Last month Maria, a Spanish friend of mine, asked me how she could start selling products on the web. She is working in the direct sales cosmetics sector, where her main focus lies on selling to people who further distribute her products. Apart from that she also frequently sells to end customers.
My friend’s business activity is usually on a rather personal level, which is why I recommended to start building up a personal reputation on the web. Until the day we talked she hadn’t made any efforts to get the word out there online, so I suggested it was high time to start off.
Get started
My idea was to start using her knowledge about natural cosmetics in order to create a blog as a basis of operations. On this blog she could present herself and frequently publish posts on natural cosmetics.This blog should be available under a personal domain name or even include the term cosmética and her name in order to do something for seo (search engine optimization) right from the beginning.
Get known
After having published quite a few informative and interesting posts on her blog I advised her to start searching for forums and blogs in her fields of interest, like forums on natural cosmetics, natural products, etc. and start to participate actively in discussions and making valueable contributions.
What’s great about this is that you can always leave a link or even a short text promoting your work or your blog in a footer below your message.
Get social
In order to further develop her reputation I recommended her to graduallz start using social media tools like xing, facebook and – if she had some time left – twitter. Already creating a profile on these sites can get you followers or “friends”.
Since natural cosmetics is something that might interest a lot of people, I thought trying to also promote her work with these tools could be a worthwile task.
Get in touch
After spending a few weeks on the tasks mentioned above, my friend would automatically get in touch with people interested in natural cosmetics. Once some online contacts have been established, further measures should be taken to intensify these contacts and try to gradually use them for business. Writing e-mails, chatting via skype or msn, or even meet for a coffee in case they didn’t live too far away could be an option.
Everything else I preferred to leave up to her – I’m not a salesperson.
What do you think of this strategy?
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