$250k/month selling perfumes online. Entrepreneur |
- $250k/month selling perfumes online.
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| $250k/month selling perfumes online. Posted: 06 May 2018 10:07 AM PDT Hey /r/Entrepreneur - Pat from Starter Story, here with another interview. This interview is with the founder of Fragrancebuy, Canada's largest online fragrance retailer! TLDR:
Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?Fragrancebuy is Canada's largest online fragrance retailer. We give fragrance enthusiasts access to a variety of discounted designer & niche fragrances through an impeccable online shopping experience. We've come to be known as one of the most dynamic and customer-driven companies in Canada. Our professionalism is well known and appreciated, which has enabled us to continue to grow and become a point of reference throughout Canada and the USA. It may come as a surprise to most, but we're just a team of three dedicated and passionate individuals managing a multi-million dollar operation. Our secret lies below :) What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?Having a background in Business and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, I've always had a passion for identifying opportunities and filling voids. Whether it was problem solving, negotiating a contract or simply brainstorming new ideas for upcoming programs and initiatives, I always have viewed life as a series of opportunities waiting to be taken. When I graduated, a saw a huge burst in the concept of warehouse sales and an equivalent explosion in online shopping. That got me thinking of ways to capture an untapped market ... Customers love low prices online, but what if we coupled low prices with an online shopping experience that was satisfying, memorable and praiseworthy? We started what is now the most trusted online fragrance store in Canada with an aim to answer this fundamental question. We began with the basic Five P marketing analysis, which in business terms we refer to as product, price, people, place and promotion. We had the product since fragrance wholesale was the crux of our business, and we had great prices due to the extensive network of partners we had developed over 18 years in the industry. We then proceeded with an action plan of adding value at every stage in a customer's purchasing experience. Promoting our products through several fun social media initiatives and offering an unparalleled customer service experience are all value-added measures that now form the crux of our company's success in the online ecommerce world. From the moment they find a rare fragrance, to the moment its unboxed & shared with family and friends, our customers can now feel the unique retail experience through an e-commerce platform. Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.Fragrance wholesale was the crux of our business and we had developed an extensive network of supply chain partners over 18 years. But with a deteriorating global economy, wholesale clients were paying late and we needed to adapt to a rapidly changing economy. Using the online Shopify platform, we were able to expand our client base and reach Canadians across the country, and offer the same wholesale pricing we had been before but without the stress of late payments. Shopify is an easy and intuitive platform that allows flexibility of making a website with minimal technical background experience. The most challenging part was the initial challenge in loading all the products on the website which admittingly took a very long time. But as a word of advice, if the groundwork (which is the hardest part) is done well, its create a solid foundation for the rest of your business. Shopify has now become the place we promote our products. Our cash flow has dramatically improved and we have emerged a stronger company than ever before. Describe the process of launching the online store/business.With the Shopify platform, we started with a simple website design and used their inbuilt basic SEO to build product metadata for online exposure. We expanded marketing with Google Adwords and over the months started gaining a following from users from different online forums. We held giveaways with blog partnerships, built a Facebook following and led exciting competitions and giveaway contests. All of this helped expand our reach and get people truly excited about our company and what we had to offer. Online advertisements and referrals from online fragrance forums of satisfied customers generate the most traffic and sales. We started the online venture with a personal loan injection of just $1,000 and an all-inclusive monthly expenditure budget of $500. Within a few months, we recouped the initial investment. As business grew and conversions multiplied, we then had a significant pool of funds which we reinvested to upgrade the website to add value and enhance the customer experience. The most important lesson we learned throughout the process is that the most difficult part is the starting phase but it doesn't need to be perfect. Our first website design was created by us internally using a Shopify free theme template. As business grew, we listened to feedback from online forums and we learned more about website elements that customers expected in trusting an online store. We slowly added new features (and still do even today) through reinvested profits in a strive to work towards a more 'perfect' website. Rome wasn't built in a day and a successful website also requires perseverance, dedication and a whole lot of patience. Since launch, what has worked to attract new customers?There is and always will be a fundamental difference between a brick and mortar store vs. an online business and that is the potential for exposure. When we started operations years ago, the phenomenon of warehouse sales in brick mortar stores was exploding. But we posed a single idea in scoping our marketing SWOT (Strength/Weakness/Opportunity/Threat) analysis: a physical warehouse sale can get max exposure only from those who live near to that actual store, but with an online business, you have the world at your doorstep. So not only do you have the ability to use traditional means of advertising that local retailers do (including print, radio, localized demographics) but you have the incredible power of social media and vast digital retargeted marketing to reach a customer that's thousands of miles away. We first created a map of all elements in an online transaction and then narrowed in on each element to find a way to add-value to the end consumer during each stage in the online transaction. This involved informing the customer about our company, the customer going through the online process and placing the order, the customer receiving the order and finally the customer's post purchase experience with the order. We started with maximizing metadata for products and images, including ALT tags and relevant search metadata to increase SEO. We used Google Adwords/Facebook Ads to market to search terms we thought our customers would search for when looking for their products online. We partnered with bloggers and vloggers to host informed giveaways to grow exposure on online forums, Youtube, BeautyBlog websites, etc. Of course we also engaged customers through our social media accounts to let them know about our company and our value added proposition. We then focused on the customer's actual process going through our website and identifying obstacles in their purchase completion. We used the power of social proof to build trust and created re-targeted marketing for abandoned carts and getting customers to engage with transactions they left hanging at the final checkout page. We used order follow-up receipt emails and shipping emails to again market additional products and keep the customers fully informed on the process. When customers shop online, there's an inherent fear of not receiving an