Forum Moderators: buckworks
1) Do good on-site SEO. Hope to get high ranking for specific terms over time.
2) Submit to shop aggregator sites and product feed to google.
3) CCP, specificly google adwords.
Not sure about OFF-SITE SEO. Mainly getting links. Most of the SEO stuff I've read is for blogs, ebooks, etc, but not clothing retail. They talk about writing articles and asking people to link to your site. It doesn't really seem practical or do-able for clothing retail. If anyone has actually done that, I would be interested to hear how it worked.
As far as getting links to my site, I end up just hoping that the first three things I listed will get a lot of customers over time, might post a few links here and there on the web.
Any thoughts?
You are probably in a good position to associate your brand name with some "mental value" by writing and distributing e-books and commenting on shopping-related(?) blogs.
Just hoping never worked for me :-(
Can you make your own brand for the items? Brand name searches are easier to rank for that terms like "t-shirt"
Adwords will get expensive too - unless you have a super narrow niche I would suggest other means.
Since you are doing SEO as well and clothing, have you thought about writing comparisons of products? Comparing the quality of certain brands to others, product comparisons, that kind of thing. That would go a long way for your SEO and makes for some interesting content.
Regarding brand name. I wonder if that would be beneficial even for a small time retailer. At the moment, I can only order small orders from my suppliers, so I don't think it's possible to get tags with my brand name sewn into the clothing, but once I start placing larger orders, I think I could do that.
Regarding affiliates. I'm not sure how that works. Get other to link to my site and I pay them a % of sales they generate? That's interesting, although I am not sure who the affiliates would be and how to find them. Or would they find me?
Regarding writing comparisons or articles. I want to do that. I'll have to think of something to actually write about and where to put it on the web. Will probably be easier to brainstorm once I actually get the store online full of products.
At the moment, I can only order small orders from my suppliers
Sounds hopelessly inefficient. You'll pay the highest prices. What will you do with the huge numbers of returned garments you'll get? About 6 years ago Walmart discussed selling clothing online and said they sold a ton of clothing but the the returns sapped almost all the profit.
Yes, you have to go niche, but virtually every online niche is filled. So are niches of niches!
Failing Brick/mortar clothing retailers, virtually all of whom have years of experience and better buying power than you, are rushing to build websites. If for no other reason, they're going online to dump their excess inventory cheaply.
I know two brainy young MBAs who are attempting to open an online niche clothing site and are failing terribly after 3 months live. (still early I know).
Their site is pretty good; they did everything very cheaply (rare for MBAs). But typical of MBAs they've attempted to differentiate their new site with a cookbook of faddish gimmicks. Like free returns and virtually free shipping. (Zappos stuff) The use the social networks that are so du jour: Twitter, Facebook and more.
They just misunderstood the difficulty of trying to shoe horn into an over-saturated niche. And I suspect they misunderstood the meager benefits and huge cost of Zappos-type gimmicks.
You actually put that very well.
That is what is wrong with the whole world today.
Everyone wants to "make money online" and is starting up a business on the web, yet they do not realise that there is only so much money to go around. We can't all make money online !
There are also lots of ebay people, upset with ebay starting up their own websites, some of those will be experienced with selling clothes on line.
Regarding affiliates. I'm not sure how that works. Get other to link to my site and I pay them a % of sales they generate? That's interesting, although I am not sure who the affiliates would be and how to find them. Or would they find me?
Yes, you pay them a % of the sale typically. You could setup a cart with affilate software built in or use a third party service like Shareasale. Shareasale will help you get affiliates - how productive they will be is another question.
As for your niche of niches - what are you passionate about? What would you spend months blogging about for no profit, because you have so much passion for it? What have you spend the last five years arguing about in a discussion forum? Because you will be working for many, many, many months (for nothing) to make a go of the site, and if you don't have passion for it then you WILL fail. Of course, the opposite is true too--- if you are the go-to person on the internet for Alternative Japanese Country/Western Goth clothing (or similar niche) then you might have a chance.
JSinger is mostly right - though I would not agree that all niches are totally filled. Well, they might be filled, but not all of them have a decent website. There is still opportunity out there, it is just harder to find.
If you think your little clothing site is going to generate "buzz" then you've probably read too many of those 1999 books on web marketing (think Superbowl ads or doggie sock puppets). We have a decently profitable site but frankly it never occurs to me that much of our business comes from anything that could be remotely defined as "buzz." We only get a bit of business from what used to be called "word of mouth advertising."
Hey, having octuplets only gets you buzz until some idiot announces his kid is floating around in a balloon.
I wonder if a small store could make enough profit just from shop aggregators and google product feed. Then any back links from bloggers or whatever would just be an SEO bonus.
Facebook and Twitter is another angle, as jleigh mentioned. I wonder how useful that would be for a small shop. I'll have to look more into that when the time comes.
I was just looking last night at the twitter pages of many of our competitors who, like us, jumped on that bandwagon in '09. Most posted a few times, perhaps offered a discount coupon to test response and then stopped posting altogether on twitter a few months ago.
Might work if you have a product with a "social" hook to it. Say, a hobby. But few products engender such a following. Does anyone really want to "follow" a seller of toilet seats, for example?
As a geezer, I should add that i'm totally dismayed by the Twitter thing. And my kids are too.
Unless your product is something that people want to follow, THEY AREN'T GOING TO FOLLOW IT. People don't log on to social media sites to shop, they log on to socialize. Products like magicJack and netTALK can be successful in social media because they're techy products that people LIKE, and like to talk about. But for most retailers selling a variety of stuff, ask yourself... is anyone really going to be passionate enough about the junk you're selling to want to talk about it or follow up and see what else you have?
For some businesses the answer is yes... but for most, the answer is no. A client of mine (against my advice) spent a few grand with a company that promised them the world in social media. This company offered to create and maintain facebook, twitter, etc. The client was selling deeply discounted one-season-off Prada/Fendi/Gucci/other high-end designer brands (the genuine stuff, not the knock-offs) and wanted to reach out to that audience. So they paid the money, and ... nothing happened.
Why? Well, basically for the exact reason I told them it wouldn't work. If you're the type of person who is buying those luxury brands, it's not because they actually look better than anything else out there, it's because of the name and the prestige/snob factor that goes with it. So why, if this is you, would you want to broadcast to everyone that you're buying them at 30 cents on the dollar from a wholesaler? You wouldn't ... because you don't want anyone to know.
When they finally understood it and focused on their internal SEO instead of wasting time fooling around with social media their business started to increase. Why the concept of "Lets do everything we can to reach people who are SEARCHING TO SPEND MONEY ON EXACTLY WHAT WE SELL" constantly loses to "Lets try to reach people who are online to talk to their friends in a back-door way" is beyond me, but new online retailers make that mistake every day.
Use their oversight to your advantage. Optimize your site for search engines, and get your products in every product feed you can find. It doesn't make any sense at all to try and reach people who "might" be interested in what you're selling, but probably aren't, when there are so many ways of putting your products in front of people who are actually LOOKING FOR THEM.
[edited by: lorax at 2:45 am (utc) on Jan. 13, 2010]
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