Louis Shalako
Blogger. A blog is a free website, simple and easy to use. Your blog has content, stories and pictures of your products. It has the imprint of your personality. Your blog can be found by simple search, it can be shared and reposted by you and others. It has an email contact form, your phone number, a Google Map showing your location. You can have a picture of the store-front if you wish. With the ‘widgets’ in the side-bar, you can have outbound links, perhaps to a Youtube video, or an affiliate link to a supplier or company website. You can have ads to other featured products. An affiliate link is where if a customer clicks, and buys something from that company within thirty or sixty days, you get a percentage of that sale. (Look up affiliate marketing). I am seeing fifteen to twenty percent offers in such programs. That’s your commission.
Okay, some sales sites have thousands of pages. Why duplicate all that expense and effort when you can just leverage their site to your own advantage.
This is basically what we do when Smashwords, iTunes, Kobo, Amazon, host our books on their websites. I don’t need a site or a shopping cart of my own.
I would suggest one introductory blog post, and then write about a single product, with one good picture, one at a time, as time or schedule permits. I would keep them short, with good pictures. Links to testimonials, magazine articles, or other blogs and related websites elsewhere could be included if you find them. For the basic product description, copy and paste them from the company website until you learn to do it on your own. You could sign the post at the bottom, (like a letter) or put the name up top and first where the search engines can find it faster. Always use clear and simple titles with the product name or word in it. I would go up to the font size on your word program and manually set the size at 13, not 12, which is too small, or 14, which is too big. Use Times New Roman, keep the page white, and fancy fonts and colours to a minimum. Save your product descriptions in separate document files.
Kijiji. You have a Kijiji account. Use the same short descriptions of single products to put up, at first, strictly free ads. Use a minimal number of the best pictures you can get. Bear in mind, you have to fill out the field for a price. Lower in your ad text, you can talk about ‘a complete line of wellness products.’ If you want to list a few prices, that is fine. Now, if you list single products in unique ads, you can put up more than one, although I would be a bit shy of going too crazy. You don’t want to get kicked off. Kijiji already has a system of communication with you and prospective buyers, and this is in the local area. For something like $3.99/week, you can have a link out to your Youtube video, a blog or website, a Facebook page. You might think, for roughly fifteen dollars a month, you might want to keep that up as a permanent ad, pitched for the most part to the local market. Oh, if you’re paying for a link on multiple ads, Kijiji is much less likely to object. In local terms, you’re in and out and about, you have a good vehicle and delivery shouldn’t be much of a problem. There is also the option of customer pick-up.
Youtube. You can post videos, long or short, to Youtube. If they are popular enough, you can build an audience of subscribers, which has its own value in terms of monetization. However, what you basically want to do is to link back and forth from your blog to Youtube. On the profile section of each site, use the same head shot photo, a nice one. If there is anywhere to set up links, say from Youtube back to your blog, this is a good thing. You could put up a pic on the Kijiji account, use the exact same bio that you use on other sites. Youtube has share buttons.
When you’re signed into Facebook, but not actually on the site, you can share your Youtube video on Facebook and a number of platforms. You already have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
This is where building up the numbers of friends and followers is important. Don’t be shy about accepting new friend requests or even making them. You post the video, share it on all platforms, using the little buttons provided. Your blog should have share buttons, either on the bottom or sometimes the top or in a sidebar.
Everything has a learning curve. Affiliate marketing sounds good, but it takes time to learn. Now you’re selling other people’s products, so their line has to mesh with your target market. When they do click, that should always open up in a new window—keeping your own window open until they’ve had their look and hopefully decided to come back. This is due to your interesting content. You can set this in Blogger settings.
Facebook. You can use a webcam or probably a phone to go live on Facebook. For this you want good light, good sound and a good background. I would suggest keeping it short, unless you begin to see good comments, or possibly a larger audience. I’ve never done it, but apparently you can see when you have a watcher or watchers. I would suggest a written script, and stick to it as best as possible. Not too many distractions in the background but a bit of staging might be good.