intended product as envisioned. To tackle this, we heavily promoted a perfect order guarantee and provided emails from order placement, to order processing, to shipping and finally order receipt. An informed customer, we learned is a happy one! The next and what we feel is the most undiscovered and underrated part of the online process is physical order receipt - when the customer actually gets their order. When a customer shops in a retail store, there is an excitement in receiving the product including the packaging, the samples, the retail experience if you may call it. We strived to recreate that retail experience coupled with a lower priced online sale. This involved us investing in custom boxes filled with exciting messages, a personalized CEO letter and of course company marketing. For example, the top of our shipping boxes say "Your latest #fragfaves have arrived. How's that for excitement". When people receive our shipments, that time between opening this custom box and retrieving their products creates a fascination and excitement that is not only remembered (and shared on social media) but creates a deeply-rooted sense of trust and reassurance to the customer's psychology that they made the right decision by buying from us. The final step in our analysis was to add value to the post purchase. This includes engaging customers to recognize us not just as any online discounter, but an actual brand. This is what I call differentiating yourself from the Amazon effect. We realized the way to do this was to recognize and treat repeat traffic to be equally as important as new website traffic. To drive repeat traffic, we kept our regular customers engaged. We introduced a personalized loyalty program, held fun celebratory events including a virtual East egg-hunt challenge (which now has become an annual tradition) and even created customized receipts when recognizing a customer had returned for a secondary or multiple follow-up order. A lot of companies forget the power of a happy repeat customer. Not only do they add monetary value through repeat purchases but they also become a spokesperson for your brand, without charging an ad fee ☺ How is everything going nowadays, and what are your plans for the future?It's been just four years since we launched and we're now regarded as one of the most customer-driven and fastest growing companies in Canada. Our professionalism is well known and appreciated, which has enabled us to continue to grow and become a point of reference throughout Canada and the USA (to where we started shipping just over a year ago). The secret to creating a profitable online business can be summarized in the words of one of my former University of Toronto professors Tim Richardson: "adding value". If you evaluate your entire business model with a value-added approach, similar to how we did in recreating a retail experience for an otherwise mundane online transaction, you can significantly grow your exposure and build a successful ecommerce business. By doing this you can distinguish yourself from being regarded by the average online shopper as merely another Amazon/Ebay seller (if you sell on these platforms) or just any regular "online website". Instead a value added approach will help you become recognized by the online community as a truly unique brand in itself. We're not just any fragrance company, we're known by our customers as Fragrancebuy Canada! But value-added doesn't just mean adding value for a customer, its also about adding value to your business and recognizing shortfalls and opportunities in your day-to-day operations. When we had our first month of sales, we were manually inputting each address to ship our parcels. But as business grew, we needed a way to build efficiency so we could ship our products faster to our clients and avoid cumbersome data entry. Shipstation's and the Xporter apps were the best choices we ever made. Then, as business grew we partnered with Riskified's app to help us better judge our order risk characteristics and protect our bottom line from costly chargebacks. With the insight of Shopify blogs, we then partnered with GLEAMIO's app to host successful competitions to increase client retention. We incorporated SmileIO's loyalty widget and Conversio's email app to generate beautiful sales receipts to get customers excited about their purchases and keep them informed of their shipment every step of the way. All of the aforementioned are simple apps to automate tasks, or should I say add value to your business. When you analyze your business, look for ways to help you reduce costs and be more efficient. Focus on your core competencies and fill the voids with a value-added solution. There are tons of applications/website addons/csv formulas out there that can help you save time in running a business and help you grow your business instead. Examining your business and finding ways to add value this way is the secret to profitability. In fact, if you're keen to know, we'll let you in on our little secret: our company has just three employees and we're able to efficiently run this multi-million dollar business :) Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?They say you can have the lowest prices in the world, but if you don't have the customer base to take benefit of those low prices, then having those low prices means absolutely nothing. In the beginning, we were heavily focused on our buying strategy entailing us buying low and selling low to compete. But we soon realized the flaw in such a strategy. Selling low makes you just like any Amazon marketplace vendor and focusing on being the lowest price may never be successful as there always will be someone out there that will try to come in and be lower. We changed gears and focused on adding value to the customer's purchasing process and adding value in our day to day operations to get customers their orders efficiently and fast. Now, we find some of our clients comfortable even paying a few bucks extra to us vs a competitor because they feel comfortable knowing that Fragrancebuy is reliable, that we care about the customer experience and that ultimately buying from Fragrancebuy is a memorable and satisfying shopping experience that is second to none. What platform/tools do you use for your business?In addition to the apps we've mentioned above like Shipstation, Riskified, Conversio, Shopify Reviews, Smile Loyalty, Gleam competition (which all add tremendous value to our day to day operations), the one app which is most crucial and we've yet to mention is our search partner, Instant Search Plus (ISP). When a customer visits a website, they are in search of a particular product, although they sometimes don't even know what it is. To help them complete their thought we've partnered with ISP to create an impeccable search experience. Customers can perform searches with synonyms so even typos are recognized and corrected by the engine. For example a customer looking for Burberry might accidentally type Blueberry but the system will recognize and present them Burberry in an autocomplete search suggestion. ISP custom created an impeccable refined search page for us that further helps our customers narrow in with smart filters to present to them a product that matches their envisioned search. Moreover using powerful website search analytics allows us to monitor what our customers are searching for and how we can fill that void between their envisioned search and the final presented search result. The result is a definitive value added to our bottom line. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?When we started our ecommerce business, admittingly there was a point in time we didn't know where to begin! Thankfully Shopify offered (and still does) blogs and articles to help entrepreneurs analyze their business and directs them to tools in place to meet commonly found roadblocks in strategy execution. My single point of advice to all readers when it comes to finding information is this: If you don't know how to do something, someone else likely has had the same problem before. Your roadblocks may be cleared with the help of a single point of advice found in reading a simple blog post or related resource on the Internet. