How To Start Selling Online In 7 Simple Steps

If you have always wanted to learn how to start selling online and be successful at it, then you are in the right place here.

So many aspiring online entrepreneurs have struggled to make a dime selling online.

Many watch what others are doing and tried to replicate by quickly setting up their own e-commerce store, wait patiently for the orders to come in but get frustrated when it seems all their efforts are in vain.

Today’s post will not only teach you how to avoid such pitfalls but exactly the steps you need to take to succeed at selling online.

If you will follow through with and check each step in this complete checklist, it’s going to be a gamechanger for you in your quest to becoming a successful online entrepreneur.

Ready?

Let’s go!!

What Will I Learn?

1. Identify Your Target Market

The major reason for many failures of entrepreneurs is they don’t know their target market. They don’t know who they are selling to.

Every successful entrepreneur sells to solve a problem and satisfy the needs of their customers.

Customers don’t buy from you just to help you make money. No, they buy because they want to be satisfied and because your products address their needs or problems.

To ensure you make sales, it is therefore critical that you know whom you are selling to.

As an aspiring entrepreneur or as one who wants to scale his or her business, you can’t afford to have your sales message be generic.

The secret to crafting a super sales copy is when it addresses the pain points of your customers and presents your product as the solution to the problems.

Just like Peter F. Drucker said…

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself

Peter F. Drucker

So one way to understand your target market is to ask yourself who exactly you want to sell to, what their pain points are, how your products can satisfy them, and the deficiencies of other solutions they have gotten before your products.

Having this knowledge will help you in presenting your product as the right solution to their need.

2. Create Or Source For The Killer Product

Once you have a handle on your target market, then you can now create or source for the solution to the problems of your tareget market.

This will come in the form of the product you want to sell.

While good marketing may help in selling average products, having a high quality products that will cause your customer coming back and referring you is more important in getting your online business going faster than you think.

Whether you will be selling physical products, digital products or services, you will need to ensure it provides a solution for a relatively large audience market hungry to buy your products to satisfy their needs.

Many small businesses and individuals offer skills and services like freelancing, consulting, agencies, etc. to other individuals and businesses.

Physical products can be sourced locally and also internationally in places like Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress, etc.

Digital products have become the go-to products by many sellers who share their knowledge via courses and video tutorials.

Once you have chosen your product or decided on the service you will be offering, you should then move on to deciding what marketing plan to employ before setting up your sales system.

3. Decide and Set Up Your Marketing Strategy

Have you settled on a product to sell?
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If no, I would guess you are still researching your target market or finding the products to solve the problems or needs of your target market.

If yes, I hope it’s because you already did your market research well before deciding on the niche you are serving and the products you are selling.

If you only jumped and havent really done your market research, i will suggest you pause here, go back to step 1 and have your market research done first.

In case you have your market research done and your product selected, now is the time to decide on what marketing strategy to employ in order to get your products out there to your prospects.

Gone are the days where you are told to just build the site and the people will come.

In a world where there are over 1.8 billion websites on the internet, your website is just one out of them competing for attention from your prospects seeking to convert them to customers.

You must have a strategic marketing plan and budget in place to ensure your products are marketed to your targeted audience and sold to them.

The following are examples of marketing strategies you can make use of to bring your products before your audience:

  1. Social Media Marketing
  2. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
  3. Blogging and Content Marketing
  4. Video Marketing
  5. Email Marketing
  6. Affiliate Marketing
  7. Backlinks Building

Also, the products you choose to sell can determine the kind of marketing platform you use.

For instance, unregulated supplements, weapons, health products (before and after) can not be sold on Facebbok.

Each of the above strategies where appropriate, can be employed to market your products and bring them before your audience.

4. Choose The Right Selling Platform

At this stage, you have researched your target market and you have created or sourced for your products.

You have also decided on which marketing platform to use and you are now ready to begin the journey to sell.

Before you set up your sales system as will be discussed in the next step, you need to decide on whether you want to sell on::

  1. An e-commerce marketplace, e.g. amazon, Aliexpress, Alibaba, eBay, jJmia, Rakuten etc.
  2. yYur online store built on an e-commerce platform e.g. Shopify, big commerce, Woocommerce, Magento, Ecwid, etc.
  3. Social media platform e.g Facebook, Instagram, Pin Interest, etc.

There are several pros and cons of any of the platforms of selling above.

While selling on an e-commerce marketplace incur a very minimal setup fee and helps in exposing your products to customers already willing to buy, you have little or no control over how your store looks like and those customers do not belong to you but the market place, which can shut your account any moment.

Having your own newly built online store gives you total control over how your store looks like and how you can manage it, but you have to build your traffic from scratch, spend more money building the store and have the store built and function within the structure of the e-commerce platform

Those who dont want to incur any expense in building their own ecommerce site or get limited to the rules of the various marketplace do opt to selling directly on their social media platforms.

Unlike the marketplace and one’s online store where sales can occur even while one is asleep, selling on social media will require you to be online always to close the sales.

As your business grows, you can expand into multichannels, selling via eachof these platforms at the same time so your customers can reach you where they are most available to reach you.

Right now, check through each of the different market places, e-commerce platforms, and social media platforms, choose one you can comfortably build your business on, and then move on to the next step to set up your sales system.

5. Strategise and Implement Your Killer Sales System

This is where you understand how your sales is made online depending on the platform you use and improve on the system to work on its own and briing more sales constantly.

A typical sales system is made up of

  1. Traffic (generated via marketing)
  2. The landing page where the traffic is sent to
  3. A means to collect the email address of your visitors when they land on your landing page (optional but very important and can be gotten after the sales is made instead)
  4. Product/Order page
  5. Follow Up Series to reach out to unconverted visitors and buyers alike

Depending on which platform you are using to sell, not all of these components of the sales system might be necessary.

For instance, if you were to use just social media, e.g. Facebook as your sales platform, all the components of the sales system are within the Facebook itself.

You only need to engage your prospects right there within Facebook and close the sales.

But if you were to usea marketplace, you wouldnt be able to collect the email address of your visitors right on the platform except you also build a landing page of yours for that.

However with your own online store, every one of these sales system component can be set up and implemented seamlessly even on auto pilot while you focus on delivering the orders received.

6. Measure Your Result

Once you start making sales, you should ensure you measure your results and know your numbers.

This will ensure you don’t just focus on what is coming in but also you focus on your expenses.

By this, you will be able to understand what is working well and what is not so you can be able to know what to tweak in your sales system in order to achieve a better result.

7. Scale Your Online Sales

Making the first sales is the very first exciting thing to do. Once you start making the sales, you should be looking out to scale your revenue by making more sales online.

This can occur by leveraging on your existing customers to spread the word by giving you reviews which will help to serve as credibility for others to buy from you.

Leveraging your existing customers to also buy more from you is one of the best ways to see recurring revenue.

Also, scaling your marketing expense to generate more traffic to your sales system will ensure you have your sales increased and revenue scaled.

In Conclusion

Selling online is what anyone can do so far he or she gets it right. Follow the steps laid out above and you will be well into making money by selling online.

If you have any question or more tips on selling online, quickly drop them below in the comment section.

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