It is no secret that having an online presence is a great way of drumming up sales for a small business,
and trading online will allow you to attract new customers.
Unfortunately for many small businesses, the idea of e-commerce can be
daunting. There is a myth that suggests trading online is expensive and
that you really need to employ an agency to build and run a custom
website. The reality is that you can build a successful online business
from as little as £20 per month. I did.
I joined the family
company, Northern Industrial, in 2007. The company had been trading for
almost 30 years and had been successful at providing an industrial
electronic repair service to local textile manufacturers. The extent of
our trade across borders was a weaving company in Dundee. At first it
was difficult to see the way forward with many textile manufacturers
moving production abroad. It wasn't realistic to expect people to send
faulty circuit boards halfway around the world for repair.
Photograph: Alamy
Towards
the end of 2007, one of our best customers decided to shift production
to India. Since most of the machines were no longer required, the
production manager asked us if we would like to purchase the spare parts
from the machines for £600. We purchased the boards thinking they would
be useful for parts for our repairs. Sadly, I didn't consider where we
would store all these parts and soon my office was full of circuit
boards. I spent the next three months climbing over parts to get to my
desk. Something had to change.
One evening, I decided to list a
couple of the spare parts on eBay to see if anyone would buy them. I
would like to say the parts went like hotcakes and it was an overnight
success, but sadly they didn't. Thankfully, I decided to try again with
slightly different listing text and managed to sell one of the spare
parts for the grand sum of £100. One down and only 200 to go. At this
rate, I would be able to see my desk in three years.
At this
point, I was confident that people were searching for these parts and
decided that we needed our own website. I contacted a few local web
developers who all came back with quotes ranging from £4,000 to £8,000.
Being a proud northerner, it was more than I was willing to gamble and I
decided to put the whole thing on the backburner. Searching the
internet one wet afternoon I discovered a hosted e-commerce solution for
just £20 per month.
I spent an evening playing with the host's
online demonstration. After 10 minutes, I worked out how to change the
website template, pictures and text. In my haste, however, 10 minutes
later I had to discover how to recover a broken website by opening and
reading the manual for the first time. My wife will testify that this
isn't something I do often. I was amazed how easy the program was to
use. It is just like using MS Publisher or Google Docs and requires no
knowledge of HTML coding.
Photograph: clarification.com
Then I spent some time reading around the subject area of SEO (search engine optimisation) and online marketing. There is loads of free information on the web and a great support community. It turns out that one of the great things about an off-the-peg package is that all the SEO basics are already in place and are constantly updated as Google requirements change.
For example, you
don't need to worry about the URL structure being correct or your
product missing the title tag or H1 tag.
All you need to really worry
about is selecting the right search terms and creating interesting and
valuable content that uses the terms on each page. Once people find
great content they are likely to share it.
I spent the next week writing content and adding the products on my site, nicontrols.com,
following a crib sheet I downloaded from the Google webmaster tools
forum. It took hours as writing has never been my strong point, but at
the end of the week, we had a very basic online store.
Being a complete
novice, I hadn't realised that I had been changing a live website until I
tried launching the site the following bank holiday weekend. Returning
to work on Tuesday, I found an email from a company in Australia who had
found my website and were interested in purchasing two of the circuit
boards. The following week we received two inquires and then eight the
week after that. The inquiries have grown exponentially from there.
Over
the past five years, Northern Industrial has grown 40% each year and
now has customers all over the world and more than £9m worth of stock.
We have supplied the Pirelli factory in Argentina, a beverage factory in
South Africa, the US Air Force, and an oil rig off the coast of India.
Not bad for a small family company starting off with a £19.99 website.
No comments:
Post a Comment