Getting Help From Freelancers

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

There’s so much involved in getting an ecommerce business off the ground that if you try to do it all yourself you run the risk of becoming overwhelmed and demoralised. There’s something’s that you have to admit, you will need the help of a professional.

Building a website for example. You can learn how to do it yourself, and I would advise you at least to get a working knowledge of websites. Having the knowledge to build a fully functioning ecommerce website is another thing all together.

Unless you are trained in website design, and building then leave this to the professionals. There’s nothing more off-putting than a cheap and badly designed ecommerce website.

Your website is your shop front to the world. If it looks cheap, no one will buy from it. Trust is crucial in getting people to buy from your website. And like it or not people judge by appearance, if you’ve managed to put an armature site up, it will show and turn people away. All your effort will have been wasted.

I have a little knowledge of most ecommerce skills. I can make an image in Photoshop but I’m no expert. I can put up a small website but I wouldn’t attempt to design a full ecommerce site.

I’ve learned the hard way that in the end it’s cheaper to hire professionals. Hire a graphic designer for your graphics; believe me it will save you a lot of time. You will have to pay for these services but not as much as you may think. www.elance.com is an excellent site for finding freelance professionals.

I’ve used this site a number of times and never been disappointed. I hired a graphic designer one afternoon and three hours later, he had designed me what I asked for at good price. He was an expert in Photoshop, the design would have taken me weeks and I would never have achieved the professional look he supplied me with. By employing him, I freed up my time to devote to my business.

We cannot learn everything in depth. We just don’t have the time. It would take years to learn Photoshop in depth, or website design. A successful business knows when to contract work out.

When you first start your business, you may not have the money to hire professionals. I would advise you to save up until you can afford to get a professional design. Re-invest your profits into your business until it is up and running.

It’s never been easier to hire freelance designers and website builders, on elance.com you can find people who will do anything. Presenting a professional front is crucial on the web, you may be working out of your bedroom but a professionally designed website will put you on par with the big players in your industry.

Don’t skimp on investing in your internet real estate.  When you’ve built up some profits, think seriously about hiring professionals to do your graphics and anything else that requires a professional touch.

Use Ebay To Grow Your Business

Experienced online traders know that eBay is more than just a selling venue. It’s also a great way to promote your own website and increase your traffic and sales. Ideally we all want to sell from our own website, simply because it’s free, there’s no eBay fees to pay meaning more profit for us. The trick is getting people to your website in the first place.

EBay obviously knows that sellers are using their site to send traffic to their own websites and has put into place measures to prevent this. You are not allowed to link to your website from eBay. When listing your item you must not link to any outside selling venues or you are in breach of eBay’s rules.

For the creative person however, there are ways around this. You are for example allowed to link to an offsite image hosting service. If you add extra pictures to your auctions, and I hope you do, then you can host them on free services like photo bucket. Your eBay listing allows you to link to these. Many sellers put a watermark with their website on the images hosted off the eBay site.

Your “about me” page is a good way to promote your own website, you are allowed to have one link to your website on your about me page. Most buyers do not look at the “about me” page so eBay is happy to allow this. It’s up to you to get creative in your listings. Put a link to your about me page in all your listings and encourage buyers to click it. They will then see your website address.

EBay is a great fishing ground for bringing in new customers to your website. When you make a sale on eBay, your marketing machine should whirl into action. It’s objective is to get the customer to return to your website for their next purchase. You want this customer to buy all future products direct from your site. You want to build a lifetime relationship.

As soon as I make a sale on eBay, I send an email thanking the customer for buying from me. I send the product out immediately, providing a fast and efficient service. I inform the customer when I have posted the product. Inside of the package, I include a personal addressed letter, thanking the customer for their business. The letter obviously includes my website address on.

Usually the customer will look at my website and make a further purchase. And may even sign up for my newsletter. I will then include the customer in any direct marketing offers I run. From one eBay, listing you can increase your customer base substantially.

EBay is the best advertisement for your business if you utilize it correctly. Get creative and think outside of the box. EBay is a huge source of traffic just waiting to be utilized. Plug into it and redirect some to your own website.  You’ll soon build up your own loyal customer base this way.

Finding A Wholesaler

<p>If you’re serious about starting an online business then Ebay is your fastest route to achieving this. This is most online businesses first step into the world of online trading. And for good reason. You can get up on running on ebay within an hour. What you need to distinguish though is between selling the odd item on ebay and selling a range of products constantly on a daily basis.

The difference is one is a hobby and the other is a business. A lot of people buy some stock from an auction or other supplier, place it on ebay, sell it then come to a dead stop. Wondering what to sell next. They then spend a few months soucing something else to sell. This is a nice way to earn a little extra cash but it’s not a business. If you want to create a serious business on ebay you need to establish your supply line so you can restock as soon as you see you stock selling. You need a supplier who will be able to resupply you within days.This step comes after you have done all your research and decided what you are selling.

