What is your business’ lifestyle?
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle, or a story that can be told to describe itself. Some businesses have an easily identifiable lifestyle, like a hotel or travel brand. Brands that are lush in experience can readily show what time spent at those businesses may be like. Businesses that are less focused on vacationer hospitality, and say tax preparation or other professional services, have a more challenging task when determining how to visualize the story of their brand. While difficult, telling a brand story about a hypothetical client success story about a business that is up to date on all of their paperwork, and how that business can now focus on their core operations. Every organization has a story to tell, a way to show how their operations work, and a community that it exists in. Even a vending machine exists in a place, and that place has a story, and people that live within it. Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and thus, a story to tell.
You may already be aware of lifestyle bloggers, or lifestyle social media influencers, or people who create content surrounding the life they live. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers generally work with brands to make content that promotes products and showcases how to use them. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers also typically rely on monetizing the audience that follows them, either through advertising, brand collaborations, sponsorships, or events. If you think of your business in the same way, you can start to think of how your business entity might tell these same stories. Are you a retail storefront? You can make the same how-to content about the products you sell that an influencer might make on their own. You can even hire lifestyle content creators to work with you on how to best create a brand lifestyle.
So what is your lifestyle? Think about your core business operations. What do you do and what industry are you in? Do you sell things, offer services to others, or are you a community organization? Where are you located, do you work online? Think holistically about your business, brand or organization and really zero in on what makes it what it is. Your business isn’t just a list of products, think about what people who shop at your store do with what they buy.
Now that you have an idea about what the lifestyle of your business, brand or organization is, you can begin to create content surrounding that thesis. Posting on social media is a great way to reach existing customers, social media platforms will also share your content algorithmically, heling you reach new people. Blogging is another great way to communicate with customers. Blogging helps you go a little more in depth on a subject than a social media post, and can also be shared by Facebook or email. Blog posts will also be indexed by search engines, so people can find your business when they search online.
Think in terms of campaigns or content franchises. A dentist can create a campaign about low sugar foods and post new recipes regularly. A bank could run a quarterly spotlight about their business banking clients, showcasing the successes and stories of their clients. The best content franchises can be run evergreen and are simple to understand. Don’t start by thinking you’ll do something daily or weekly, because you might find that it’s hard to generate that number of ideas while also running a business or organization.
You don’t need to be trendy in your communication or follow what lifestyle bloggers and influencers do. Stay true to what your business does, or what your operations are. By communicating to your customers through storytelling and valuable content, you will show that you know what you’re talking about, and if your business operates well, customers will return. Lifestyle content keeps customers engaged with your brand, because it gives people something to read, watch or listen to that is related to, or presented by, your brand, but not necessarily explicitly transactional, like only posting an image of a product and asking for people to buy it. When the time for a purchase decision arises, your business will be in you customers’ minds, because they have been engaging with your lifestyle content.
Lifestyle content and multimedia storytelling benefits from longevity. Stick to what works and adapt to what doesn’t. Pay attention to what your customers say and how they engage with your content. Monitor analytics provided from your social media or website accounts, and let them tell you where to potentially focus. Be regular, but don’t burn yourself out. After some time, you’ll begin to notice a depth and range to what you’ve been posting and your business’ lifestyle will start to be readily communicated to anyone visiting your online or marketing presence.
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and a story to tell. Communicating in a way that draws customers in by showcasing your operations and community will go much further than simply stating what you sell. Show existing and new customers how your business operates, give people how-to’s or walkthroughs to inform them beyond a product listing, keep engaged with your local community and how your industry interacts with it, visualize a lifestyle for your audience and how what you sell will help them achieve it. Lifestyle content is simply showing people what your business does in a way that communicates more information than price and purchase. What is your business, brand or organization’s lifestyle?
Every business should be blogging
Blogging. Blogs. Blog. What is a blog? Blogs are online journals or informational websites displaying information in reverse chronological order. Blogs are articles that you publish on your business’ website. Blogs can be about your business, what you do, your business processes, what you sell, your announcements, and your plans. Blogs can be posted as often as you want, and they’re great for speaking directly to your customers, as well as for finding new people to inform about your business. Blog about your location and where you operate. You can really blog about whatever, as long as it is relevant to your business. All you need is a website, and most website platforms have blogging built in.
