Hope everyone is doing well…

In the last few months, I have attended a number of workshops and seminars relating to the internet and online business. I have gained some new insights in this area… and at the same token, I’ve discovered the success lies on the tools or software system you use for your business – this is the platform and foundation for any online business, which means choosing the right one from the start will ensure you don’t waste time or money down the track.

One of my goals this year is to grow my online business… The opportunities and the resources one needs to build and create a successful online business is available right here, right now! If you are in search for a proven system (that works) or a successful business model that you can easily start with little investment outlay, then DecoNetwork is the solution you need to get you started.

If you are an existing business that offers product customization/personalization and or offer  Embroidery and Print designs with your products, then DecoNetwork is the premium solution you will ever need. The state of the art online custom design tool encompasses a powerful embroidery and print engine that is created by a company that has been in the multi-decoration industry for over 30 years – Wilcom. In addition to this, the ability to leverage your business is the key to its efficiency. As a fulfillment centre you can have unlimited number of affiliate stores (operated by anyone who is keen on your products) to grow and market your products online. This is definitely one of the best avenues to get more volume (and indirectly – traffic) to your business.

On the other hand, if you are a designer, entrepreneur, internet junkie or someone looking for an online opportunity – then DecoNetwork is also the solution you need.

I created my online store with a fulfilment center that I had an interest in their product offerings with as part of the experiment. It only cost me less than USD$10 to create my store (cost was for personalizing the domain name). I must say, I would’ve liked to spend some time on creating some more fancy designs for my store, I think this is probably the only limiting factor that is stopping me from achieving my online goals.

Going forward, this is what I endeavour to do…

An interesting article I read a few months back, confirms the power of affiliate stores. The two seminars that I attended, both emphasis the importance of having LOTS of affiliate stores/sites out there… Yeap, that’s right, LOTS of them…. That’s my tip to you too!

I will be looking at planting more seeds (another way to get more business) by creating a number of new affiliate stores in due course… Also to create a “t-shirt” only website and market it through a new social media channel (fashion related, which I’ve registered – tshirt designs last year) as well.

So… it is with great sadness, that our experiment has come to an end!
I hope you have enjoyed reading our blog and I hope you have learnt and gained a few tips along the way.

What I learnt from the experience is understanding the process and gaining a clearer picture and strategy in mind, to go forward with perfecting my online business ventures and goals.

I now bid you farewell and I wish you luck with your online ventures.

Good bye and good luck!

Anh

It has been fun conducting the T-shirt experiment with Kristi and Anh! Thanks to those who have been following our blog but it has now come to the end of the experiment.

From this small adventure of starting an online business I’ve learnt that even someone like me who has no web programming experience can launch a website that sells products! It’s exciting to know that it’s possible and manageable. I’ve also learnt that a website doesn’t just manage itself but it’s like a baby that you need to nurture and grow. Also, I think the best way to market the site was to use social networking like Facebook and LinkedIn where there’s a lot of traffic so you’re then able to draw traffic into your store. The other way to drive more traffic to your store is definitely Google Adwords and selecting the correct keywords can really help boost traffic flow to your store. Also, if I had time and budget I would market my website offline too, give out postcards and advertise in a magazine etc.

I think I’d do a couple of things differently if I could. I’d probably set a time for the website everyday if I could and also set a schedule or business plan so I could follow it so I can keep track of what things I’d need to do. Also, I think it would have been helpful for me to actually get some advice from people who have successful websites and find out why and draw inspiration from them. The business and the sales part definitely wasn’t as easy as what I thought it’d be. It’s probably not what a lot of people want to hear when they first start, but it takes a lot of time to make it work!

The experiment has been a really cool and fun way to learn about selling t-shirts online. The setting up, website layout and branding was my favourite part. The challenging aspect to me was the marketing and driving traffic to my site and actually encouraging people to buy is the hardest part. I realised that it takes a lot of persistence to keep working at the site, so in a way it’s like a real store where you must continuously change the look of it, add new products and also build up a database who you can email regularly to build a relationship with the customers.

