June 2017 - QL Tech

Most Impressive SEO Trends That Actually Came True

Posted on June 27, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

The last year 2016 was quite a roller coaster for search marketers due to substantial and unforeseen changes took place in paid search marketing, for both Google and Bing platforms. Taking into consideration these changes and their impacts, at the start of the year 2017, lot many people have published numerous posts regarding most prominent and top SEO trends to watch out for. Various predictions were made on SEO, search engine, and ranking algorithms. Now, we are halfway through the year 2017. The exciting part is most of the anticipated trends proved to be of significance for SEO.

Here we present the most talked SEO trends and how it proved their prominence in this year:

1. Video content is booming

People love audio-visual content over textual content. As predicted at the start of the year 2017, many established as well as newbie brands are banking their advertising campaigns on video content. With so many active social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat where people love to share their stories, how come brands stay behind this trend?

Crowdcart is quite prominent in the race of video advertising. Crowdcart helps to connect and engage with your audience through LIVE video. It enables to teach, share, and connect over webinars, Q&As, live courses, and summits.

Coming back to video advertisements, popular brand Coca Cola’s advertisement #LiftTheFeeling has gone viral on digital media. The video garnered over 20 million views (around 12+ million views on official YouTube page and around 9 million views on the Facebook page of Coca Cola) in just two days of the advertisement.

The ad titled ‘Elevator’ has been made under the ‘taste the feeling’ campaign keeping the Indian audience in mind. It is about a tale of togetherness between two strangers, a celebrity and a diehard fan. The video content focus on those two strangers who meet up in an elevator and coca-cola helps them to break the ice and make the connection between them. Since it was an elevator, they promoted it as ‘lift the feeling’. The amazing dance and music quality make video content more interesting.

Before the digital launch of the ad, teasers of the campaign sent the consumers in a dither guessing what is next. Creating curiosity amongst viewers, the launch on digital media had consumers liking, sharing, and commenting persistently, which resulted in greater engagement between consumers and the brand.

Later on, the ‘Taste the Feeling’ campaign was featured by more than 200 countries across TV, outdoor, print, retail signage and more.

Here is the curated list of the most popular video ads (visual marketing) on YouTube in the year 2017:

Samsung: This is a phone (March/April 2017)

A Better Super Bowl | NFL Hyundai Super Bowl LI (February 2017)

2017 Kia Niro | “Hero’s Journey” (February 2017)

2. User-generated content is shared and perceived most

If you serve what your audience is seeking, you are surely going to rock with all your campaigns. But, how to know what they are looking for? There is a marketing gimmick called user-generated content. User-generated content (i.e. UGC) comprise any form of content that is created by users and consumers about a brand or product. Ask users indirectly what they want and accordingly tailor your content marketing and SEO content.

Especially on Instagram, UGC is highly prevalent, shared, and perceived. UGC generates more engagement on social media and from there attract more organic traffic towards the website.

According to HubSpot, 76% of individuals surveyed said they trusted content shared by “average” people more than by brands, and nearly 100% of consumers trust recommendations from others.

Let us take a glance over how SEO can be benefited with the help of user-generated content.

Wayfair, an online furniture store, is one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home decor. Wayfair is running a fun UGC campaign since 2016 to boost its online sales. Basically, this campaign intends to let customers display their online shopping experiences using hashtag #WayfairAtHome. Many buyers who did online shopping posted millions of content using this hashtags. This hashtag is highly popular on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. And, in June 2017 also, people are highly using this hashtag to convey their experiences. Lots of UGC is available for this brand and it is cashing on it through varied advertisements.

Here, are some of the recent examples posted on social media:

Whatever hashtags are posted on social media by users, they all are reposted by the brand with relevant hyperlinks that can drive organic traffic and boost conversions. The user-generated content serves two-way benefits – it acts as testimonials plus it provides an exact idea of what they want and how they feel about the specific product/service.