You can buy an ad on Facebook for as little as $25.00. They’ve offered me a $20.00 credit more than once. If you want the credit, look up ‘advertise on Facebook’. Sooner or later their algorithms will present you the offer. You could try it once on an experimental basis just to see what return on the dollar you get. If it works, you could set a small budget—two months at Christmastime for example. Google also offers ads—you see them on the side of web searches. For the time being I would suggest relying on your own network and your own resources, including time. I post links to my books and art all the time on Facebook. It’s free. The thing is to strike a balance where you’re not too much of a spammer. This is why you set up your own Facebook page for the new business. You want people to click like on that page, follow it and then keep them interested by regular product or service updates.
Podcasting. What exactly is a podcast. (Look it up.) It doesn’t have to be a live performance. It doesn’t have to have video or even be a video, although many people are doing that too.
Podcasting is hosted by sites like Spotify. Subscribers on a monthly payment plan get unlimited access to literally thousands of resources including music files. Ah, but a music file also has an album cover, hence the photographic or video aspect of it. At its simplest, it is ‘digital content’, some of which is pure entertainment, and some of which is documentary or promotional, such as sales of products.
Podcasts have sound but only a slide or background to look at onscreen, someone listening on a phone would see that slide when they selected the item. Posting a video to Youtube, (vlogging), accomplishes the same thing, admittedly, the greater the number of platforms you appear on, the more likely people are to discover your work.
Tagging. On Youtube, on your blog, you should always use ‘tags’. Tags are used by search engines to categorize, filter and ultimately present content in terms of searches. People look for essential oils, your blog post on essential oils will be indexed not only on its content, in other words a search of key words through the post, but also by the tags. On Twitter and other platforms, hashtags like #Louis (for example) provide the same function. Kijiji has provision for tags, this is for their own site and customer searches. Someone wants a product, their search should find a properly tagged item.
LinkedIn. Let’s say you’re on LinkedIn. What good is it. You have to click around and make ‘connections’ with people, most of whom are there for professional purposes. With a certain set of skills you could probably get a job on the site in a matter of minutes. Selling things is another story. But let’s say you have a thousand contacts. This is useless if you never share your content on the site. If you never share it, no one on the site can repost or share it. If you never make any friends or connections, no one is going to read your bio or look at your links. This is true on all social platforms. You can get on Instagram or Snapchat easily enough, why are you there? Getting friends and followers on any platform takes time and it only does so much good unless you’re good at finding your target audience. You can’t really search on any platform for ‘people that want to buy this or people that want to buy that’. It’s just not that easy, although Facebook groups might be a place to begin.
Print Ads. Pick up the phone, call First Monday or Daytripping or the Sarnia Journal. How much does it cost to put up a simple ad in their paper or on their website.
Bulletin Boards. I really don’t see bulletin boards in grocery stores these days, but somewhere like the Strangway Centre might still have them. There may be a community, online bulletin board. If you were going to do that, make up a good quality black and white image with some text. Print out a dozen or so and drive around to all the coin-op laundry places in town. They might have bulletin boards. People doing laundry are bored sick, they’ll read anything.
Why are people reading your material in the first place.
How did they find your blog? Can you read the analytics and see how many people a day read the blog, or what story, etc.
What category are you listed in when you post a Kijiji ad. Are there other ads in that category. Can you post outside of your geographical area. What other viable free online ad sites are there.
How long or short should your product videos on Youtube be.
Where do you get the quality photos of your products.
Do you have a folder set aside on the desktop for this particular business. What email address are you going to use. What password. What phone number.
Okay. So, you have all those products, you spent so much money. Yet some of those products you will never use. If you haven’t opened them. Why not use a free Kijiji ad, give it away for free. You believe in this product so much, you will deliver it to anyone in the city or county. Only thing there is, now would be the time to have 500 business cards for $9.99 from Vista Print or some other print on demand (POD) service online. You give them the free product and the card at the same time.
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Disclaimer: I am not currently involved in affiliate sales, neither do I receive a bounty for sign-ups through a link. It is true that if I sign up someone on Audible.com, I would receive a $60.00 bounty. Here’s my new audiobook, incidentally. You can listen free with trial membership.
(Okay, maybe he’s doing it after all. – ed.)
Here is a link to the Amazon Affiliate Program.
Here is a link to the Smashwords Affiliate Program.
Here is a link to ShareASale, where, once approved, you could sign up for affiliate programs dealing in literally thousands of products and services.
Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.