So I think using DecoNetwork has been a really easy way to start an online business. It was easy to choose products that you want to sell and also to manage the store layout. I think it’s a very strong and useful tool that has everything that you need. It’s quite a detailed software that can be used to create a strong website layout and then all the backend things like pricing, managing orders and viewing how many people come into the webstore is all there and available. It almost has things that I thought I didn’t need but it was created to make it quicker for me to update, add content and also change the layout of the website. So I guess it’s a really powerful platform that can be used and it depends where you want to take it.

Thanks again for following our experiment and Good luck with your own webstore too!

So if you’ve been following from my last post, I was waiting for a call from Google. They needed a few times to have a look at my site: inlovewithluna.com to suggest keywords and to set up a campaign for me. This morning I heard the phone ring and I was like a kid on Christmas Day!

Google Girl was on the other line. She was really nice and walked through what sort of campaign she set up. Basically she did all the work!

So all I did was log onto adwords.google.com (after you’ve created an account with them). The first page is a snapshot of everything. Since I’m only a newbie I don’t have much activity happening. (Google Girl said once I clicked on ‘Pause’ and switched it to ‘Enable’ it’ll take a couple of hours to be effective.

I had a look at the first few lines of my keywords and it looked like this:

This is what the first few lines of my Keyword section looks like

I think the awesome thing about adwords is that it’s effective advertising. I know it sounds really salesy but I don’t know how else to describe it. You’re putting money into an area where it’s talking to the right people. For example, if you’re advertising in say a magazine, (no offence to magazines or anything) you’ve paid for a page in a magazine no matter who sees it or who doesn’t see it. You’re not specifically targeting a customer who wants a niche thing. Whereas I feel online, when someone types in black strappy shoes size 6 and if your shop has those things Google will match it up. It’s sort of like match making. Your customer wants say to have a particular t-shirt and you can provide it then it’s great! You’re paying for each person that comes to see your site!

The downside is that money is the biggest thing when it comes to “winning first place” in the Google world. You pay for what you get really. I guess if you put in $2 worth of advertising, you’ll sell $2 worth of things but if you trust in it and know how to work the keywords and you invest enough to wipe out the competition then you sit taller in the Google Tree so more people can see you. So to stay that way you’d want to be paying above what everyone else is paying. You can see this in CPC (Costs per click). For me though I’m going to try and stay down low and play with the settings and campaigns and then try and learn how to get the maximum benefit from my money! (even though it’s not much yet)

So whoever is worried about launching into getting online and doing these adwords, it’s not so scary once you’ve done it once.

So just recapping my next steps… since there’s going to be more people viewing the site (hopefully) I’d like to create a video of some sort to explain the process of designing your own shirt and upload more artwork.

Chat next time!

It’s been a while since my last post. Running and maintaining a website is rewarding after seeing the finished product, but also takes a lot of time! I’m really happy with the way my website looks, but I think the main thing is getting people to actually visit the site. I realised that my expectations of owning an online business is a bit different to what it’s actually like! For example, I thought if the site looks nice it would be enough but looks like that’s far from the truth.

Although Google Adwords seem like a pretty blazé thing to just about everyone, I was actually quite nervous signing up for an account and worried about spending my money on the wrong thing. So after talking to Anh and shaking a bit of and nervous energy, I signed up an account with them. I used one of the promotions (that Anh refered). Basically I paid for $20 worth of adwords (Google giving $10 back) and on top of that Google gave me $75 AUD worth of adwords credit if you will, which is pretty awesome. So I took the plunge and called them up.

They were super friendly and helpful. It was an American guy on the phone so it was interesting to speak to someone overseas. Basically I said I’m new to adwords and need help with setting up a campaign. I have a fair idea on how it all works but it seemed like choosing the words were the number one thing to do and I didn’t have confidence to choose the words, so they offered someone to help me out for free!

The experience of speaking with a Google guy/girl was good, because they were so friendly and nice. I didn’t expect this at all, because I thought… they’re part of the Google team – they’re so successful that they don’t need to be nice. Anyway, so the first time I called all their consultants were busy so they said they’d call me back in a couple of hours. That day I was quite busy so didn’t realised that the day had gone by and they hadn’t called. The next day they called but I was about to go into a meeting so couldn’t speak with them. So this happened a few times, so in hindsight it would have been even better if they emailed after their call so that I was able to call them and request to be spoken with by a ready consultant. Oh well. So finally we spoke and it was the same gentleman who spoke to me, which was great because it felt like it was the same person following up.

