The Blog Shop Bandwagon - Where Do You Begin?

Take a look at Multiply sites, and you will see that the place has evolved from a mere blogging platform to a thriving online marketplace. People are posting less of personal photos and uploading more pictures of merchandise for sale. A lot of Facebook users have become hybrid traders on the social networking site.

Setting up a blog shop these days seems like a painless process. Even teens and college students have eagerly ventured on the blog shop bandwagon with little apprehensions. If you want to join the fun, then nobody's stopping you. Here are some general guidelines and hints to help you out.

1. Know what you want to sell and are capable of selling. Do you want to market goods or services or both? If blogging is something that you don't really enjoy or have time for, then you may want to set up a conventional web store instead of a blog shop.
   
   
2. Consider your role in the market place. Are you a direct seller or a reseller? Buyers prefer to transact business with direct distributors over middlemen, but it's a given that the number of resellers far outnumber direct suppliers. Make your role clear to your potential buyers.
   
   
3. Select where you want to put up your shop. Many considerations come to mind - Is the platform secure? Is it user-friendly? Does it allow you to customize the look of your shop or integrate other software? Is the site scalable? Are there any restrictions? We'll look into these options in the next blog post, so stay tuned.
   
   
4. Choose an advertising medium. When you're just starting out, you don't have to think right away of paying for advertisements. Some communities allow ad posting. Oftentimes, the best way to start spreading word about your shop would be through friends and referrals.
   
   
5. Anticipate your needs. As a seller, you might require order forms, shopping carts, vouchers, a phone line and flexible modes of payment. You might even want to upgrade your PayPal account from a personal account to a business account. At any rate, putting yourself in the shoes of the buyer will really help you anticipate your needs better.*

Blog Shop - A Lucrative Venture for Sellers Who Love to Write

Teecup Limited has been pretty quiet for a couple of weeks -- this is all for good reason. I've decided to take a detour from pure web content writing to a fun and lucrative venture called online selling. Simply put, I opened a blog shop.

The Defining Elements

So, what exactly is a blog shop? To put it bluntly, a blog shop is a hybrid of a web log and an online shop. It slightly differs from your typical e-commerce sites in at least two ways:

• The blog is the heart of the blog shop. Fresh content takes the center stage. Without the blogging element, the site can easily pass for a traditional online store where you see shopping carts and photos of products for sale.
  
  
• The home page of the blog shop is not static. Depending on how frequently the seller updates the site, the home page typically reflects your latest posts. Majority of the blog posts reflect the publication date, so that readers are assured that the shop is not one of the virtual white elephants.
  

If you love to write and know how to sell things using your flair for words, then setting up a blog shop might be just your thing.

You need not limit yourself to selling tangible products. You can also sell your services and use the blog shop to strengthen your online portfolio for a number of lucrative web content writing thrusts such as ad copy writing, product description writing, blog posting, and regular article writing.

Judgment Call on Content

Generic e-commerce sites all follow a similar pattern. Apart from the standard "About Us" and "Contact Us" pages, majority of the online stores devote a huge percentage of their space to displaying the items for sale, including the prices, shipping charges and a "check out" shopping cart.

Blog shops may also have all of the above-mentioned features. When it comes to content creation, the seller has full creative control. It's not enough to include just the price updates. There are plenty of other things that you can do as a writer and seller:

1. Include informative articles. Doing so can assure customers that you know what you're doing. Articles also help to build your credibility as a seller and help prospective buyers to get to know the product fully before making a purchase.
   
   
2. Elaborate on the products for sale. One-liner descriptions are okay, but if you are selling electronic products, don't just copy and paste the specs. Write a convincing user review, especially when you have had first-hand experience with the gadget you're marketing.
   
   
3. Give your potential buyers a choice. Press releases and testimonials are fine, but be careful of sounding too aggressive. Provide your customers the information they need to come up with a decision by themselves. Stating the mall price and your selling price is a very effective and subtle sales pitch.
   
   
4. Establish your online presence. Provide a paper trail of feedback, as this builds buyer confidence in your blog shop. Respond to inquiries in a polite, timely and comprehensive manner. Responsive online sellers are twice more likely to succeed than individuals who stick to just text messaging.

Profiting from Your Blog Shop

Physical stalls and mall space all incur steep overhead costs for rental and maintenance. With a blog shop, you cut these operational expenses. Furthermore, by combining your online selling and web content writing activities, you benefit from the blog shop in the following ways:

1. You get to hone and test your web content writing skills: ad copies, online articles, blog posts, product descriptions, user reviews and sundry. You will even develop the discipline to stick to the topic and to a schedule along the way. Your best critics are your own prospective buyers.
   
   
2. You get to reinforce your online portfolio. There is no better testament to how good a copy writer you are than by showing to prospective clients that you run your own shop and that you've made a handsome amount of money by selling products with your crisp and convincing copies.
   
   
3. You get to diversify your income stream. Churning out pure web content for clients may burn out even the most passionate writer. Online selling lets you take a fun breather from heavy deadline-oriented projects and allows you to make money from the web all the same.
   
   
4. You get to socialize and network with netizens who share your interest in the same products. Depending on how open you are to making connections, you might well be on the way to establishing your own circle of trusted business partners, resellers and friends.*