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?E-commerce is a different ball game now than it was 4 years ago. More and more competition is entering the game and it's only going to get more crowded and challenging. The key to winning is to always keep ahead of the game in such a way that when your competitors reach the level you are today, you've already innovated and are still thousands of miles ahead of them. Where can we go to learn more?We hope we were able to inspire you to rethink your business with a value-added state of mind. We'll leave you with the following custom message which we transcribe on all of our shipping boxes to showcase our commitment to an impeccable online shopping experience: "Hello Fragrance Connoisseur, Welcome to the revolution in online fragrance shopping! Although we trust that you have received your fragrance(s) safe and sound, kindly take a moment to verify that everything arrived in perfect condition. If there is any reason you wouldn't rate this as a 5-star experience, please contact us right away and we'll do all we can to make it right! If everything looks fantastic (just as it should be) we encourage you to leave us some feedback, join our Facebook community, hashtag us on Instagram via #FragFaves, tweet us, be inspired by our pins on Pinterest or upload your box-opening Fragcitement to YouTube. Serving you great deals and exceeding your customer service expectations is - and always will - be an integral part of our philosophy. We thank you for choosing FragranceBuy. It has been our pleasure to serve you. Happy Savings!" [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2018 12:26 PM PDT Hi there r/entrepreneur! My twin brother (/u/vitekitchenstim) are in middle of our Kickstarter for Vite Ramen, the world's first nutritionally complete instant ramen, and we figured we could share some of what we learned so far! We could also use a bit of advice on where to go from here, so if you've had experience crowdfunding we'd love to hear from you!
We're not marketing professionals, so this is personal experience! We haven't been working with any marketing companies, so we've done this mostly from reading articles online. Here's hoping this can help out someone in the same way! This is a learning experience for us, too, so feel free to chime in if you've had a different experience or insights into things that can be improved! A list of some of the resources that helped us is at the end :)
1. Make a project you're legitimately passionate about. This isn't a get rich quick scheme.Passion and authenticity are things customers will pick up on and reflect through your marketing and social media. They'll be more passionate and excited about your project if you are! Make something that you're legitimately proud of; something that not only you would buy, but that you'd be an evangelist about! If you weren't making it, would you still be telling your friends about it? Don't be that guy. We were intent on making this ramen because, well, we really need it! Sometimes we're just too busy to cook and want something comforting (e.g. not Soylent) and tasty, but don't want to sacrifice our health and performance to do so. Also that, but noods. It's something we're really passionate about because it's something we couldn't find and we really want! A couple great examples here are Larry from AMMO NYC (detailing company) or David Chang (Ugly Delicious, Mind of a Chef). These guys exude passion about what they do and it's an important part of their brand. Speaking of which….
2. You're just as important as your product.Especially in the age of social media, people want to see people, not a company. Our social media posts that show us as people, even if it's just cleaning our warehouse, usually generate way more engagement than our professionally shot photos (still important to get those though)! Show that you're a real person by responding regularly to social media, being honest and genuine, and not being afraid to admit your faults. You're human and it's good to show it. It's especially important if you're doing anything health related like we are; since health related foods are a minefield of claims and pseudoscience, we'll respond to almost every social media post we get. No matter how much proof you put on your website, people will be unconvinced until they talk with a human being. Engaging with our audience has been an extremely important way for us to build trust. Be honest with your customers and don't press your product onto them! It's better to pull your customers to you rather than be the pushy sales guy. Explain your thought process kindly (think: would r/wholesomememes approve?), and admit if things aren't perfect yet! It's completely ok to tell someone that your product may not be what they're looking for and suggest alternatives.
3. Don't start until you're ready….but it's ok to start over.A famous quote by Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario goes "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." There are always going to be a lot of factors that pushed us to try and launch quickly: fear that someone else will take our idea, the "right" launch window, pressure from family and friends, or even just being eager and wanting to see our project come to life! This Kickstarter is our second announced date; we decided to delay it by almost 6 months in order to really make sure we had everything ready! A lot of time was spent making things work before the Kickstarter. Since we've began this project, we've had to:
It's a learning experience, and sometimes there are things you can't control! Do your best to make a kick ass campaign, and prep as many things as you can beforehand. However, there are many campaigns that fail the first time but go on to become massive successes after reworking the project! Do your prep, but if things go awry, you can take a step back, reevaluate feedback, and do it again.
4. Pre-campaign and build the right audience earlyA majority of the promotional work should be done before the launch of your Kickstarter. It's the same reason movies release trailers before the movie (or even teaser trailers for the trailer...) Get people excited about your Kickstarter so that you get that initial boost! Keep in mind that while clickbait style content work in generating clicks, they're generally far less likely to convert to an email lead or purchase. Your final goal shouldn't be clicks, it should be who's actually going to buy your product. Quality leads to quality! The most powerful tool with the best returns was our email list. Our list wasn't huge by most standards (~3000 subscribers at KS launch), but we found it was very high quality; over 40% of subscribers will open our emails (according to Mailchimp, industry average is 1-2%)! Our sign up rate was also unusually high; 25-30% of visitors to our site would sign up for our list during our promotion! To our knowledge, the high rate of sign ups and mail opening comes from a couple factors:
1. Specific, narrowly defined audiences Find your niche by starting with yourself! What kind of person are you, and what characteristics about you might reflect someone who will also be interested in your product? For example, one of our top performing audiences is a reflection of /u/vitekitchenstim : Professional cooks who are interested in health, wellness, esports, and anime (weeeeb :P ). It's also important to write ads for your audience. Our advertising on Reddit is much more stats focused (27 protein, 25%DV vitamins and minerals, etc), whereas our advertising on Instagram is basically a pile of emojis 💪🍜💯👊🔥(and makes me feel like I need a shower afterwards).