He explained adwords carefully and patiently. We went through how to set up campaigns and looking for strong words relating to my website – inlovewithluna.com. They basically look at your site and then suggest what to do with the credit you bought from adwords. It was interesting, because if you had typed in keywords that you think would apply to your site, you can see how much each keyword is. I imagine it to be like an auction but sort of a daily thing. Here’s the link to have a look at keywords and you can search them: https://adwords.google.com.au/select/KeywordToolExternal

And looks like this when you search a word/phrase:

View of Google adwords when you want to search for keywords or ideas for keywords for your website

So now all I have to do is wait. The consultant will call me up (they said within three working days) and they’ll come up with suitable keywords and then go from there.

I realised that with my website I should have more text and update the about page as a lot of people read that page to get to know about you and the company.

I think there’s still a fair way to go as I have a lot ideas on how to market the site but I do realise that I’m quite new to the building  and maintaining a website, even though it’s easy to come up with ideas on what to do, doing it is much more fiddly than I thought! But I am glad I’m using DecoNetwork, cause I can imagine me trying to build a website from scratch. I’d probably give up in the first week if I didn’t have a platform or system like this to start on.

So my next steps are:

- Tell more people about my site by posting up RSS feeds on this blog

- Write more content on my blog

- Update my website by adding content in the “About” section

- Think about how I can connect more with visitors on the site. Maybe even thinking of doing a small video or something to explain why my site is different, because at the moment it’s feeling like it’s just another t-shirt site but I want to make it more interesting. If you have any ideas for anything including how to promote the site, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I am writing this from a hotel room in Birmingham. I’m here for the Printwear & Promotion exhibition this weekend. Long way from home and after having dinner in the pub by myself, thought I might jot a few thoughts down here…

I mentioned a while ago how I was surprised to start getting orders, before I really thought my store was ready. This was all due to Google Adwords, and I continue to get orders regularly from all parts of Australia. The cool thing is, I can see what the referring sites were and what keywords people have used.

You do have to be careful though – I ended up spending too much money on the Adwords. This was because I was getting high ranking on very general, popular keywords like “cheap tshirts”. I was also targeting people wanting to make shirts for all the music festivals on in summer and this was attracting a lot of traffic too.

I have scaled down my Adwords, and am now focusing on schools, and sports uniforms, since it’s the start of the school year in Oz.

You can see the effects by the stats shown here.

Speaking of site traffic, I also mentioned last time that I was going to experiment with Facebook for drawing traffic and creating awareness of my store.

Firstly, I figure – I want to show my friends and family my exciting new little business, so what better way than putting it on my facebook status.

And yes, it worked! Look at the top referrals for that week:

Now, these are particular online marketing ideas I have used. But there’s still the best and free way to be found – and that’s through plain old Google search results.

The trick with this is, that Google has to find your site, and think it’s relevant enough to show it in search results.

In order to best optimize your site for what’s termed “Organic search results”  – ie natural, not paid, it’s good to think of it from the searcher’s point of view.

I think of it as hiring a private investigator. I really need to find something/someone, and I dont have the resources or time to find them. So I hire my trusting PI – Google. Now, I need to brief Google on what I am looking for, so – I enter the keywords that best describe what I’m looking for. Often, I am only looking for things in a certain geographical location, so that’s why I might choose to search only UK sites, or only Australian sites.

So I might tell it: sports uniforms, and search australian sites only

Now, how does Google find results that are going to be useful to me? Well, again, they’re not experts on the subject matter and they dont know who the best sports uniform suppliers are in Australia so they rely on:

- what websites contain those keywords

- what sites others have recommended (how many times has this site been listed or mentioned on another website or in a blog, forums etc)

- it also looks at how active the site is and how often it’s content it updated. This is a good sign that it’s a useful site.

There are lots of other more technical things it does too, but let’s not get overwhelmed here

So, essentially, I ask my PI for some sports uniforms suppliers in Australia, and Google gives me a whole list of results, ranked in order of relevance.

Back to the site owner: what does this mean for me?

Well, it’s the same:

- make sure the keywords your target market are using in searches, are well covered in the body of your website. This doesn’t mean dodgy lists of hidden keywords, but useful, well written content that describes the products and services you offer. (This is one reason why sites made of just images are not good at returning search results)

- submit your site to local business directories, or any site related to your business. Ie, a sports uniform supplier might be listed on the Sports Assocation websites for example. Also, the more your site is talked about in forums, or blogs, the better. Google is moving towards relying on social media as a source for relevant search rankings.