Simply put, blogging will increase traffic to your business’ website. By publishing regular blog posts, you are creating new information rich webpages for search engine to index, and if your blog posts are relevant to your business, search engines will reward you with traffic. Search engines “scan” the entire Internet often, mapping out domains and keeping track of website quality. Blog posts are pages that people like to click on when using search engines, as they generally answer a question, explain something, give a how-to, or announce news. By keeping your blog posts high quality, search engines will notice when people stay on your website and re-visit it. These are indicators that search engines use when deciding who to rank at the top of a search page.
Your business can blog as much as you’re able to, and anything helps. You can blog every once in a while, and it’ll still grow the amount of you business’ website pages indexed by search engines. Blogging more frequently is rewarded with more traffic because search engines will begin to consider your business’ website to be a good source of information that they can rely on to send traffic to. As reported by Oberlo, “Businesses that produce 16 or more blog posts per month experience 3.5 times more traffic than blogs that post fewer than four posts.”
Blogging is a common practice in big business that can easily be adopted by any small business, nonprofit, artist or organization. Brands often announce product launches on their own company blogs, and companies like Facebook use blogging to inform their business customers on how to use Facebook for business and announce new ways to advertise. These companies use content marketing because it works, and is an effective means of corporate communication. According to Oberlo, “86% of content marketers use blogs as part of their marketing strategy.”
Not only does blogging give you the ability to speak directly to your customers, maintaining a regular blog for your business is an excellent way to find new customers organically when people search online. When blogging, use phrases that people may be searching when making purchasing decisions. If you provide a service to a local area, be sure to mention the specific towns that you provide service for, and when someone searches for that service you provide along with their town, you’ll start to show in results the more you blog and mention that phrase. If you’re a pizzeria in the northwest Chicago suburbs, write blog posts including your service and location, like “pizza delivery in NW Chicago suburbs."
When search engines think of your business’ website as a good source of information, they will send relevant local traffic to it. This new traffic consists of people who are searching real questions on search engines, and are actually curious about the topic since they made the search (as opposed to being served an ad). If your website provides good information and is easy enough to navigate, people who find your website via search can become new customers. Again, Oberlo published in a study, “55% of marketers gained new customers because of blogging.”
Blogging is free and easy to do. Start by writing about what your business does. Write about your industry and how these things are relevant to the area in which you serve. Post your blog posts onto your social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and your existing customers will be able to start reading your posts right away. As you post on you blog, keep posting them to social media, and you’ll begin to get even more traffic. Blogging is the best free way to build your business’ brand and communicate to new and existing customers. What will your first post be?
Are you advertising on Facebook yet?
Facebook’s advertising platform is probably the best way to reach customers right now. If haven’t yet tried using Facebook to advertise, then you should consider incorporating it into your marketing strategy, as you can reach exactly who you need to as a cost effective price. You can “boost” posts within Facebook’s app, within a few simple steps. Just tell Facebook where you want your ad to show up, and to whom. Facebook lets advertisers access their knowledge of Facebook users and shows ads to the people who are most likely to engage with an ad. Since Facebook makes money when ads are successful, they are highly motivated to help you achieve your business goals.
Facebook lets you “boost” posts that you’re already making. You don’t have to create an individual ad, or think up a catchy slogan or memorable concept. You can just promote the posts that you already make, visible on your profile, putting them in the newsfeeds of others who don’t follow you. As Facebook owns Instagram, you can advertise on both platforms seamlessly. You can boost your posts within the app simply by clicking the blue “Boost Post” button beneath a post. This will bring up a menu where you tell Facebook your objective for the ad, who to target, and how much you want to spend.
Objectives for Facebook and Instagram ads are simply telling Facebook what you want to get out of your ad spend. Do you just want more engagement on the posts on your business profile? Do you want to gain more awareness from people who don’t follow you? Do you only want to reach people who already follow, and are already engaged with your business? Do you just want video plays, or are you trying to optimize for a click-through to your webstore, ending in a sale? Keeping your objective in mind while advertising will help you achieve your goals, while minimizing wasted ad spend.
When you start to advertise more on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook’s algorithm will begin to learn who responds to your ads the most, and start to show your ads to them more organically. You can also save a custom audience of people who respond to your ads, or even those who make a purchase after clicking an ad, to target future ads later. Making a custom audience like this helps you target your most engaged customers, in a cost effective way. You can also create a “look-a-like” audience of this group or people, where Facebook creates a new audience of new customers who are similar to those who already engage with your brand.