3. Intense content paves a smooth road for SEO

“Don’t optimize your keywords, optimize your content”. This was emphasized as one of the top SEO trends for the year 2017. Unlike past years, the focus has shifted on comprehensive and long-form content for SEO to provide value to the readers. On the other hand, search marketers can also have a higher number of Backlinks and internal links in the intense and long-form content, which eventually boost their SEO. Airstream is a popular and iconic American brand, dealing in Travel Trailers and Touring Coach. Their policy is “Let’s not make any changes, let’s make only improvements!” They well applied their philosophy for their content to boost their conversions. They were not much worried about the number of visitors, but their real challenge was their conversions.

According to Hileman, the team needed content that would appeal to people who were higher up in the funnel. They did take help of lifecycle content (by developing gated and lifestyle-centred eBooks, revamped newsletters) to boost their conversions. The new content they created included guides — such as “Road Trips Across the U.S.” and “Farms & Wineries” — as well as ebooks like “Why Airstream?”

Their textual content was beautified by adding image content. Earlier they discovered that inclusion of an image of the cover of the eBook resulted in much higher conversion rates than just a text-heavy page. Later on, they also realized that video headers on a landing page distracted people from performing an action on their CTA buttons. Minor updates resulted in huge conversions, their brochure download conversion rates surprised and satisfied them with good traffic.

4. Personal branding – verified as an undisclosed SEO strategy

Branding makes a huge difference in your overall online impression and foothold. Personal branding is an unexplored yet very powerful tool for your SEO. The biggest benefit it provides is the trustworthiness of the brand. In the digital marketing field, there are some giants who have established their personal branding very well. People just trust their offerings by their names.

Examples include:

Neil Patel: there is hardly anyone who hasn’t heard about him for SEO and digital marketing. He has consistently grown his personal brand through blogging and guest posting on sites like Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc., etc. Owner of neilpatel.com, quicksprout.com, and crazzyegg.com. Also, a co-founder of hellobar.com and KISSmetrics.com

Rand Fishkin: He is the CEO and Co-Founder of SEOMoz, a leader in the field of SEO tools, resources & community. Furthermore, he is the host of Whiteboard Friday, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, co-founder of Inbound.org, and serves on the board of the presentation software firm, Haiku Deck.

Gary Vaynerchuk: He runs VaynerMedia. He is regarded as one of the well-known entrepreneur personal brands. He’s active on Snapchat and YouTube and his podcasts are everywhere on the internet.

Jeff Bullas: His blog receives over 5 million visitors a year. He helps businesses and personal brands with digital marketing services that include blogs, social media marketing, and search engine optimization.

Larry Kim: He is the founder and Chief Technology Officer at Mobile Monkey. In addition, he is regarded as the most influential PPC expert.
No doubt, building a personal brand takes a lot of efforts and consistency matters. But, one should try it out persistently. A strong and recognizable personal brand can attract tons of organic traffic.

5. AMP does make a significant difference in your SEO

As we already know that Google favours the websites which have switched over to AMPs.

According to Google, more than 50% of search queries, globally, are now take place from mobile devices.

Here’s how 2Dogs Media churn out huge results from improvised SEO due to AMP in place.In November 2016, there were no AMP pages indexed on the website. On 2^nd December 2016, they implemented accelerated mobile pages on their WordPress website. They also submitted a new sitemap into Google Search Console so that Google can easily notice the site. On the first day of AMP installation, they experienced website traffic on all 14 AMP indexed web pages.

Not only this, other massive benefits include:

Within 6 months of AMP implementation, observed much higher CTR on AMP pages as compared to traditional pages
Improved website speed (earlier non-AMP page load time was 11 seconds which went down to 2.2 seconds for AMP pages, with reduced page size and reduced requests)
40% of the traffic on AMP pages was organic (Excluding referral, social and direct traffic sources)

The gist of the entire story is if a greater portion of your traffic comes from mobile, implement AMP NOW! However, even if your traffic sources include both desktop and mobile devices, then also we suggest you go for AMP. This is because we cannot deny the fact that mobile optimization is already extremely important in SEO strategies in 2017.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The above-mentioned SEO trends are just a portion of the chunk of anticipations. There is a high reliance on other trends as well, which are: voice search, user intent, the influential role of structured data and schema implementation, the influence of artificial intelligence on working of algorithms, local search, cross-channel marketing, and optimization for user-intent. As a general tip, continue to optimize your online presence to boost your SEO.