- make sure your site is updated regularly! Google visits your website to see if there are changes. If there are none, it will visit your site less and less, meaning your search ranking will go down. Basically, it will see your site as not relevant. On the other hand, the more you update, the more Google thinks “this is a happening site, I’ll keep checking back on it for updates”.

So there you go. I don’t profess to be a SEO expert (Anh has a lot better knowledge than me) but just sharing my experiences and th0ughts. Also – I refer exclusively to Google in this post, but just for simplicity sake. You could replace it with Yahoo or Bing or whatever, bearing in mind that each search engine works a little bit differently.

So long for now!

Kristi

The good thing about DecoNetwork is that you can change your website anytime you want – quickly and easily. With the new version 2, there are more new cool design templates to choose from. I have changed my logo and site look and feel – hope you like it.

For a Fulfillment Center, you will need to set up and define the printable regions for your products. The DecoNetwork Help site is a great resource on how to set up your Fulfillment Store. From an affiliate store perspective, the products have been added and set up by our Fulfillment Center, so we just need to focus on creating and adding our designs to the store.

This is the stage where we would need to invest most of our time and effort to. After all we want our site to have a combination of already “created products” to sell and “store designs” for our customers to use for their creations.

As a newbie, I’ve discovered a few things along the way – that will ensure the whole process will be a lot quicker and easier going forward. The secret is to practice and do a few test designs first to get the feel for it, before you start uploading all of your designs – incase you discover it isn’t what you want (this has happened to me a number of times – now that’s the time consuming part).

Here are some tips:

1. Work out your design categories – just to have an idea what you will be designing and how it is going to be structured on your site (doesn’t have to be a complete final list, you can change later if needed).
2. Use Firefox as the chosen browser – found it quicker than Internet Explorer.
3. Choose and copy a good small selection of “stock designs” to your site for your own use and for your customers’ use – choose the designs that are most likely to be used as this will appear in your “store designs” library and on your homepage for customers to choose from – the “stock design” library is still accessible for your customer usage too.
4. Focus on the easy and quick design first – build the momentum and experience. You can work on the more elaborate designs later.
5. Try to save your individual elements/motifs separately – so you can add them to your “store design” library (provide customers more choice) – customers can reuse different elements for different products/items, plus you can use them too when composing your designs, as they can be overlapped (providing you save the file with a transparent background).
6. For graphics or vector artwork, best to save them as a .png or .eps file – for background transparency. So the designs will look good against any coloured background.
7. Saving files, ensure they are in the following format:
   • .eps
   • .png
   • .jpg
   • .gif
   • .emb (for embroidery designs – only available for Fulfillment Centers only)
8. If you are stuck with some design ideas, try creating some designs using DecoNetwork “stock designs” just to get you site up and running, so there are some items for sale while you think, plan and work on the more unique designs for your site.
9. Refer to online graphics and design resources for inspiration like Smashing Magazine, CG Textures (free texture site), Colourlovers (colour & pattern ideas), Color Schemer (work out color palette), Absolute Cross (good Photoshop tutorials and textures), CreativePro, Design Meltdown 2010 and fotolia (stock images – more affordable than istockphoto).
10. Consider using different brushes and effects to give your design a new dimension. Have you downloaded the 50 Must-Have Photoshop Brushes?

Now that there are some development and some designs on our site, I am really excited about creating more designs for the store. My next task is to design some patterns for the fabrics and wall decals and include more fancy designs for the t-shirts.

If you have any other tips on creating designs for your site or have any recommendation on design resources, please do share with us…

I hope you find the above tips useful.

Happy designing!

Anh

It’s February already! Time sure flies….
(I apologize for not making any entries since December… I had work commitments that required me to do extra work over the holiday period). But now I am back on deck!

