Marketing help

[cstroke]

Hey all,
I need a few pointers and some help.
Been doing the metal cutting for quite a while and it's all been word of mouth. I'm self employed and need an outlet for some of my items.
I have a domain name that I dont really use.
I'd like to create a store and link it with instagram, twitter, facebook, etsy etc... I dont have any of them yet other than a personal facebook page.
Any suggestions on web building wix, squaretrade, godaddy, etc.??? I have my domain name from go daddy.
I'm a bit overwhelmed right now with all the options.
I plan to do my fabrication as my main gig but supplement it with some art etc that I enjoy doing. Art is alot nicer than humping around 3/4" plate..
Thanks in advance..
Chris

[adbuch]

Hi Chris,
You might look into Etsy as a possible outlet/store. The sellers there seem to get a lot of their stuff linked into Google searches for images of particular searched items. There is already a lot of metal art stuff there, so take a look and see if you think you can be competitive with your products and pricing. I have a website for my products and also have an Ebay store. Lately I'm doing a much higher volume on Ebay than my website - but that has not always been the case. Here is my website:

https://www.desert-hybrids.com/id63.html

and here is my Ebay store:

https://www.ebay.com/str/Desert-Hybrids ... 7675.l2563

As you can see, I'm not doing any metal art commercially. I do quite a bit for gifts and such, but not anything offered for sale.
Good Luck!
David

[cstroke]

Thank you for the input.
Did you create your own website?
I have a bunch of oddball stuff I"d like to post up and see if any of it sells.

[adbuch]

Yes - I created my own website over 10 years ago using a tool called Trellix that was part of my Earthlink package. Earthlink has since decommissioned Trellix (very unfortunate because it was an excellent website creating/editing tool) - so I am now hosting my original website at IPage, and I do all the editing using a free HTML editor called KompoZer.

The key to a successful commercial website is driving traffic to your site. In my particular case, I manufacture many products which are not available from any other vendors. For example - if you do a Google search for "Pullmax tooling", you will find my website near the top of the search list and also find images of some of my products on the Google "Images" page. Google automatically attaches links from the images of my products to my website, or sometimes one of my Ebay listings. So this is sort of like free advertising.

If you only have a handful of items to offer for sale, then Etsy or Ebay (or even your local craigslist) would probably be good inexpensive choices.
David

[Rodw]

I would suggest to start with you run a web site using Woocommerce which is an add in to Wordpress. There are dedicated hosting platforms for this. They might cost you $30 a month. Don't do it with go daddy or any other shared host. I moved to a VPS (virtual private server) soon after I started. Then I wen to the cloud (similar to Shopify) and now we host on AWS. You should be able to accept payments by Paypal and Stripe as a start. Be sure to have top quality images and be sure you fill out every SEO field on every product and every category. There is a Wordpress add in called Yoast which will guide you on this. Running a good ecommerce site today is enormously complex. I started mine as a hobby 11 years ago but its now a full time business.

Today we have to offer buy now pay later payment methods, paypal, credit card processing, integrated freight quoting and shipping tracking, email marketing systems, popup marketing messages, reviews

Then you need to look at your google search profile. Be sure to enable google analytics and install a facebook pixel on your site. Also get set up on Google Search so Google can tell you about any errors it finds so you can fix them.

There is not much point starting with the end in mind. You may not implement all of these things straight away but one day you will want them. Get email marketing working first up though!

[adbuch]

Hey Rodw,
Please post up the link to your website so we can take a look. I might learn something about improving mine.
Thanks,
David

[Rodw]

Hey Rodw,
Please post up the link to your website so we can take a look. I might learn something about improving mine.
Thanks,
David

David, now worries. We ship globally you know so feel free to try the checkout
https://www.vmn.com.au/

There is still so much to do but we set all our product listings up in our Accounting system and Push them across. Shipping is calculated by a system called shippit who give the customer the cheapest rate from about 10 carriers. Orders are sent back to the accounting system and we barcode items into shipping cartons becasue we sell a lot of kits. We use a system called Klaviyo to manage our email marketing. We don't do newsletters but have a lot of email sequences.

Be sure to come back in a week or so as we are about to push a lot of development to the live server..

I might add you could buy a very nice plasma table with what this has cost me!

[adbuch]

Nice site! Thanks for sharing.
David