In case you feel something else can change the scenario of SEO in the rest of the year 2017, do drop in your words in the comments section, we would love to hear from you!

Instagram – Boost Your Social Media & Digital Marketing

Posted on June 21, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

Social media – who doesn’t know about it? In this digital tech savvy world, social media has gained a massive toehold. Various social media platforms are explored in-depth for digital marketing. No doubt, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social platforms for business; however, various platforms, including Instagram, are preferred for various marketing activities; they are:

Facebook dominates among all social media marketing platforms as a source of social traffic and sales.

Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. The name Instagram is derived from a combination of “Instant Photo” and “Telegram.” Instagram, an incredible social media platform for sharing pictures, was launched in the Spring Season of 2010. In a less than a decade, this platform has grown into a powerful social media force, not to be overlooked.

Since 2012, Instagram is owned by Facebook. This acquisition of Instagram by Facebook shows where digital marketing trends are heading. Since both social media platforms are owned by the same owner, you can easily connect these two to boost your digital marketing strategies.

In the recent past, Instagram has literally competed extremely well with the dominant top four platforms viz. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Instagram has more than 500 million users.

Instagram is a great platform for online marketing since it is more popular on mobile; moreover, mobile is gaining huge traction day by day by both users and search engines.

People are prioritizing visual content over plain, and hence, Instagram is considered as one of the most effective social media marketing platforms for the coming days. As a business owner, you should use Instagram to market your products and services. Apart from product images, you can also share videos. Its ‘LIVE recording and sharing’ feature are getting way popular bit by bit.

Explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform

Social media management starts with the base of your followers and followings. To boost your Instagram marketing, first of all, you need to boost your followers on a constant and stable basis. The more people are aware of your brand, the greater your chances are to potentially reach your target audience.

Let’s run through the tips and tactics on how to explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform to make your brand more popular.

1. Hashtags – use unique, crisp, meaningful, and attractive

Hashtags are not only important for Twitter; they also play a prominent role on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and google plus.

According to Dominique Jackson, the beauty of hashtags for Instagram is they make your content discoverable and increase your chances of engagement.

It’s a big way of how users can find you through their mobile Instagram searches. As compared to Twitter, where you’re not restricted by character count. You can include a few tags in your posts to get connected. While deciding on the hashtag for branding, it is advisable to create brand-specific hashtags. Try to keep it as unique and crisp as possible.

Make usage of both sorts of hashtags; brand-specific hashtags and community-specific hashtags. Brand hashtags help you to popularize your brand and community hashtags help you to become more discoverable.

Try multiple variants of hashtags such as brand-specific hashtags, general hashtags, and trending hashtags, to get noticed in searches.

Examples of brand specific hashtags are:
#PutACanOnIt—Red Bull
#ShareaCoke—Coca Cola
#SpeakBeautiful – Dove
#TweetFromTheSeat—Charmin
#OreoHorrorStories—Oreo
#WantAnR8—Audi

An ideal general hashtag should be prepared with two words over a single word to make it meaningful e.g. rather than #QL, #AskQL is a better hashtag.

2. Emojis – use the right Emojis to keep your audience engaged

In any sort of online communication, Emojis is the best substitute for the absence of facial expression, tonal inflection, and body language.

Nearly 50 per cent of all captions and comments on Instagram now have an emoji or two.

The same source has mentioned that posts with Emojis bring 17% higher interaction rates on Instagram.

Based on the fact that 80% of smartphone users regularly use Emojis in their daily communication, their use has been quoted as the highest growing ‘language’ in some of the countries across the globe. Worldwide brands are obviously energized and enthusiastic to cash on this new form of communication.

3. Interaction – consistently interact with your followers

Once you get follower/s, do not shy away to stay engaged. Constantly post impressive content which your followers find relevant to their interest and business. Avoid throwing random posts, i.e. once in a week or ten in a go, as far as possible. At least, twice a day posting is requisite. Once your followers start increasing, you can start posting three to four times a day. Consistency matters most!