Another great thing about Facebook advertising, is that you get access to Facebook’s Ad Manager, which is an extremely in depth, robust, tool to advertising on Facebook, Instagram and beyond. With Ad Manager, you are able to reach much more targeted audiences of people, and track metrics of advertisements to inform future ads. You can measure who sees your ads by demographics, who engages, and who purchases. You can see how many people saw an ad, how they engaged with the ad, and how many times people saw the ad. Facebook Ad Manager will tell you exactly down to the fraction of a cent how much it costs to achieve a business objective, like a sale. With Ad Manager, you can clearly see how someone finds your company, how long they engage with your content, and if they make a sale.
By knowing if your ads are working and if people are engaging with the content, and not clicking or scrolling away, you can iterate and build better ads. This knowledge also helps you post more relevant and better content, as you’ll see exactly what your audience likes and responds to. Knowing this can help you make business decisions too, and help with planning. Maybe people engage less with a seasonal sale that you would have hoped, or people really respond to limited “drops” of products. If you blog as a part of your marketing and brand strategy, keeping tabs on which articles perform best will help you write more.
By advertising on Facebook, you also have access to advertising on several prestige publications and websites that can help you gain more reach, with no additional effort. Facebook has a service called Audience Network that acts as a display advertising network for publications to use on their websites. Publications like Buzzfeed, Vice and the Huffington post all use Audience Network, meaning your ads can run on the articles published by those outlets. The media brands have a deal with Facebook where they get paid to generate traffic, and Facebook extends that access to its advertisers (you!).
Advertising on Facebook is a powerful tool that help any business reach new clientele, as well as speak directly to those who are already customers. Advertising on Facebook doesn’t have to be a tech-intensive difficult process. You don’t have to know how to code, or even have a lot of budget to spend on ads. You can start advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and their Audience Network today with as little as $1. You can spend as much as you’d like as you become more familiar with the tools. You can also stop your spend at any time. Testing Facebook advertising is a win win if you have a specific goal in mind, or just want to get your business out there a bit more.
Event marketing tells brand story through customer experience
Event marketing is simply figuring out an experience that can tell the story of your brand, company or organization. If you have a retail location, event marketing can be an event held at your storefront. If your are a brand, then event marketing can entail throwing a party for a product launch. If you’re a nonprofit, then event marketing could be throwing a fundraising gala or concert. The common thread between all of these examples of event marketing, is that they all give your customers an opportunity to engage with your company while building community, entertaining, and potentially expanding your audience.
Event marketing can be to promote specific products, or to generate sales, or to just create more awareness about your brand. If you are a gourmet boutique, then hosting a wine tasting every month where you pair wines and foods you sell to customers is a simple way to incorporate event marketing into your brand strategy. If you own a coffee shop, then simply inviting local musicians to play acoustic sets during off hours could be a great way to build community and increase sales.
Event marketing can also be done online, now that consumers are more familiar with attending livestreamed events. If you are a startup clothing brand, or similarly lifestyle oriented brand, then you can schedule livestreamed concerts or live performances to be distributed through your social media channels. This helps your brand gain awareness, and can help you tell the story of your lifestyle company. People who engage with your livestreamed content can be re-targeted later with future products, information or events.
According to PR Newswire, “in this year's report, consumers identified ‘inspiration and meaning’ as the most sought-after quality in brands, a 200 percent increase from 2012 for this particular set of attributes. 76 percent of all consumers would rather spend their money on experiences than on material items.”
Because consumers are now looking to spend their money more on experiences than physical goods, event marketing helps your business reach potential customers, for when they do decide to make a purchase decision. Events don’t have to be cost intensive, and don’t need to be too high concept either. Figure out a small scale event that is relevant to your business, better if it can be repeated if successful. Start small, and scale from there. Your customers will be happy to engage with your business in a new way, and you might find some new business along the way.
Are you posting your art on social media?
If you aren’t posting your art on social media, you should consider starting. Not only does posting your work on social media give you a digital space to showcase your work, but it also gives you the ability to create a following for your art as well as give people you meet at art fairs/galleries a place to find you and follow along. Social media is somewhere where a majority of people spend at least a little bit of time online. Since it is free to post, you can essentially use a platform like Instagram as your own personal digital gallery.