2. Endless A/B testing (Adespresso) Constantly expand and test who might be interested in your product! We use Adespresso in order to test our Facebook ads; it allows you to input different headlines, pictures, text and audiences together, then mixes them up to generate up to 125 ads at once so you can test which factors are working the best. The statistics readout is also far more intuitive than Facebook's native one. Highly recommended; we've found that our Facebook audiences are a decent reflection of overall interest within audiences as well.
3. Call-To-Action (CTA) SEND NOODS. If you've poked around our website, we use this joke a lot...partly because we're immature. That being said, creating a unique, strong call to action might be the difference between someone clicking away or clicking the link. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback indicating that some people clicked just because they thought it was funny, then got caught up in the product itself! That leads to our next topic:
5. Build your brand. Learn the basics.This is one of those massive topics that has some very talented people working in it. Strong visuals and consistent design help indicate that a company knows what it's doing, and go a long way to helping you stand out and stick in people's minds! I like the example of Hydrox vs Oreo as an example of branding making a big difference in sales. We personally decided to direct a majority of the creatives ourselves; Tim wrote the script and directed the video, and I designed the graphics for Kickstarter and much of the website, etc. It was still important for us to find people we trusted to pick up the slack where we couldn't though! Finding the right photographers, videographers, graphic designers, and other creatives can make or break your Kickstarter before it even starts! Don't use Fiverr; find someone with a style you like on Dribbble or Behance. This is not the place to cheap out. It's also important to understand where you want to go with your branding and image. Educate yourself on the basic terminology and concepts so you can effectively communicate what you're looking for! Don't be that guy who wants the design to "pop" more. Effective communication will make your designs better and cost less money for revisions.
6. Success breeds success.Underdog stories are popular because the underdog wins at the end! In the end, it is a bit of a popularity contest and people want to back a winner. In Kickstarter terms, this means setting your goal as low as you can possibly afford. For us, our $10k goal was the lowest possible amount we needed in order to combine with our remaining budget and satisfy minimum order quantities for our raw materials. Once you've hit your goals (even if they're bare minimum!), people will be more likely to support you because you've proven you can hit your goals! A large initial response (like from the mailing list!) is very helpful in pushing this. Kickstarter itself is no different than its audiences! Because they get a nice kickback from every campaign, they also have a vested interested in seeing you become successful. Strong branding, communication, and authenticity will help you achieve Kickstarter's "Projects We Love" status, which will give your project a huge boost for no extra work! To give you an idea, 43% ($55,693) of our current pledges can be traced directly back to a Kickstarter source! Between their Advanced Discovery system, recommendations, sending out their own emails featuring badged projects, and all the rest of the good stuff, it's a massively significant amount. I will say that we've had pretty limited success with any achievement based marketing, however; conventional wisdom says that if you advertise that "we've been backed x quickly!" it's something you should advertise, but compared to our normal ads we get pretty poor returns.
We could use some advice too!Thanks for reading through this far! Hopefully it's helped some people out with their Kickstarter. We could use your help with a couple of things too if you've had experience crowdfunding. How do you structure the final push (e.g. last week or so) of the Kickstarter? Funded Today has an article more or less saying they just put more money in it by the end. So far our ideas are more content (customizing ramen, how to make your own instant noodles at home, alkalinity experiments with dough, etc), releasing beta tester reviews, posting more update videos and asking backers to help us share and get that last push in. I'd love to hear more ideas or strategy specifics from anybody who's done this before! We've also had mostly poor returns on news articles so far (although we haven't pursued them explicitly much yet). The nutritionally complete (Soylent etc) crowd has been great, but ramen enthusiasts and college students are surprisingly pretty hit or miss so far. Does anybody have ideas on types of blogs or news we could contact that may be more relevant to our product? The big catch here is that our materials suppliers only give us a fairly small amount of raw supplies to experiment with, so we're pretty much using it all on either internal testing or sending out for beta testing. Sending out more samples is pretty much a no go, so it would have to be interest only articles like this one.
Again, thanks a ton for reading! Hopefully it's been helpful and we appreciate any help or advice everyone can offer! :) Feel free to ask questions or discuss; we'd love to know what you think!
