Starting an online business seems easy, and if you have the drive, you can make it a big success.  However, it takes hard work and some tech-savvy.  One of your first goals should be good Internet marketing.  The three main ways to market online is through your website, through emailing and through social media.  Once you have your product and develop your marketing, you need merchandising tools to make the buying process smooth and easy.

Internet Marketing

Your website needs to be informative as well as attractive and entice people to stay for a while.  Vlogs or video blogs are one way to interest visitors.  They are easy to create yourself, or you can have a professional make them.  If they are full of important information or extremely entertaining, they could go viral and reach millions of people.  Web marketing includes having an informative and easy-to-navigate website that includes:

• Affiliate marketing

• Promotions

• Online advertising on search engines

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Online Shopping by Daniel Foster, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Email marketing includes sending advertising and promotions through email to potential customers as well as current customers.  It may take time to get an email list big enough to really be effective, but it should not be ignored.

Social media marketing includes viral marketing as well as advertising.  Viral marketing is a technique in which people are encourage to send the marketing messages, vlogs or other marketing tools to their friends.  This is considered the equivalent of word-of-mouth, but much more effective.

Merchandising Software

A good merchandising software company will enable you to have control of your inventory and orders, so you can have a close eye on your business.  You can update your merchandise every day with just the click of your mouse, and with unique logins, you can grant access to employees, contractors and vendors to the information they need, while maintaining your privacy for sensitive information.

You’ll also receive alerts when a new order is placed on your desktop, laptop and even on your smartphone.  Some companies offer extra items that you can sell along with your main product.  For example, if you sell cosmetics, you can also sell mirrors, brushes, combs and other related items.

Orders can be managed easily from the minute the payment is received to the time the order is shipped.  You can also give your customers the capability of looking up their own orders and tracking the shipping.

A good merchandising software company will make it easy for you to track your success after all of your hard work.