According to Anthony Carbone, “If you stick to a niche and show authenticity and passion in your posts, you will find a strong following”

The more people you can dynamically involve and persuade to comment on your content (images/videos), the better for you. Since it will inculcate the interest for others who want to contribute or comment on your content as well.

A good example of how to stay engaged with your customers is well set by Starbucks. It is considered as one of the top brands on Instagram. Starbucks often appreciates their followers/customers by giving a shout-out with cool images. This is how they had updated their Facebook cover image using Instagram post.

4. Networking – create a positive community

Once you will have an active profile, you will surely start getting followers of your niche. But the main question here is retention! You need to retain them as your dedicated followers.

This is, in fact, the most important, most tricky, and most significant matter for any social media account. You need to build a network of your domain and keep them engaged. Interact with them, share their posts, give opinion/comments on their posts, ask them relevant questions, reply to their questions, and keep having all such sort of communication. In addition, stay away from controversial posts. It can badly impact your brand value. Build a vast network of your industry and create a positive community through your posts and engagement.

Follow your followers and work hard to turn your following into followers.

5. Amount of information – do not bore your audience with information overload

No doubt consistency is inevitable, but if it lacks harmony and relevancy of content, it results in either spamming or information overload. Keep your frequency correct and consistent. Rather than preaching them, engage with them. It’s better to ask sometimes, they should feel being valued. Dig out meaningful interaction from them.

The ideal proportion of posts based on followers suggested by industry experts are:

6. Free tools – make the most use of Instagram marketing tools that are free

Instagram also provides free analytics tools for business profiles; prudently and sensibly make the most use of them to market your products and services.

For example, “insights”, an analytical tool, provides you access to engagement data. If your account is initially signed up as a personal account for your business, do get switched to a business profile. That’s how you can cash advantage of the free tools that businesses use to track the shape of their brand on Instagram. ‘Insights’ assists you understand your audience, provides you data on posts with most impressions, engagements, and shares. Ultimately, you will conclude which posts are effective and which ones are not working well with your audience.

With SocialBakers, you can get a FREE report on the most engaged Instagram posts. If your Instagram followers are below 25,000, you can use Simply Measured to check your highly popularized posts.

Alternatively, there are many other scheduling tools available. With the help of tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Autogrammer, and others post your content when your audiences are online and earn more engagement.

7. Promotion – utilize cross-posting function

As a business, one normally stays active and present on all possible platforms. Now, practically speaking, not all your Twitter followers are your LinkedIn buddies and not all your Instagram followers know about your presence on Google Plus.

Here, to expand your relevant reach and knock your target audience from all possible angles, you need to do cross-promotion of your own posts.

A research conducted by Harvard Business School reported that retailers using cross-media marketing are more profitable than those that use only one channel for promotion.

Invite your followers from other networks to visit your Instagram profile and build your network. Whatever posts get better engagement on Twitter or Facebook, repost them on Instagram too and vice-versa.

8. Content – repurpose content from other related sources

As stated in earlier paragraphs, effective and successful Instagram marketing

needs consistent posts related to your products and services. It is well obvious that every time coming up with creative and engaging posts is not as easy as it seems. That’s where repurposing content or curating content offers a hand of help.

As per Amanda DiSilvestro, Content repurposing is your hidden online marketing gem.

It’s absolutely fine to use other content which is relevant to your products and services provided you either have tagged or mentioned the original poster. Tagging is the best way, you need to give the credit to the original creator, and that’s how it becomes a completely ethical marketing practice and does not fall under the black clouds of plagiarism.

Tagging provides you with another major benefit of engagement. You may receive like or report from the person whom you have tagged and your post can easily reach to their audience. You need to ensure that the posts which you wither repurpose or curate are relevant to your followers.

9. Engage with influencers – you need them!!

According to KISSmetrics, 70% of Instagram users have already looked up various brands on the platform and actually want to consume their content

Here comes the power of Instagram influencers in the picture. Instagram beats all other massive social networks like Facebook and Twitter when it comes to influencer marketing. This is because the other platforms share information whereas Instagram is about sharing experiences with the help of visual content.