Once you’ve decided what to sell your next goal is to find a supplier who sells the products at a price that enables you to make a profit. Ideally you want to buy direct from the manufacturer as this will guarntee that you get the product at the cheapest prices. Realistically though, as a small trader buying from the manufacturer is not practical. Manufacturers want you to buy in large bulk quantities and will not sell small quantities of items.

As a small trader you need to find a genuine wholesaler. I say genuine because there are a lot of people out there claiming to be wholesalers who are retailers: Type in a search for the products you are interested in in google putting “supplies” or “wholesalers” after the products and see what comes up.

You will get pages of companies claiming to be wholesalers. The question is are they genuine wholesalers or companies buying from the wholesalers and selling the products on at just under retail prices? Your research, if you have done it right, will have come up with the average selling price of the products you want to sell. If the prices from the sites claiming to be wholesalers are too close to the selling prices your research has uncovered then you can safely conclude that they are retailers and not wholesalers.

Most of the companies advertising themselves as wholesalers on the net are really retailers. You need to make sure you get to the genuine wholesaler so you can get the products you want at the cheapest prices possible. The less people between you and the manufacturer the cheaper you will get the products for.

Most genuine wholesalers usually only have a small presence on the web. They don’t usually have online catalogues, some do but many don’t. They usually have hard copy paper catalogues that they send you when you sign up with them. So what’s the best way to ensure you get a genuine wholesaler for your products?

It took me a while to discover the best way to locate genuine wholesalers. Once I did discover the best way it was so simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it straight away. All you need to do is look at the packaging the product you want to sell is in and get the manufacturer’s name off it. Search for the manufacturer on the net. The manufacturer’s website will have a customer service section or sales department. Simply send them an email explaining you would like to stock their products and can they supply you with details of the wholesalers who stock their products.

,/br>

This works every time. The manufacturer will send you a list of the wholesalers who stock their products. You can be assured that these are genuine wholesalers. All you need to do then is contact the wholesaler and apply for an account. Once you are accepted they will send you one of their catalogues. The catalogue will contain lots of other products which you can add to your inventory./p>

Establishing a good secure supply line is one of the major building blocks you need to put in place before launching your business. Spend some time doing this. Ensure you can get the products you want at the price you want. make sure you can get resupplied fast. This is crucial for a genuine business. Without a supply line you can never be a genuine professional business.,/p>

9 Reasons To Start A Small Business

Learn How To Deal With People

Learn to deal with people. I’m not just talking about people you like; that’s easy.  I’m talking about dealing with certain customers who enjoy being difficult. This is excellent practice for learning the skill of not taking things too seriously. How to remain logical and professional in the most trying of circumstances, whether it’s dealing with suppliers or customers, you’re bound to have your patience severely tested at some point. Can you cope? Can you remain professional under pressure? You’ll never know if you are not pressure tested.

Know The Thrill Of Taking Risks

Unless you’re a seasoned gambler or on active military service, only in running your own business can you experience the thrill of taking risks. Even those overpaid business leaders cannot know the fear and excitement of the independent small business owner who has everything riding on a decision he or she has taken about pursuing a strategy. For the overpaid business executive, deep down, he doesn’t really care if he makes a bad decision, after all, it’s not his company and he still gets paid if it all goes wrong. Someone else will pay for his bad decision. Usually employees who are made redundant. Look at the banks. The people who made all the bad decisions still got their millions. It was the employees who had to pay the price. In your own business, if you’ve made a wrong call, you will pay. When you put together a strategy, invest time and money in it and need it to work, you’re on a rollercoaster ride and you feel every turn and twist.

Learn To Overcome Fear

There’s no getting away from it, if you run your own business you are going to be confronted with challenges that will test your character. You will have to do things you may find uncomfortable, step out of your comfort zone on a daily basis. It may just be negotiating a new price with a supplier. If you’re easy going, you will have to learn to put some steel into your character, so you can deal with suppliers who will want to sell you things at a high price. As a small business owner you will have to take on roles you may not be familiar or comfortable with, like sales. Every day the small business owner has to exercise fear and continue to function professionally.

Challenges You To Excel

Learn to be your best, to extract every bit of mental and physical stamina from yourself, to continue going when you are exhausted. To continue thinking when all options seem closed, to keep looking for solutions when others would have walked away saying there is none. Running your own business will present you with unique challenges daily. Can you deal with them? How do you respond under pressure? Can you remain calm and in control or do you fall apart?  Don’t know? Start a small business and you’ll soon find out.