Here's a dump of resources for y'all too: Some of these are slightly outdated, but still contain good concepts. https://adespresso.com/blog/facebook-ads-for-kickstarter-guide/ https://adespresso.com/blog/facebook-ads-case-study-the-million-dollar-indiegogo-campaign/ https://tim.blog/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/ https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-to-make-popup-subscription-forms-that-work/ https://learn.launchboom.com/hacking-kickstarter-2-0-24cebb74f281 https://www.kickstarter.com/campus/questions/building-a-data-model-for-tracking-kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/campus/questions/using-ads-to-promote-kickstarter-analytics-tracking https://www.kickstarter.com/campus/questions/what-can-i-do-with-google-analytics-and-kickstarter http://www.spellforgegames.com/kickstarter-and-google-analytics-a-guide-for-kickstarter-campaigns/ https://adespresso.com/blog/16-genius-ideas-for-your-facebook-ad-ab-testing/ [link] [comments]  |
| My blog has made a total of $500k over the past three years — Should I go full-time? Posted: 05 May 2018 04:59 PM PDT Long story short, my blog has earned a total of around $500k over the past three years ($200k in 2017, $200k in 2016, and $80k in 2015). The blog is about 6-years-old. I have a full-time job (~45-65hr/week making $60k/yr). The website has always been a part-time gig that I work on at night/weekends. I spend anywhere from 2-10/hours a week on the site. I've been toying with the idea of quitting my job to go full-time on my site. I'm thinking I could work on it for a year just to see if I can ramp up content creation and hopefully increase traffic/revenue. If things went well then I could see myself continuing to grow the site. If things didn't go well I figure I could continue working on it part-time as I have the past six years. My main concerns: All my income is all affiliate-based. My Amazon affiliate income is around $120k/yr — so it's a huge chunk. I'm diversifying to other affiliate income streams but I would currently take a huge hit if Amazon was to change their commission structure. I was down about $25k from 2016 to 2017 because of a commission change early last year. I'm 35. My current career path favors the young so if I were to leave for a year or two it would be hard to get back in. Basically, I'm already 6-8 years older than most people at my experience level so I'm already in a weird spot. That said, I don't hate my job but sometimes I look at my bosses working crazy hours and wonder if I could do that (even though they're making $250-400k). This is a big worry... I worry about the blog puttering out in a few years and then I'm a 40-year-old dude with no real prospects — then what? I'm still a long ways away from retirement and my current career would be essentially over. I live in a high cost of living city. My wife and I really don't feel like leaving for awhile. I'm having a hard time seeing a path forward other than "keep making content". And maybe that's is the right path? Positives: The website is a legit established site and I'm not doing anything shady so I don't worry about Google shunning me. It's also in a subject area that I don't see ever going away/becoming less popular. We have a savings cushion should anything dramatic happen. We have $250k in savings in addition to $120k in a SEP IRA. No debt or student loans. No car. We rent so no mortgage. No kids (but this could change in the next year or two). Wife has a job so I can get fairly affordable insurance through her. So yeah — I'm not really sure if this is a dumb idea or not. Any advice would be really helpful. [EDIT]: I'm not going to share my site — for obvious reasons. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2018 06:08 AM PDT |
| How To Grow Your Business With Social Media Posted: 06 May 2018 12:27 PM PDT Social media is a fantastic way to promote your business. It's free, you can target your posts and your audience reach is endless. Few other marketing mediums can make such claims but as any social media expert will tell you, there's no point wasting time and energy sending out content if you don't have an audience. Increasing your followers should always be at the forefront of your mind when managing your social media accounts. Why? Because a large audience leads to increased brand recognition, improved customer loyalty, more opportunities to convert and of course, higher conversion rates. On the flip side, a dwindling following will leave you trailing in the wake of your competitors and losing out on valuable marketing opportunities. Whether you're just starting out with your social media efforts or you've been trying for some time and are becoming frustrated with the lack of likes and follows, below are some great ways to increase your followers. HOW TO GAIN FOLLOWERS: To start off our journey growing on social media we are going to buy some followers. Some people say not to buy followers, but I completely disagree. Buying followers will boost your ranking on the recommendations tabs and will allow give your customers more of reason to trust your business. I buy my follows here they have pretty cheap prices and I haven't had any problems with them. They also sell on most social media platforms, so you wont have a problem with that. ENGAGE: Establishing connections and building relationships is one of the easiest ways to get more people following your social media pages. If you don't have time to sit down and do this on a daily basis, try to at least do the bare minimum. If someone responds to your post, like their comment or reply. If a follower sends you a message, try to respond to them because this could be someone who is thinking about using your product or service. USE HASHTAGS: Just like you use keywords to attract visitors to your website, hashtags are crucial if you want to increase your exposure on social media. Twitter and Instagram are where hashtags are most commonly used so you should always try to use them when posting on these channels. Hashtags help to bring more people to your pages because anyone searching for the word you've used will see your post. It is however important to stay on topic. You shouldn't be commenting or posting on everything that's trending – it must be relevant to your business. Say you run an accountancy firm and Game of Thrones is trending, it's not your place to comment on this. If the Autumn Statement or the self-assessment tax deadline is approaching however, this provides a perfect opportunity for you to increase your exposure through topics that a lot of people will be searching for and talking about. BE CONSISTENT: One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make with their social media is posting too sporadically. In order to attract followers in the first place, people need to see that your account is active and to retain followers, you need to provide your audience with interesting content on a regular basis. There are many websites and tools which allow you to schedule posts in advance so you don't have to worry about trying to remember to send out your posts every day. Some of the more popular scheduling websites include Hootsuite, Buffer, TweetDeck, SproutSocial, CrowdBooster and SocialOomph. I know this tutorial was very vague, but I just wanted to get the general point across. It is very hard to cover every single way of growing on every social media in a few paragraphs. Because there are different ways of growing on every single platform. For example: To grow on Instagram I post my picture and then buy some likes and then the picture will go on the IG explore page and I will get organic traffic from just doing that. There are different tricks for every social media, but like I said its hard to cover them all in one post. Hopefully this gave you guys a little motivation on how to grow your social media presence and if you have any questions/troubles I'd be glad to answer your question in the comments! Thanks for reading and good luck on growing your business! [link] [comments]  |
