure that you do not make it compulsory because some customers do not want to share this information). This way, you can inform them by email when you have promo offers or discount sales. Take note however that this is also a double edged sword. Avoid crowding your customer with email. If you do, they might just begin to hate you.

10. Offer freebies that cost little or nothing
Your customers will love freebies. And by offering freebies, you will also attract new customers. But there is one downside to this: it is costly to give things away for free. So what do you do? One clever solution is to offer a freebie that will cost you little or nothing. Examples include eBooks and other electronic goods that can be redistributed endlessly (buy 1 eBook with redistribution rights then give a copy to all your customers). And if you have old merchandises that are not getting sold, you can dispose of them by offering them as freebies.

11. Maintain quality even in seemingly unrelated things
Everything in your website must have good quality. They do not have to be extravagant. They just have to be error-free. For example, you must avoid mishaps in graphics editing and grammatical errors in product descriptions. This is because customers will relate any error to the quality of your products/services. If a customer sees a lot of grammatical error in your website for example, that customer will think that you do not value quality. They will also think that your products/services also lack quality.

12. Prioritize on customer satisfaction
Customers return because they liked something about your service. And this is not just about the quality of the product they bought from you. This is about the service you provided in general (ex. How easy it was to transact with you, how fast you had the products delivered, how easy it was to use your website, how informative your product descriptions were, etc.).

Thanks for reading through.