I’ve been listening to some Anthony Robbins motivational CD’s the last few weeks (on a daily basis) and have purposely listened to the “goal settings” section repeatedly all this week. I can’t believe the last 2 years I have not set any written goals… no wonder, I didn’t achieve much

Anyhow, the audio have inspired me to take serious action this year, especially on the business side of things – one of them is to grow and make money from my DecoNetwork web store – stickkers.com. It is so important to map out goals and objectives for our business so we can develop action plans to achieve them… otherwise we allow other external factors to take over the important things. It’s like driving a car to a new destination; without a road map – we need a map to help us get there.

Tony Robbins states, “I believe that setting goals empowers us. We can cast our dreams into the stars but we need to reflect on those goals, break them down into actionable elements and move toward them every day.”
Thank you wise one!

Here are my goals:

• Redevelop my logo and branding for the site – 7^th Feb
• Set up store items and make the site at a sellable/ready to purchase state – 14^th Feb
• Designs prints, motifs, elements and statements for the site – 28^th Feb
  • Real Estate
  • Game console
  • Parking stickers/tags
  • Car tags/stickers
• Site optimization, social media marketing and activate (turn on) google Adwords – 1^st of March
• Collate / revise relevant keywords for bidding – 31^st March
• Create Ad groups and relevant landing pages – 31^st March
• Competitive analysis and research – 31^st March
• Promote site on twitter, facebook, forums and other social media avenues – 31^st March
• Launch a “limited time special offer” to encourage sales, allow customers to test drive and build site awareness – 12^th April
• Aim to generate $1,000+ (each month) in sales for April and May
• Site update, create new designs and categories (with the flavour of the month/time) – 1^st June
• May – September: aim to generate between $2,000 – $3,000 in sales each month (may require Ad groups tweaking / additional special offer for encouraging sales)
• Site update, create new designs and categories (with the flavour of the month/time – special holiday season theme) – 1^st October
• October – December: aim to generate between $5,000 – $10,000 in sales each month (special Xmas / holiday season promo)… repeat this for the following year

Now, I am going to re-tweak on the logo and the site look and feel…. Stay tune for my next week’s post.
Chao!

Anh

Well and truly back from Christmas/Summer break (we’re in Australia) and from travelling for work.

Since then, my DecoNetwork store has been updated to version 2. This makes my site look more snazzy, with some cool new ways to create a fresh store front. Things like featured products, most popular and more flexibility for image sizes, etc.

I’ve chosen one of the new themes, and simply updated it with my own colours and banner. What’s cool is I dont have to worry about coding or anything – just click where I want to change and enter the details:

Simply use my browser to customize the look of my page. The red outline appears when I hover over anything that's editable.

I’ve also let my friend and family know on FaceBook about my new site. I’m going to see how much my site traffic goes up from this! I’ll let you know how it goes…

Post again soon…

Happy belated Australia Day to those in Oz! 

I had some time to think about the branding of inlovewithluna.com. I like more imagery and I think showing t-shirts and explaining how the website works and what it can offer helps a lot. So I changed the home page graphics and kept the pink and simple colours. So here it is! 

At the moment I’m arranging and setting up all the products and also designing some more prints! DecoNetwork has recently launched their second version so the backend of managing products and adding products has become better. 

New Homepage for inLovewithLuna.com : I changed some of the graphics in the top hand side but kept the logo the same

Adding products is quite easy. Inlovewithluna.com is mainly going to be different types of garments like t-shirts, hoodies and tops so I’m going to start of with these products and go from there. 

Adding products with DecoNetwork : You just keep adding products by clicking on the button and choosing the colour and style you want displayed.

The next two steps are to finalise all the products and then set up some google adwords!

I apologise as it’s been a while since my last post! Just thought I’d give a really quick update on how the poll is going. So far 71 people have voted. Thank you for your votes!!! It’s exciting hearing other peoples’ ideas and inspires me for more interesting prints. Since the poll a couple of people have emailed me and let me know what they like and are waiting to see what’s online so they can make a purchase. All I need to do is actually start designing So here are the results from the 71 votes…drum roll please…. 

Here are the results from the Poll!

So there are more results too! Quite a few people made suggestions which is great! The more specific the better hehe  My absolute favourite is a “Centaur punching a unicorn in the face” and “Retro cartoons like superted.” Omg what a crack up!  

So thanks so much to everyone who voted. (More votes welcome at any stage as I’m always interested in new ideas!) I’ll keep working on the designs and send out another poll for voting on designs soon!

Have an awesome Christmas!

Suggestions from others!