If you haven’t yet started posting your artwork on social media, consider starting an Instagram profile to start building your online presence. You Instagram profile is a grid of photos three images wide, that can scroll as far as photographs you post. Posting to Instagram is as simple as choosing an image from your smartphone’s camera roll, then clicking “share.” You can write a cation for your work, add a location tag, or tag another account. If you want to, you can edit the image you choose to upload, and add hashtags to help others find your artwork.
When you start your Instagram account, you can start by posting your past work in however order you like. You can group images by series, or create carousel posts to showcase multiple sides of a work within one post. Create text posts to give information and context about your artwork to anyone viewing your page, or post behind the scenes photos of your process to show people how you make your art and find inspiration.
An Instagram account can be a great low barrier to entry way to start building an online presence for your work. You don’t need to start building a website for your work, and can build at your own pace. Instead of trying to create an entire art career online over night, start slow and build over time. Showcase your artwork on an Instagram profile, use the tools to find a following, then start to decide if you want to build a website or online store.
If you are already posting your artwork on social media, but aren’t advertising, consider boosting your current posting with a bit of ad spend. You can promote the posts of your art that you’re already making for as little as $1 and gain more audience for your work. Are you showing at an upcoming art event and want to make sure your followers know when and where you’ll be? Post and promote a notice of your upcoming event to make sure it’ll be a success.
Advertising on social media can be done simply. On Instagram, you don’t even have to leave the app. Underneath any post that can be promoted, there will be a blue button that says, “Boost Post.” Click this button, and you can tell Instagram who to show your post to, by location, interest, behavior, and other demographics of your choosing.
Having an online presence gives fans of your artwork a place to stay up to date with what you’re working on. If you’re someone who sells art at local art fairs or exhibits at a gallery in your area, having a web presence will give the people who see your art at a physical location a way to follow your artwork, and potentially make a purchase if your have an online store set up. Platforms like Instagram also have built in ways for your artwork to be found by people who you may not reach otherwise. If you haven’t yet started posting your art on social media, you can build a gallery for yourself today.
Try Instagram Reels for more organic reach
Instagram is a great medium to tell the story of your business, inform customers of new information or to reach new customers. Since it is free to post on Instagram, you can post as much as you need to, showcasing new products, bring customers behind the scenes, and promote limited campaigns. As time goes by, Instagram organically distributes your content on the Explore feed, putting your content in front of people who might not already know about your business or organization. Instagram was once a image sharing social network solely, and as Instagram develops new ways to post, Instagram rewards posts made with new features with more organic reach. This reach brings in more traffic to your business’ profile, potentially bringing in new business.
via Facebook
It pays to keep up with the new features that Instagram introduces, as Instagram is generally releasing the new mediums to keep up with their competition. In August 2020, Instagram released Reels, their response to the short video based social network TikTok’s rise in popularity. Reels let users upload short vertical videos that can be made on platform with a simple to use video editor. Instagram users can play the latest popular music, or anything else from an in depth music library, over their videos, and utilize a few other editing tools that create a surprising range of video styles.
“More than 50 percent of people use Instagram’s Explore page in a month, Stein said, and now there’ll be a dedicated hub for Reels.” -The Verge
Instagram has created several surfaces within the Instagram app for Reels to be played, organically distributing Reels content to Instagram users who’s interests align with subject matter. Use a few hashtags when uploading, and you’ll help Instagram show your content to people who will most likely want to engage with it. Instagram has made Reels the default content medium to show at the top of all hashtags, and have allocated a similarly high traffic section for Reels within Explore. Because of these Reels dedicated locations within the Instagram app, as well as an organic promotion in Newsfeed, Reels are getting a massive amount of organic engagement.
Utilizing Reels increases your chances for your content to reach more people on Instagram, and if you use hashtags relevant to your business, you’ll likely reach the right people. If you are a local business, tag nearby towns or the hashtag that a local media outlet uses, and you’ll have a good shot at reaching a lot of people in your area, as these hashtags are generally less populated that more general ones like #smallbusiness or #boutique.
Instagram is currently promoting Reels in direct response to TikTok’s rise in popularity. As Reels is essentially the same video format as a TikTok, Instagram (who is owned by Facebook) hopes to slow user attrition to another app. Instagram still has more users, and even more daily users, than TikTok, so it will pay to make the most of Instagram’s reaction to TikTok’s success. Your content, and thus your business, will reach a wider audience. In addition, Reels is an information rich way to post content, so you’ll benefit just from higher fidelity communication with your customers.
