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If you have been blogging for a while, you might be starting to wonder what further you might be able to do with it in order to make the most of it. It’s a good idea to appreciate the power of what you have here. After all, a popular blog is a website which many visitors flock to every day, and that is quite an amazing thing to have under your belt. There are so many things that you can do with that, and if you hoping specifically to make some money from it, then there are many ways in which you can do that too. One of the best, and most popular, is to turn the blog into an online store – or at least to turn part of it into an online store.
That is something that might be much easier to do than you think – and it will be highly lucrative if you get it right. Online retail is big business, and once you are all set up it might just be a case of watching the funds roll in. But you do need to first set it up right, and that is what we are going to look at in this article. Here are some of the things to consider if you are trying to turn your blog into an online store.
What To Sell?
First of all, you need to have something to sell, as without that you obviously don’t have a store. Knowing what to sell is tricky, unless it just so happens that you have a particular kind of item which you like to create, and which you feel people would enjoy buying from you. That could be something creative and pretty, such as designing and creating your own jewellery, or it might be more like a craft, such as building furniture for people to buy. Whatever it is, you need to get really clear on what it is that you want to sell, as you will then need to start directing your branding and so on towards that kind of direction. So make this decision early on, and think about how focused or wide you are going to go in terms of what you offer your customers.
Creating Listings
Your listings of the products that you are selling are important, as they double up as marketing tools and also the actual place where people go to buy the products in question. So you need to put a lot of effort into the listings if you hope to end up with the right kind of success, and this is actually one of the more difficult parts of the whole process. You need to think of this as designing a store in real life, for that is really the equivalent of what you are doing here. You need to imagine that your blog is a store, and think about what people see when they enter it. What do you need to set up to make it clear what you sell, and how are you going to make it prominent in terms of those items? You want to make it easy for people to click through and buy, and you also need to think about how to present your products as well as possible.
A hugely important concern here is how you photograph the products in question. There are many tips when taking photos of products that you might need to consider to get the best possible images, and it is something that you are going to have to put a lot of work into if you want to get it right. As long as you do that, and your listings appear as you want them to, you should find that your products look much more enticing, and that you get many more buys as a result from day one of opening.
The question of marketing is going to be as important as ever here, and it is something that you are going to want to think about if you are to generate as many sales as necessary. Drawing people in to your online store can be tough, but thankfully something that you can do is encourage people to click through to it, in a way which you can’t with an offline store. So get posting on social media, and start thinking about what forums and other blogs you might be able to consider in terms of marketing your store well. You might find that this really helps.