Hi all, I am hoping for someone generous who has done it before to provide their opinions/advice! I am in the midst of producing a range of women's fashion apparel, to be sold predominantly online and launch later in 2014. I plan to have my online store professionally designed & built when the time comes, but I have it on good authority from a few SEO experts that it is advantageous to setup a landing page with email subscription/registration to start building a marketing database now. Has anyone done this before? Did you do it using a template program? I am trying to keep costs down for the moment and from what I've seen so far, it seems not too difficult. Am I naively oversimplifying this?! If so, did you do it in the following steps? 1) buy domain reg (done) 2) register for web hosting (done) 3) sign up for paid wordpress, woo ecommerce etc online platform with template code 4) integrate email marketing like mailchip or campaignified etc to build database. Thank you in advance for your input ps. I don't whatsoever deny the value of good programmers/developers.. I just can't afford it right now!
3 and 4 are not required if its not done. No need to rush things but a landing page with some meta info if not an email capture field is only going to help with your SEO efforts down the road. Nigel
Great advice, Nigel. Establishing your site's presence on the Internet isn't going to hurt at all. If there's any way you can put content on your landing page, it'd possibly help you in a pretty big way. (If you look at my post history, I'm obviously a HUGE content marketing advocate, but I truly believe that it works.) Women's apparel is super easy, when it comes to content marketing. If you can start to put up at least a steady trickle of content on your site, you'll be able to begin to leverage yourself as a lifestyle brand, and build an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to say (this kind of influence is invaluable when you're selling something). This also gives you a great way to build anticipation for your site. What's nice about content is that it's easily build on clever, as opposed to cash. Hope this helps! _ Sean
Check out Launchrock, Instapage, Kickofflabs or Unbounce. Launchrock and Unbounce are free, not 100% sure about the other two. We're using Launchrock at the moment, and I've used it in previous businesses very successfully. Launchrock has an inbuilt viral loop. So not only do you collect email addresses, you incentivize people to share your page with their friends. Plus it's free and relatively easy to set up. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I have had some good results with them in the past. If you want to see an example, check out the splash page for Ashop.me (launching soon).