Your content shared, acknowledged, or praised by any influencer can embark a real positive image on your followers.

To reach on the peak in no time, we suggest you make use of the tool, Revfluence. The Revfluence platform enables you to create original content with influential content creators that can drive new customers and followers for your brand.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

If you have an online business, why can’t you have a strong social media presence too? Social media marketing via Instagram can assist you to achieve your targeted business goals with much of the ease.

Instagram has very dedicated users, who often use it daily. It provides a great social media marketing platform to reach potential customers across the world. Use Instagram extensively and appropriately, and grow bigger!

Tips for the startup: Outsourcing to freelancers

Posted on June 13, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

Being a startup, one has to face many challenges in the initial period. Normally, startups face common concerns like lack of finance, inadequate resources, high employee turnover, inefficient time management, and lesser projects in hand. However, the journey from a startup to an established brand isn’t much hard-hitting or unattainable, but it needs a good amount of patience, analytical skills, and timely execution of planning.

The biggest challenge for any startup is to strike a balance between providing value and utilizing limited resources in an effective manner.

benefit from outsourcing and freelancing Startup

Startups aim to provide value in terms of innovation, quality, and convenience, albeit having limited resources and may be facing intense competition to be a pioneer in the market. In the initial period, startups can’t afford to recruit a lot of many employees. They employ people based on project requirements. And hence, they prefer an alternative approach that many other companies have actually utilized during their startup phase, i.e. outsourcing. Outsourcing some of the secondary tasks to other companies or freelancers can help startups to meet deadlines with minimal cash outflow.

How outsourcing and freelancing can help startups?

Most of the startup entrepreneurs prefer to outsource some of their tasks to the freelancers or hire dedicated resources for other than core tasks during the project tenure.

Outsourcing of some of the tasks provides several benefits to startups, as listed below:

1. Focus on organizational growth

Entrepreneurs can pay special attention to core tasks if their secondary tasks are outsourced to experts / dedicated resources. As an entrepreneur, you must experience the constant pressure to stay on top of industry trends, keep updated with and ahead of your competitors, and look forward. At times, freelancing, freelancer are blessings in disguise.

Most popular business tasks preferred for outsourcing are

Social media marketing
Customer services
Search engine optimization
Content marketing/copywriting
Web development and coding
Web designing
Accounting and bookkeeping
Payroll processing
Tax preparation and filing
Event management

Depending upon organizational core function, management decides what tasks are better to outsource. For example, if you are a digital marketing agency, you can opt for outsourcing payroll processing, accounting and tax filing tasks. On the other hand, if you are into the accounts and finance sector, you can outsource website development, website designing, and online marketing.

2. Increase inefficiency

When non-core tasks are outsourced, your productive time can be focused on organizational core tasks. Moreover, you can get done your secondary tasks from experts and skilled professionals. Furthermore, there are some of the special benefits of outsourcing. Freelancers are stoutly dependent on five-star client feedback and mouth-to-mouth advertising. In such cases, delivering high-quality projects on time is their key concern.

Most of the freelancers handle one client at a time in order to provide quality output and maintain their dependability, so you’re at the centre of their attention. So as a whole, outsourcing tasks to skilled freelancers increase the organization’s efficiency.

3. Reduction in risks

An underperforming employee is a significant cost to the company. Because they either fail to deliver timely or provide the output that is below par.

According to HR, it can take a while to get rid of an underperforming employee. In case, an organization has an obligatory long-term contract with a service provider, it can be complex and costly to avoid it if you need to.

When you prefer outsourcing, it reduces that risk, particularly for short-term arrangements while you see how a freelancer works. If a company is not satisfied with the output or behaviour of a freelancer, it has no obligation to continue with that resource or hire them again beyond the original contract.

4. Savings on cash outflows

The decision of outsourcing is a major strategic one for most companies since it involves evaluating the potential cost savings against the consequences of a loss in control over the product or service. You can employ the best and most talented workforce as freelancers within your restricted budget to get done technical tasks. Outsourcing costs form a part of your variable costs and hence your fixed costs remain static regardless of total output.