Get A Mission

If you’re drifting through life, following the same routine every day, year after year, starting a business gives you a chance to launch yourself into a mission.  We need a mission. Life’s not just about filling our time with pointless leisure pursuits all the time. Or working so we can afford to buy another trinket that will offer us no lasting satisfaction. We humans need to be doing, to be planning and testing ourselves. That’s when we’re happiest, pursuing goals and dealing with all the problems that entails. We need a cause greater than ourselves to pursue. Get a business, get a mission.

Open Up Your Creativity

We’re all capable of being creative, most people though never touch on their creative powers. If you start a business, you will unleash them. You’ll have to if you want your business to survive and prosper. Being in charge of your own business will allow you to express your creativity, whether in marketing strategies, or business organization, no small business can thrive without a creative driving force behind it.

Make A Million

Well maybe not, but there’s no denying that it could happen. You should certainly aim for the million but if you only make 250.000 it’s 250.000 you wouldn’t have made if you’d never started. Anything you make is a bonus and will add to your wealth. Starting your own business is your own wealth creating system. The alternative is to trust a banker to look after your money. We won’t go there.

Experience Variety

If you work in a job, doing the same thing every day then starting a business will give you plenty of variety, from doing accounts to working out a marketing plan, from dealing with suppliers to organizing processes. It’s a daily adventure that will require you learning many new things.

Build Your Character

There’s no doubt that running your own business is a character forming experience. Apart from taking part in combat, there’s no other area of life where you can test yourself so thoroughly. And win or lose you will definitely grow from the experience and come out of the other end a better and more rounded person.

Using Keywords To Get Your Products Noticed

Any market is only as good as the as the amount of customers it brings to the venue. The job of a market manager is to bring customers through the doors, that’s what sellers pay for, once the customers are in, then the market has done its job, it’s then down to the sellers to sell their products. EBay has done its job.  Millions of customers come to the site daily, as sellers it’s now up to us to get our products in the sights of potential customers.  It’s no good listing hundreds of products if no one can find them. So how can we increase our chance of getting our products noticed?

One of the simplest yet overlooked ways to make our listings more visible is the use of keywords. Keywords in the title of our listing will help to get our products under the noses of potential customers. So what exactly are keywords? Website owners and those familiar with search engine optimization seek to maximize their use of keywords because they know it’s an effective way of getting their products noticed. For the uninitiated, keywords are basically the words people type into searches to find a product.

When you list an item on eBay the first thing you fill in is the title. This is important. What you put into the title will determine how visible your product becomes and how easy it will be to find for potential customers.  Writing your title is a skill and you need to take your time over it. You have 55 characters and you need to use them all effectively to enhance the chance of your listing being seen. Let’s say for example, I’m selling an in car DVD player.  I’ve seen one where the seller had just put “DVD player” as the title. This is not the way to sell an item.

Remember you have 55 characters to get your listing noticed; you’ve paid for them so make them work for you. Back to my DVD player. If I was selling one I would list the full model:

Philips 7in twin screen in car DVD

Now I’ve listed exactly what it is I’m selling. If someone is looking for a Philips in car DVD player, my listing will show up in their search results. I have also though used keywords to spread my net wider. What if someone just types in “in car DVD player”? I’m still covered in my title. If someone types in “DVD player”, I’m still covered and my listing should show up. I haven’t put “player” on the end because I don’t want to waste my remaining characters which I can use for other keywords. Now think, what other words could people use to search for an in car DVD player? Maybe “in car entertainment” I can add this to the title:

Philips 7in twin screen in car DVD in car entertainment

Now you’re probably going to say, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter; you can make it nice and neat in your description. Your title is to get your listing coming up in the searches. Use every character if possible. Think out of the box. Once you’ve written what your product is, model, name, tech details etc, use the remaining characters to add other descriptions that people may refer to your product as.

Don’t waste your title by describing your product as “new” or “great” etc. These are all things that you can explain in the description; with only 55 characters you can’t afford to waste them. Notice I used the number 7 and didn’t spell it out. By doing so I saved four characters. The objective of utilising keywords in your title is to get your listing hit by hungry buyers not to win a grammar test.

Here’s a few essentials when using your title:

• You don’t need to use plurals. EBay’s search engine will find the item whether singular or plural
• Write numbers rather than spell them out
• Don’t waste characters by using adjectives like “great2 2good” etc. You can mention this in your descriptions.
• Check your spelling. Some people search eBay for misspelled titles, looking to get things cheap. If you’ve got an auction running and you’ve mis-spelled the word few people will find it. Those who do may get it cheaper than you wanted to sell it for.
• Can’t think of alternative descriptions. Look at the titles of other eBay sellers, especially the successful ones. Copy them
• Think outside of the box, use your imagination.

Next Page »