In the last series I posted named Online Stores, The benefits of being on the Internet (Part 1 and Part 2), I presented some benefits that has an online stores when you compare them with physical stores. Among these benefits where cost reduction, storage, extent and the possibility to have it open 24/7. However, even though we can see there are a lot of benefits of having our sales on an Internet platform, it also implies many things we must arrange.
In this way in order to be fair with online stores I will talk not of flaws but subjects we must take into account when we decide to create an online store. These stores might be very successful (even more than physical stores) as long as we at least have into account the themes I will talk in this series of articles.
The first subject is marketing. As we have said creating a virtual store is very easy an economical but not just for us but also for our competitors. This is the reason why it is very important to be different form them and to be easily found in search engines. Ad hoc we have to take into account two subjects very popular today in Internet: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). The first one talks about organic positioning, in other words the qualification that search engines give to our webpage without having to pay them in order to appear in one of the first positions of the search results. The second talks about paying them in order to appear in the first result positions. Both SEO and SEM are important so that our potential clients get to know us and buy on our store.
Besides SEM and SEO, today it is very important to have a strategy in social media in order to be visible to our potential clients. If we talk about two of the most popular social networks, having a presence in Facebook and Twitter is free and easy. However we must remember that we need not only to exist in this media but also to exist providing our community high quality information, because we are going to have to compete with many companies that are also willing to be remembered an visible to their potential clients. Remember also that if having a great presence is not enough in Facebook with a small budget we can advertise with a great segmentation.
In my next posts of this series I will present other elements that you should take into account when you open an online store.
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