“We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it.” -Instagram spokesperson Devi Narasimhan
Video is a great way to communicate with your followers and potential new customers on Instagram. A picture tells a thousand words, and video tells 30 pictures a second. Baseline, utilizing Reels helps you tell the story of your business, inform your audience about what you do, and promote events, campaigns or sales. The added bonus is the Instagram is organically boosting these posts to stave off competition from another company. Utilizing Reels will be a win win of showcasing better content, while reaching new audience.
Instagram Shops brings your retail store online
If you’re a retail storefront and don’t sell online yet, Instagram Shops might be a good first step into ecommerce. Instagram Shops helps you utilize the effort and design you have already put into merchandising your storefront by making Instagram posts shoppable. If you’ve never sold anything online before, you can list a batch of initial products that you sell in your store, and sell them through your Instagram profile. You don’t have to list your entire inventory and can list your products with Facebook, if you don’t have a website. As you get comfortable operating an ecommerce channel, you can add more products and advertise your listings.
Instagram Shops give your business profile the ability to create “product tags,” which operate the same as when you tag another account in a a post, except linking to a product listing instead. These tags make your posts shoppable. This means that you can take a photograph of your retail store, featuring a product, then tag that product in your post, and Instagram users can make a purchase within the Instagram app.
Instagram Shops help you get started with ecommerce. If you already post on Instagram, you effectively are doing the same as you have been, just adding on the ability for people to purchase what you post. You can use product tags on image posts, Reels, and in captions. When someone clicks on the tag, they are brought to a listing page for the product, and they can make a purchase right on the Instagram app. Instagram even offers users the ability to save payment methods, so frequent shoppers can make one-click purchases.
The ability to make your Instagram posts shoppable makes your retail offering that much more robust. If you have a physical retail storefront, you get to be meticulous in merchandising. With Instagram, you get to showcase your work, your products, and use the medium to tell the story of your business in a way that lets customers engage beyond the walls of your store.
You can advertise shoppable posts as well, which amplifies your product listing’s reach to a relevant audience. If you’re an outdoors store selling a water bottle as your first product, you can boost that shoppable post into the newsfeeds of people who are near your retail store, who are interested in hiking. If you are a clothing boutique, you can target to people in your retail storefront’s area who follow the brands you sell on social media.
Shoppable posts and Instagram Shops merges the in depth merchandising of a retail storefront with the efficiency of a digital sales channel, enabling your business to potentially reach new customers by doing what you’re already doing. All you have to do is post about your business, and showcase the products that you sell. Tell a story about your business and inform customers about the intricacies of your wares. Once approved, you can set up Instagram Shops within a day, and scale as you become familiar with selling online.
Email newsletters are a simple way to reach your customers
Newsletters are a great way to reach your customers directly. By emailing them directly, you can give business updates or promote specific campaigns, while linking back to your website or product and event pages. Newsletters bring your business to customers’ attention by meeting them where they are already. Most people have email, and a lot of those people get email on a phone that they might have with them often. A newsletter, sent regularly, can become a direct dispatch to your most engaged customers, where you can build brand identity and keep customers up to date.
As Nextdoor explains, “as a small business owner, you know every interaction you have with potential customers is one that counts. Sending regular newsletter campaigns is an effective way to cultivate long-term relationships that are essential to your business’ growth.” These emails give a higher resolution impression of your business than a single image posted to a social media website. With newsletters, you can go into detail about your business, and what makes it unique. Do you offer a selection that can’t be found anywhere else in your area? Showcase that within your newsletter and give in depth descriptions of what you sell.
Nextdoor continues, “aside from fostering quality, intentional communication, newsletters can also be well worth the time and marketing dollars spent on creating them. In fact, research conducted by Litmus showed that for each dollar spent on email marketing, brands saw an average of 42 dollars in return.” This means that for every dollar invested into email newsletters, a company can see up to a 42x return, or more, on their investment.
Email marketing is so cost effective because you can reach an unlimited amount of people per email sent. You are only limited by the amount of people on your mailing list. An email with several links back to product pages, or one with advertising embedded in it (with display ads, affiliate links, or paid content) can have a high conversion rate, as it is sent to people who have likely already bought something from your business.
Most website building platforms have built in tools to collect emails and send newsletters. Squarespace has tools to help you build a newsletter right on your website’s dashboard. Mailchimp is a pretty common tool that can plug into most website builders.