| Has anyone wasted too much time day dreaming rather than actually doing? Posted: 06 May 2018 03:05 AM PDT Hi, I am going through very strange phenomenon and mental situation from like 2 years now. I became Chartered Accountant(Indian version of CPA) in 2016 and I had this knack of doing something of my own. But when I actually took that path, I found myself getting distracted towards lot of things, to a point that I completely forgot what I wanted initially. Fast forward 2 years and I came to the conclusion that you have to stick to one thing no matter what.. No matter how cool and easily these cryptos can make people rich or how tough it is to pitch to investors or clients in your niche, you still have to keep growing.. Since, I had wasted 2 years while doing only freelancing work and failed at growing my virtual bookkeeping firm so far, and I am getting nowhere to that.. I also realized there is not much in my niche to offer and there is already too much crowd to deliver something of value.. Meanwhile, only good thing I did during the period is passing my CFA Level 1, beyond that I got nowhere.. Now my family and society in general, look down on me and consider me as a failure. Even my own brother don't support me and thinks I am a bullshitter, not anything beyond that.. Meanwhile, I am considering to give CFA Level 2 in June and will look for job which I will have lot of trouble to get because I was only doing freelancing.. The skills I learnt during the period beyond my core field: - Internet Marketing - How to shape your services in terms of offering - Nobody really cares about you except your parents. - There is a really big gap between what people say and what they actually mean by it. - You have to work hard to become better marketer or salesman. - Friends are as long as with you as you are having good time, the moment shit hits the fan, he will be the first to run away and won't help you. I also realized that I just get easily attracted towards success stories whatever I came across and dream myself to be really become like them.. But what I cannot conquer is my laziness and habit of getting easily distracted.. I don't want to complain anything or brag anything, just wanted to state my opinion and no I am not selling anything at all. What do you think about it? [link] [comments]  |
| I need help with my product. Please tell me everything wrong with it Posted: 06 May 2018 08:33 AM PDT I'm working on developing a project for cleaner water, and I need someone to answer a couple questions I have and tear apart everything wrong with my idea. Here it goes: I'm trying to develop a water bottle that can desalinate water. I've looked into ways to do this and decided that you have to use heat, pumps have been used but are not cost effective. My idea is to make a two part bottle, the bottom half is where the sea or dirty water is taken into the bottle. In the bottom there are two layers of glass/magnifying layer. The outside layer has to be transparent to allow light to pass through and then the inside layer can focus the light into the water to heat it. There have to be two layers or else the bottle would be too hot to touch. On the very bottom there would be a layer of light absorbent material, such as vantablack, but vantablack is not purchasable so it would have to be something very similar. This material would collect the light and transfer the heat to the water which hopefully would get it to the point that it boils. There would be a layer of silicone that keeps the salt water from the upper chamber. When the water evaporates it can still pass through the silicone and then it will be in the top half of the bottle where it is drinkable. The top half only has one layer protecting it from the outside and a white covering to reflect the light away to start to cool it. Once the water is in the top half it will condense and turn into drinkable water with the salt left on the bottom. The silicone would still prevent the salt and clean water from mixing. When all the salt water is gone there is a white layer that can slide over the outside of the bottom so the bottle can cool. The bottom can be opened to release the salt and the top has an opening to drink the water. Tell me what you think about my idea, tear it apart and help me make it better, thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you make money when you've got hardly any to start with and legally can't work jobs? Posted: 06 May 2018 12:32 PM PDT Hello folks, "wannabe entrepreneur" here. I'm 15 at the moment, and I think the issue is clear. How on earth can I make money when I've got hardly any to start with? I have £600 ($810) saved up, but when adults do startups it's usually in the thousands. And what if I were to fail? That's 800 dollars I'm not getting back. I'm not trying to make a multi-million dollar industry leader, or a huge business. Whilst that's fine and all, it's just not going to happen, and all I'm really looking for is to make adult wage at an age where I'm not legally allowed to work yet. Anything in the thousands or ten thousands would be amazing, but I realize that may be overshooting my ambitions. If I could work a job for £10/hr for a 9-to-5 I would, probably drop in an extra hour or two of work if possible, but I can't. I'm not legally allowed to until I'm at least 16, and even then the minimum wage for 16-18 year olds in the UK is half that of an adult. I have motivation, I have the drive to do it, I just don't have an opportunity to do so. And "making an app" or "writing a blog" and "just happening" to hit it lucky and become rich off my ass just isn't something that would even happen. So, here's my question. How can I make semi-decent money when I legally can't? (Please don't suggest waiting until I'm 16! It's going to be an issue until I'm at least in my early 20s, judging from how the job market seems to love low salaries for those with low experience) [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for project check in buddy to stay on track Posted: 06 May 2018 11:26 AM PDT Would be great to have a check in buddy as we each work on our respective projects. I'm trying to start a property management company, and plan for other real estate related apps further out. We could bounce ideas off each other and stay somewhat accountable as we try to get our projects going. Web dev with b2b marketing experience and experienced rental property owner here. If you'd like to connect, send a message with what you're working on? [link] [comments]  |
| About having multiple instagram accounts Posted: 06 May 2018 11:23 AM PDT I'm currently trying to grow my accounts with the follow/unfollow method. Both accounts are on the same phone. Will instagram connect their actions together? I heard you shouldn't or are limited to following 100 people in an hour. If I follow 100 people in one hour on one account and log in to my other one to follow more people will instagram limit my actions? If I get banned on one account will it affect the other in any way? Anything I should be aware about with having more than 1 account on the same phone? I plan to create more in the future. Thanks, instagram beginner here. [link] [comments]  |
