Content marketing can feel laborious and intensive, especially for shop owners. But there are productivity hacks and tools to help with e-commerce content marketing that not only serve your end buyer but also help you find new customers without spending too much time on content creation.

Today, Ashley Alderson from The Boutique Hub, shares a great behind-the-scenes story about growing her business and weaves in six quick, actionable, and valuable tips for creating a manageable ecommerce content marketing strategy.

Ashley is the founder and CEO at The Boutique Hub, a membership that brings together all the resources boutique owners need in a community of over 7,000 members from the United States and eight other countries. It is the largest global connection point in the world for boutique owners. 

How The Boutique Hub Came to Be

Her business is great success story to share. But it sometimes seems like every good business success story starts with a failure — Ashley’s is no exception. 

Ashley grew up in North Dakota (not exactly the fashion mecca of the world) and had a love for fashion. Rodeo was a big part of her life and as she traveled to rodeos she discovered boutiques in all the cute towns she visited. The idea grew in her mind that she wanted to be able to shop these cute stores in one central place.

I felt like fashion was so New York or LA and believed the rest of us in this  world deserve to feel beautiful and have unique things too.— Ashley

The idea for the Boutique Hub became Ashley’s answer to the “What about us?” question. It started as an online shopping mall for boutiques and then took off from there. 

While building her online shopping mall of boutiques, Ashley talked to boutique owners and found what they needed more than anything was a community where someone could help them see the forest through the trees and be a voice for the industry. 

She noted that at that time, it was such a dog-eat-dog world and the concept of community did not exist. She thought to herself, “there’s got to be a better way to do this.”

So The Boutique Hub evolved from that online shopping mall. Ashley launched it with the motto of community over competition. It resonated with people because they needed connection more than they needed anything else.

Getting Defrauded

Unfortunately, we all make mistakes and when Ashley made this pivot to a new idea, she met a real pain point in her journey. While she was building her membership in The Boutique, Ashley met a guy on Twitter who seemed to be building something very similar to what she was trying to do. 

Imposter syndrome was hitting her hard at this time. She was questioning “Who am I to launch a startup and build a membership? What do I know?” So, having a shared vision, it seemed natural to partner with this guy. 

They teamed up and he convinced Ashley to give him a majority share of the company, change the name, and add him to her bank account. Ashley already had an initial version of The Boutique Hub established with a healthy list of clients. He convinced her to merge her list with his.

It all seemed great until she discovered his client list was nonexistent. He kept putting Ashley off, telling her the legal papers are in the mail and they would get everything finalized soon. But those papers never came.