Your newsletter doesn’t have to be weekly, or even monthly. You can send a quarterly, or even year end, update, as long as you keep your newsletter consistent. If you feel that you can add more emails, then add more. If you notice that less people are opening your emails, then send less. Email marketing is a great way to communicate directly to your customer, in a way that can be much more in depth than through other channels.
Is your business on social media yet?
Social media is the easiest way to reach your existing customers, while finding business at the same time. According to Forbes, “driven in no small part by the pandemic, Americans spent more than an average 1,300 hours on social media,” last year. Continuing, “Facebook led the way, where Americans spent an average 58 minutes a day on the app – or 325 hours a year.” Social media is how people communicate, pass time, and get information. If your business isn’t yet on social media, or if you aren’t posting regularly, then you are missing out on the ability to communicate directly to your clientele, and passing up an opportunity to promote your business efficiently.
1) Communicate directly to your customers
Social media gives you the ability to communicate directly to your customers. You can describe your business as you wish, and showcase your work the way that you want. Since posting doesn’t cost you anything, you can speak directly to your clientele whenever you want. Promote sales, use Stories to show how your business works. Go live to give a walkthrough in your retail store, or write a long post on Facebook thanking your customers for their business on a holiday. Social media gives you the flexibility to keep in communication with your audience, which helps keep your business in mind during purchase decisions.
2) Promote specific campaigns
Do you run sales seasonally, or do you need to promote an in-store event with a live musical performance? Do you have a book launch coming up, or throwing a customer appreciation night? You can use social media to promote time specific campaigns, like events or sales and keep customers up to date with special offerings from your business. Use Facebook Events to inform and remind customers of an event or date, and use Instagram to promote and inform potential attendees of the event as well. Social media helps you reach your customers to promote whatever you’re planning.
3) Reach a local audience
Social media is global, but you can also use it to reach a local audience. Use hashtags of your town, surrounding area, local publications, local businesses, your state, county, etc. and you’ll start to reach a local community of businesses, organizations and potential customers. Comment on content within these hashtags that you like or are in a similar industry as yours, or even begin to collaborate with other local businesses. Once you start to get more engaged with your local social media, you will begin to algorithmically surface in the feeds of other media users local to your business.
4) Automate ads
You can also automate your marketing with social media advertising. Find a targeted local audience of potential customers, or promote an online store to a much wider audience. Social media ads help you reach new and existing customers directly in their newsfeeds. You can target your ads by interest, location, or behavior, and the available tools are very effective and cost efficient.
5) Gain credibility in your field
The more you post about your field, if customers and other people on social media respond positively to the content, you’ll gain credibility in your field, as your posting will show that you know what you’re doing and are good at what you do. If you’re an artist and you post daily about your work and process, you’ll showcase that you’re an experienced artist. If you have a specialty retail store and post credible information about your wares, people who visit your profile will pick up on that.
Social media is the best way to reach your customers and find new business, as it’s free to post, and most people are on at least one social media platform. If your business isn’t on social media yet, you really should be, as it will likely only become more a part of how people engage with commerce. You don’t need to get on every platform immediately, and create new profiles on every new platform, but finding one or two platforms that you’re comfortable posting on will go a long way towards establishing an identity for your business online.
It has never been easier to start a business online
Have a business idea or a hobby that you want to start earning additional income with? Do you have a craft, or a product in mind that you want to bring to life? It has never been easier to start a business, and it is even easier to start a business online. You don’t even have to quit your job, and can start own your own business to earn supplemental income. If it becomes successful enough to become your sole source of income, then you can work for yourself. You get to set your own hours and your own pace.
Start today
1) All you need is a website
A simple website landing page for your new business can be made in as little as an hour. Modern website creation platforms like Squarespace and Wix make basic website creation simple, and are very cheap to continue using. You can purchase a custom .com domain for your business for around $20, and the platforms handle web hosting. Platforms like Shopify and Etsy have extremely robust, easy to use, commerce tools that you can use to create web stores, complete with shipping and automated marketing. Now that you have a website, you can turn a hobby into a small business, or start selling products and services to customers that may have never found you.
2) Social media helps you reach new customers
Start today
Now that you have a website, you can turn a hobby into a small business, or start selling products and services to customers that may have never found you. Add your website domain into your social media bio, and start posting to promote your new business. Post things that are relevant to your work, or start blogging from your website, and post those articles to your social media. Communicating on social media helps you share information about your business and what you do, while also engaging new and existing customers. You don’t have to over exert yourself either, just start with one or two channels that feel comfortable.