| Copying an unmade, unsold logo: legal? Posted: 06 May 2018 01:30 PM PDT So there's a design on this one website that offers free logos - free for the smaller variation and you would have to pay for the larger version if you wanted it. If I copied this logo almost to the "T", could I be sued for any kind of copyright infringement or anything like that? [link] [comments]  |
| Becoming a distributor for Chinese goods in UK? Posted: 06 May 2018 01:26 PM PDT Hey all, This will be a bit of a rambling post for sure, but Im just looking for some inspiration or maybe even a few words of wisdom while in the airport - my head is racing. I am in a fortunate enough position to be somewhat fluent in Mandarin, not fluent by any means but enough that it turns a lot of heads when I am there and I can hold a conversation quite well. In my university I was selected to go to China as part of an innovation academy, and it was probably the best thing that has ever happened to my career from a networking point of view. When in Shenzhen I came across the electrical market place, of course. It has everything you could ever dream of there, and it got me thinking why didn't we have anything like it at home? Obviously there is a lot of issues with it but the general concept - China are so far ahead with their technologies. One of the connections I made is a managing director in a large manufacturing company - I wont get into details. But essentially the products they sell are like things I have never seen before, almost as far as breath taking. He suggested to me that we should "partner up" and I set up a company back home and I can become the sole distributor for them here in the UK. My ex girlfriends father was a mens clothing distributor and I am thinking along the lines of what he had. So he: - approached stores. - Showed them all the samples that he had in his warehouse etc. - Took orders. - Delivered it to them in the next season. Technology is a thing that moves sooo quickly I am not sure if that would be feasible, but with some of the products that they are able and willing to supply could be large consumer items and appliances if required, right down to smart control facilities etc for hotels. I am just brain storming here, I am quite young and have absolutely no experience at all in this industry so just seeing is anyone in the supplier world that could offer some insights. [link] [comments]  |
| Does anyone lack focus. Or has anyone solved the problem of being undisciplined. Posted: 06 May 2018 09:38 AM PDT I have a simple ish goal. Earn an income online that isn't dead end. I've churned through a million business ideas or topics to study. Every 3 months I get a new idea to do something radically different. Has anyone else suffered with lack of focus and how did you deal with it? I something's think if I just stack at something for 3-5 years I'd be successful. But I usually get a few months in and they get distracted by a new goal. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for advice and/or opinions on my self-designed website and on forming partnerships. Posted: 06 May 2018 01:14 PM PDT My business: Mermaid Entertainment Base of Operations: Charlotte, NC Current Goals:
Hello! I started this business with the encouragement of my husband as it was always one of those "if only I could but of course could never because it's not realistic". Well, it's reality now and I'm loving it, hardships and all. I'm reaching out to this community because I've always loved the advice I find here and the support shown. Since middle school I've dabbled with photography, photoshop, html/css coding, and web design so I've used what little skill I have with those for my business. Since I'm not a professional I'm always worried my website could be better and so I fidget with it quite often, much to my husband's annoyance. I'd be grateful if some of you could look over my website and tell me your opinions or if you see room for improvement. My goal when designing my website was to make it as simplistic as possible so clients could easily find what info they need and book fast without a ton of walls in their way. My website: www.MermaidAni.com On to my other goal, I'll admit that while I do well at entertaining kids I'm a nervous wreck when I think about approaching businesses for partnerships. However, I am a mermaid after all and a mermaid needs a place to swim. Right now when someone books my services I travel to them but I'd love a place where I could regularly offer my favorite service: mermaid swim classes. It's been hard and so far none of the places I've reached out to have bothered to contact me back, not even to politely turn down my proposal. That's business though so I'm not discouraged and eager to reach out to the next business. If I'm honest, I'd love to form a partnership with one or several of the local hotels. They already rent out their "meeting rooms" for businesses to use. I'm hoping with the right offer I could partner with them to use their pools when they're not busy for my classes, I'm just not sure how to approach them. I'd love any pointers, tips, tricks, and general advice you guys could offer about how to approach the hotels the right way. If you have questions about my business or need more info I'd be more then happy to answer them. Thanks so much for your time guys, I really appreciate it. [link] [comments]  |
| Is it worth the effort to build a podcast or YouTube channel? Posted: 06 May 2018 01:08 PM PDT I'm a Fractional CTO and product strategy consultant. I've been putting a lot effort into writing articles on Medium, and getting speaking engagements at conferences and meetups. I've been considering starting either a podcast or a vlog. These episodes would largely be just me discussing various topics on technology, leadership, and product development. Does anyone have any experience with building a podcast or vlog? Is it possible to generate client leads this way? Is it otherwise worth the effort? [link] [comments]  |
| Question about starting a non-profit company? Posted: 06 May 2018 12:58 PM PDT I'm working on a t-shirt company that would send profits over to my war-torn country of Sri Lanka. My idea was to send half of all profits to them. My first idea was to contact individual schools and communities. But my friend thinks it would be better to send the money to well-known charity. Also, I am doing this thru Shopify and printful. My friend thinks this eats too much of my profit margins. Would it be smarter to find a cheaper t-shirt manufacture. I think print to sell, would make my life easier. I'm just going to promote thru social media. Maybe take business cards to events. Or I can buy a few t-shirts and sell them at events. any tips or advice would be helpful. thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2018 12:40 PM PDT I recently watched a interesting, albeit drawn out, webinar from Sam Ovens from Consulting.com where he described how he set up a consulting business with no prior experience or expertise. So I've been inspired by this and plan to read up about digital marketing, social media marketing and SEO optimisation in the hopes of reaching out to local businesses (to start off with) and becoming a successful consultant. Will books provide me with the information i need, of course in addition to gaining experience, to be a successful consultant in these areas? Or should i get a formal qualification? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Is there no demand for your product? Or are you just bad at selling? Posted: 06 May 2018 02:02 AM PDT You hear all the time that businesses don't do well because their product or service has no demand. However you also hear that businesses go under because people don't know how to sell and thus people don't purchase from them. If I create a product and it doesn't sell, how do I know the reason? My question is especially relevant for when you're creating your own product that can't be found anywhere else. [link] [comments]  |