Steps to successful outsourcing and freelancing for startups

According to Richard Branson, everything in your business can be outsourced, if you are not emotionally attached to doing it all.

Are you ready to outsource your non-core or technical tasks to freelancers? Here are the handy tips on how to find a perfect freelancer to whom you can outsource.

Determine the task which you want to outsource
Search for freelancers on sites like Elance, Fiverr
Check the credentials and past work of freelancers
Establish procedures and benchmarks to get them on board
Set expectation levels with respect to work, timeliness, quality, and payment
Stay in touch with them during the project tenure and provide them required assistance
Take follow-up on time to time basis
Provide feedback

Steps-For-outsouring-and-freelancing-Startup-

Closing thoughts on outsourcing and freelancing

Most of the millennial today prefer to take up freelance projects as compared to fix the 9to5 job. This trend is growing and is projected to show an upward shift in the coming future. A number of online services such as Elance-oDesk, upwork, BidModo and others serve as virtual marketplaces for contractors and business owners to connect and begin working relationships. Future of freelancers is indeed bright and the time is not far that they will establish themselves as an entrepreneur based on the outsourced projects in hand.

Startups should take the best possible advantage of this trend and establish themselves as a strong brand in an optimal manner. Here are a few examples of large startups that have thrived using this strategy to launch their highly-valued businesses:

Skype
Klout
Appsumo
Slack
Staff.com
GitHub
MySQL
Net2Text
MindSpark
Mailburn
Opera

Closing thoughts on outsourcing and freelancing Startup

Feel free to share your insight in the comments box with regards to the trends of outsourcing, freelancing, entrepreneurship and startups. We’d love to hear from you.

How To Setup an eCommerce Store In Australia?

Posted on June 6, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

This post is by guest author, Umair Qureshi. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.

Australia is the 7th largest economy in the Asia-Pacific region and the 12th largest in the world. Since the last two decades, Australia has enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth, a result that is reflected in the per capita GDP of the country (the fifth highest in the world today). World Bank Group ranks Australia as the 15th easiest country to set-up and runs a business. Furthermore, the establishment process of e-commerce stores is so easy that you can set up a new business in just two days. Here, we shall focus on the process and potential hurdles of the establishment of e-commerce stores in Australia.

Establishment of an eCommerce store in Australia

For people who like to crunch numbers, here are some interesting statistics and facts pertaining to the Australian economy and eCommerce scenario in perspective:

Australia’s eCommerce sales were more than $20 billion in 2016 and, are estimated to exceed $24 billion by 2018.

Australian eCommerce customer demographics are mostly dominated by the youth with the age curve around 30 years. This means a somewhat limited market as of now. However, this also implies that there is a huge potential for growth in the upcoming years. The number of online buyers is steadily increasing. At the moment, the number of online transactions is low, but the cart size is on the rise. All these cumulatively indicate that more and more people are comfortable with online shopping.

Australia is fortunate in terms of eCommerce and online business because it has a clear-cut high demographic yield that responds well to the market. 90% of online transactions in Australia involve three or fewer brands. This can also be interpreted as brand loyalty because customers trust the brand for the quality of products/services and remain loyal to the chosen brand. Therefore, it is important that an online store should establish itself as a trustworthy brand in the market.

Now, running an eCommerce store in the competitive Australian market is not that easy. Although there are a number of platforms that streamline the process of setting up and managing online stores, you as the owner/manager should also be well versed in the relevant fields such as logistics, referencing, and customer management.

So, if you wish to launch and manage an online store in Australia, read through this blog. This blog will help you to avoid the hurdles that have the potential to sink many online stores.

The process to Follow to Establish an E-commerce Store in Australia

The success of any business is dependent on proper planning and following a well-prepared plan. Setting up an eCommerce store in Australia is a step-by-step process that requires thorough planning and attention to minute details.

I will now present several important pointers that will help you come up with proper planning and action items for your business setup process.

1. Choose Your Legal Form

Opening an online store begins with the legal recognition of the brand/store. You will have to define the legal status of your store before registering it with the relevant services such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). This authority allows a registration number to your business. You could choose any legal status you see fit. However, I recommend that you opt for being registered as a self-employed entrepreneur or a sole proprietor. It is always best to consult an expert (an accountant or a business advisor) at this point.