3) You can automate scheduling
If you’re monetizing a service that you can offer as a small business, like catering or dog walking, there are simple digital tools available that can help you automate customer scheduling. Square offers a service that can be connected to your social media accounts, where you can set your availability, then a potential customer pays for and schedules, never leaving your Instagram. Squarespace also offers a feature for this to happen on your .com domain. All you have to do is figure out how much time you have, set your availability, then let the digital tools do the rest. Once a customer schedules an appointment, you’ll be notified via push notification or email.
4) Bookkeeping tools are digital
Start today
If you use your website to sell products or services, you’ll get insights on how your store performs over time. Squarespace offers detail rich data, like per-product conversion rates (or the percentage of people who buy a product after visiting a product page), and will visualize a click funnel that leads to purchase (or which pages lead to which purchases). This helps you figure out what is performing best, and what needs improvement. These platforms let you export this data, which you can import into something like QuickBooks to handle bookkeeping and taxes, automatically.
5) Incorporate online
You don’t have to incorporate right away when you start your business online. You can just start slowly, selling a few items here and there, while you learn how to operate an online business, and then incorporate when you plan to dedicate more time. Incorporating online has never been easier, and services like LegalZoom will handle the entire process for you. All you have to do is pay their fee, and tell them a little bit about yourself and your business. You’ll get an EIN number right away, and they’ll mail you your business’ paperwork when it is available.
It has never been easier to start a business online. You can work at your own pace, and accept as much business as you decide. You can start by selling very few things, and then grow to become an independent business owner. Digital tools make this a simple process, because you can scale from zero at the rate you decide. An online business can either be a hobby for your time off, or something that you create to begin a new career. What would your business be?
Why you should start selling your art online
If you’ve ever considered selling your art online, but haven’t started yet, here’s something you need to hear: why not? With today’s digital tools, you can start selling your art online, and potentially make your first sale, within a day. You don’t need to jump all the way into a new career, but there is potential for one to flourish from the first steps into selling your artwork via the internet. All you need is some art, a smartphone with a camera, and you’re good to go. If you have a laptop, even better, but the tools of today have made it remarkably easy to earn from your creative work.
1) It is easier than you think
If you have’t started selling your artwork because you think it is too difficult, or that you need to find gallery space, or that it’s too much of a technical problem to sell online; good news is that you’re wrong. It is very easy to get a basic online art store started, and you don’t need a gallery because you can list and market your own art. Really, all you need is a smartphone with a camera and your art. And a cell connection, or free wifi. You just have to use a service like Etsy, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. to begin (and they’ve done most of the work for you).
2) You don’t have to commit a lot of time
You can start and stop, create as much work as you like. You are setting the deadlines and can sell as much, or as little, as you want. The creation of your store and initial listings can take you as long as you want. Do it over the course of a year—it doesn’t matter, as long as you start your shop. Once your store is created, it’s your own space to do with what you will. List your back catalog of work for fun, or paint one painting a year. It’s your shop.
3) Shipping is simple
Gone are the days of going to a physical store to figure out how much shipping costs, then packing something up with overpriced materials. Most to all platforms to sell art on have robust shipping features built into their service. A platform like Etsy lets you save shipping profiles for your art, and automatically print a discounted label whenever you get a sale. Print the label at home, and drop your art off to ship at the nearest post office or USPS dropbox. You can even schedule for a mail carrier to pick your art up from your house or studio.
Start selling today
4) Selling online grows your market exponentially
Not only does selling your artwork online open your sales potential to a global market, but marketing your work on social media can help you gain traction and sales that you might never of had you only sold your wares offline. You can still be local and sell online, all you have to do is target marketing to your surrounding area, and focus your efforts there. Selling online means that anyone who enjoys art (many people), who may want to buy creative work (a lot of people), who are actively looking to buy artwork (more people than you think) is potentially a client for your creative practice. This doesn’t mean that everyone is going to buy your work, just that you have the potential to reach a wide range of people.
5) You can automate the process
If your artwork is digital, then you can even automate your sales process. All you have to do is create your listings, upload your work, and automatically send the file of your work to your customer automatically via email. If you are a graphic designer and want to sell clothes, prints, etc. with your work printed on them, there are services like Printful are integrated into Squarespace that will automatically print-on-demand and ship your art to an end customer, without you needing to do anything. You can even automate advertising for your listings on most platforms.