| Options for recent graduate to start an online-only business Posted: 06 May 2018 12:25 PM PDT I currently live in the UK and I am just about to graduate from my engineering degree. Now engineering jobs in the UK are alright but they don't pay anywhere near as much as in America or other European countries. I spend very little money and consider myself a minimalist, planning on only using public transport to save money and I find very cheap deals for food and holidays, etc. I have worked out that once I have bought a tiny house (costing approx. $70,000), my expenses should be around $12,000 a year, let's say $15,000 a year to be comfortable. So my thing is that I want to travel a lot as I hate the weather in the UK and like to visit new places. So my plan was to either get a well paying job and save as much of my earnings as possible, then invest it all and retire at 40. OR I will start some sort of business that I can run online so that no matter what country I am in I can keep working and travelling at the same time. I would appreciate any help at all on fulfilling either one of these options. I have been doing Merch By Amazon for 9 months which is OK, I am tier 500, but it is inconsistent and not making enough money to live on. I think it is becoming oversaturated anyway, I'm not too hopeful of success on there, but it is an online business I can run anywhere in the world. I also know a lot about YouTube, advertising online, I have decent graphical design skills from the Amazon Merch work, I have looked a little at running a drop-shipping business. I am just not sure what is the way to go. Obviously I will get an engineering job first but pay will most likely not be that great, I would prefer to retire and/or travel as soon as I reasonably can. So I want a decent online idea to possibly do full time and be able to work abroad and invest my money and retire young. I would prefer to stay near the UK, the area in the UK I live is very cheap but I have considered moving country to maybe france, germany or spain as they seem to have higher salaries by quite a bit but there is the language barrier. I have considered moving to USA but that's complicated and very far from the UK. Thanks for any input. (Not planning on marriage or kids at all) I mainly want to try starting a small business online while working engineering and eventually work online full-time while travelling. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 May 2018 07:43 PM PDT It's for salesforce right now ... you just set it and forget it, It'll notify you of changes to your leads, news alerts about the companies that are in your lead database. Thinking of charging around $25/mo or so for this. What do you guys think? Anyone here interested? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 May 2018 09:29 AM PDT First a little background on me, I'm an industrial designer by trade that got a little jaded with the industry a few years back, and I have been travelling the world looking for my calling. My girlfriend is a Chinese national, and I have a pretty sweet multiple entry visa to China, so I've been travelling back and forth to China between other travel for the last couple years, and spending most of my time in Guangzhou while here. For this current trip, I've decided to take advantage of the full 90 days that my visa allows. By chance, the Canton Fair just happened to be in town so I registered as a buyer and checked it out... and wow! Crazy amount of stuff. Some of it good, some of it bad, I mostly focused on the motorcycle stuff because I have a strong grasp of that industry. In a back corner of the motorcycle section I found a Shenzhen manufacturer that mostly peddled in e-scooters, but they also had a prototype electric longboard that didn't require a controller. I jumped on and gave it a spin, and it's damn near magical! Real life magic carpet. I have a few little concerns, but I can tell the quality is decent, in fact: the controller-driven variant of this board has been available for over a year via a couple OEM's (the manufacturer didn't mention this, I found out through my own research) and has gotten good reviews from more than one youtuber. A quick competitive analysis has convinced me I could definitely make this into a sustainable venture if I play my cards right. I believe that if I brand this correctly, bring in some outside help where needed (graphic/web design, marketing consultation, etc), and find the right distribution networks, then I will avoid many of the mistakes that I think the current OEMs that sell the controller-variant are making, and I could potentially make this into a genuinely scalable business. The manufacturer is also very interested in my industrial design experience and claims to be more than willing to listen to my input for the next generation of this product. TL;DR: Found a product that I like, that I'm convinced has legs, is worth selling, and has potential for profit. My next steps as I see them:
THE QUESTIONS:
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| How do I get a better price in Alibaba? Posted: 05 May 2018 10:38 PM PDT So I'm into Bass fishing. Since it's an industry I'm familiar with I ordered 200 Bass Frog Lures from Alibaba in China. I landed them in the US for about $1.1 each. They sold slowly on eBay and eventually I got sick of them sitting around so I bundled them in a pack of 5 and sold 20 in a week. I probably broke even on the whole thing. It was more of an experiment than anything. I wanted to learn as much as I could with little expense. The problem with this is that I can't negotiate the price low enough to compete. For example I found some mugs that I know would sell. MOQ is 1000 and they're $1.2 each. But get this: the shipping alone is $2500! I could literally fly to China and pick them up myself for that price. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| title: Most effective way to validate a product with health professionals? Posted: 06 May 2018 07:53 AM PDT Hi guys, So we have designed a product to book walk in appointments (for a specific niche and medical speciality). We have an initial sketch of the product and we want to test it and also the business model with professionals in two selected countries (one in SEA, one in Europe) In your experience what is the best methodology to test/validate and record our assumptions, the product and the business model? Through a google form, a personal call, an interview? Any suggestion is more than appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
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