2. Draft a Business Plan

A business plan documents all the required details about how your store will be established and how will it function. Many people skip this important step because creating a business plan appears too cumbersome to follow. However, following this step allows you to analyze your action plan and ensures that your project is on the right track at all times.

3. Choose A Domain Name

The choice of the domain name pretty much determines the future of your eCommerce store. Plan to invest several hours in discovering the right domain name for your store. A number of online tools (like Mashable, shopify) help you in choosing the best name for your new store. Remember that your domain name has to be catchy and unique.

4. Choose Your Hosting Service

Very few people actually know how to set up and manage servers. Even if you are among the very few of such technical experts, it is still a tedious and time-consuming process for you. I recommend that you opt for managed cloud-based hosting for your online store. This way you will be able to sidestep all server related issues (including security) and focus on your business full-time.

You are definitely wondering: which hosting provider to choose for your e-commerce store? A very legitimate question indeed! Choosing the right eCommerce web host, as Cloudways helps you by providing:

● 24x7x365 chat supports so that you are able to get quick help at all times.
● A powerful stack comprising of high-performing and optimized caching technologies.
● Auto-scalability with almost zero downtime.
● Dispersed data centres to reduce latency and target your audience more effectively.

5. Create the Store

There are many platforms in the market which you can use to open an online store. Depending on your requirements and technical expertise, you can choose Woo Commerce, Magento, Prestashop, Opencart, or others. Some of these platforms offer turnkey e-commerce solutions, while others require extensive design and development skills. Other platforms request for HTML and CSS skills. A competent developer who specializes in eCommerce solutions could prove to be an ideal partner.

6. Standards and Technical Regulations

Suppliers and manufacturers have a legal and moral obligation to ensure that their products are safe for consumers to use. All products must comply with the appropriate safety standards, contain clear instructions for proper use, and include warnings about probable abuse. If a product does not meet the mandatory standards as set by Australian authorities, there is a risk of legal actions against the business.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) requires compliance with product safety, information standards, and the prohibition of dangerous goods as declared in the Trade Practices Act. The “Fair Trade Offices” also play an important role in the safety of products.

7. Finding and Dealing with Suppliers

As an eCommerce store owner, reliable suppliers should be of utmost and important priority. For this, explore your industry to discover wholesalers. Once you have the suppliers lined up, you need to set up logistics.

Many people prefer handling the supply lines through the post office. However, third-party logistics partners such as DHL are also popular business partners. Whatever your choice is, it is essential to negotiate an advantageous contract in your favour.

8. Manage the Inventory

No customer, willing to buy, likes the “Out-of-Stock” notice. To avoid this (embarrassing) situation, it is important that you pay close attention to inventory management. This is an ongoing process and requires good relationships with your suppliers and logistics partners.

Sales data analysis is an important part of inventory management. Over a period of time, you will acquire the skill of juggling between often contrasting requirements of inventory management.

9. Define (Legal) T&C and Policies

Well defined and easy to understand policies are one of the essential requirements for any eCommerce store. Many customers often check out the payment and return policies prior to finalizing their purchase decision.

In order to come up with an ethical and concrete set of terms and conditions, ask a lawyer to go through your draft of T&C and policies. He will ensure that your draft complies with the existing Australian consumer protection laws.

10. Build Your Online Presence

“You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you have to create traffic.”- Joel Anderson, Walmart CEO

Once your e-commerce site/store is ready, you have to build your online presence in order to reach new customers and build rapport with them. This step demands careful planning and working with vendors and suppliers so that you could build a solid and trustworthy online presence on social media channels. This necessarily involves good digital marketing strategies that include an email campaign, a customer loyalty program, a blog on a persistent basis, and a proactive presence on multiple social networks.

Closing thoughts – Now Realize Your Dream

As I mentioned earlier in this article, Australia is the country where people are not at all stranger to online shopping. Proper planning and meticulous attention to details are the real keys to the success of your online store in Australia.