Everyone needs a holiday at some point, even if that just means taking a break from working to clear your head and enjoy yourself with friends and family for a couple of days. Once you’ve decided that you definitely need a holiday and when you want to take that break, your next step is planning how you plan to manage your online shop whilst you’re away.

This is an essential part of your online shop as it gives your potential customers a bit of a backstory to how and when your brand was created. In this episode, I'll be talking about the different things you can add to this page to give it the greatest impact and encourage people to support your online shop. 

Contact Us pages are often the most visited pages of the entire website as new visitors are often curious about how they can contact the owners. Most Contact Us pages are the bare, basic contact details but often these don’t inspire customers to make contact; You need to make it easy for people to contact you with an inviting Contact Us page. The best Contact Us page makes it easy for visitors to contact the company - you - and provides links to a range of resources that the visitors might be looking for.

If you’ve not run a sale on your online shop before, the success of your sale depends on the amount of planning involved in its conception and launch. Like the scouts say ‘perfect planning prevents poor performance’ so, in this episode, I’ll be taking you through the steps required to create a sale on your online shop from conception to completion.

It is of course nice to have likes on your Facebook Page, but they’re not the be-all and end-all - what you really should be aiming for is engagement - that’s the number of people who follow your page but also interact with your content. That is way more valuable, both in terms of attracting new customers and encouraging existing customers to return to you time and time again.

When you've set up a Facebook Page to promote your online shop, the next step is to populate it with as much information as possible and provide a steady stream of content. In this episode, we're talking about common mistakes online shops make on Facebook Pages, and how to avoid them.

Your final step of encouraging traffic to your online shop is to set up a Business Instagram account, and more importantly, Instagram Shopping. This is a fantastic way to reach a wider audience and encourage traffic from Instagram to your online shop.  As always, I've added some useful links and notes for you all at ekm.com/blog.

Now you've ensured a high quality of content on your online shop and you're set up your Facebook Page, your next step is to submit details of your online shop to Google to help your pages get displayed in search engine results. There's a lot to learn, but I've added some useful links and notes for you all at ekm.com/blog.

Once you've ensured the content of your online shop is high quality and ready to promote elsewhere, your next step is social media. If you're not keen on using social media at all, in this episode I explain why you should use it and what basics you need to set up. 

Once you've got your online shop up and running, the next step is to encourage people to visit it, and ideally get the ball rolling with your first few orders. But if you've not got a budget to invest in online promotion, you're going to need to do lots of other things instead. In this episode, I'll show you where to begin.