If you love shoes you will be happy to hear that the shoe industry is one of the hottest markets globally. Zion Market Research has said that the industry will grow from $240.06 Billion in 2017 to $320.44 Billion by the year 2023.
This is great news for people who are looking to get a piece of the cake financially by starting an online business. Knowing how to sell shoes online is actually easier than you might have initially thought, trust me.
With the internet this has become even easier for anyone to have their business online working from home. The best news is that you do not need huge amounts of money to start working on your business.
All you need is a computer or laptop with good internet connection and you are ready to get started.
However, to be successful selling shoes online as your business you need the right method or strategy and in this post that is exactly what I will be showing.
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Strategies
When it comes to selling shoes online there are two methods that work quite well which you can use.
What are these two methods? There are :
- Starting an Ecommerce business
- Affiliate marketing.
Let me briefly talk a little about these methods.
- Starting an Ecommerce business
A shoe Ecommerce business is basically opening a website and buying shoes and selling them at a marked up price on your websites.
For this method you can sell used shoes, especially your own shoes which you would like to get rid.
People will visit your site and then buy directly from you. You can use retail companies as your suppliers to give you regular stock.
- Affiliate marketing
This method is my favorite and the one I have been using for the last 3 years where you promote a product (shoes in this case) for an online company and then your earn a commission every time a person buys from that company through you.
This method is the easiest method since you do not need any stock and do not need any of your products to handle and stock as the company does that for you.
What is more the company does literally everything and all you have to do is to promote the company and collect a commission.
However, to succeed you just need the right steps and in the next step I will be guiding you through it to promote your passion of shoe selling just like how I promote my passion which is the vegan diet.
Step 1:Choose the right niche
When it comes to selling shoes successfully you need to be narrow down and be specific, Why?
This is because the shoe industry is a broad topic which may be a problem if you are just selling any type of shoes especially when you are starting off.
Online there is a concept called keyword focus (which I will talk about later) which basically helps you get better and focused results that will help you with the competition in your shoe business,
Remember you will not be the only one selling shoes so it will help you to focus on a niche that is less competitive and narrow.
How do I choose my niche?
You must first check if the niche you are taking is in demand or not. There is no use in promoting something that will not convert. Remember the aim of your online business is to help people with a problem.
This step is the most important and mostly overlooked by affiliate marketers which is what causes failure. In fact for any business this is the most important step.
For you to be able to make money online you need to be in a profitable and in demand niche as it will be incredibly hard to be profitable in a low demand niche.
There are many ways that all successful internet or affiliate marketers use and I will be showing you now.
1.Forums
The best and easy way to check if your chosen shoe niche is profitable is to check if there are any forums related to your niche.
This will help you answer the following questions:
- Are people talking about it online?
- What problems are they facing
- What are solutions are they trying and are they working?
- Can you provide them with a solution?
In order to do this, just go to google and then type your niche and add the work forum after it.
For example, Let’s say I want to sell sneaker shoes then I would type the following.
As you can see 1 180 000 000 is pretty good and high in terms of internet standards and this means that there are people or companies who invested in paying forums because they know that there are people willing to pay for sneaker shoes.
This also shoes that there are people posting daily or weekly looking for solutions.
If you enter those forums and skim through it you will see that there are people posting and looking for solutions.
Now as an online marker this means that now you know that this niche is pretty profitable.
Your job now is to just find a product which will solve that problem and then you promote it. This could be a physical or digital problem it doesn’t matter).
2. Jaaxy Keyword research tool
Now, to make your search even more focused you can use jaaxy. What is jaaxy?
Jaxxy is a keyword tool which helps you check if your keyword (niche name) is profitable and also how much competition you have on that specific niche or keyword.
You can register for a Jaaxy keyword research tool free account which will give you 30 free search.
The best aspect about this tool is that it is one of the top ones in the online world that has a free search (only for 30 keywords)
Unlike like others it is simple and easy to use for any person and I will show you how simple it is.
After registering your account free you can start searching immediately.
Let’s say you have registered and you type in sneaker shoes as shown below.
Now all you have to do is to look at 2 things only when you are doing your niche research
1. The traffic for that keyword search (demand)
2. The competition for that keyword
This is how you check for this.
- The average searches (AVG), which is your traffic, must be above 30
- The QSR, which is your competition, must be below 100.
Looking at the screenshot below we can see that our keyword “sneaker shoes” meets our requirement which means it is a great niche to focus on.
You will be able to get traffic to your site in no time especially since the competition is not too much.
This is all you need to find your niche,
Site Note: A profitable niche is any niche you can be able to find a problem and offer a solution.
Create a blog/website
Once you have chosen a niche you will now need to build a website whereby you will be promoting the solutions you provide.
Don’t know how to build a website?
Do not worry I got you covered. Unlike before where you needed to be a programmer or know how to code to build a website now this has all become super easy.
In fact now you can create a website in less then 30 seconds,
Yes I said 30 seconds.
All you need is website builder which uses WordPress to do this and you are set.
In fact I will show you how to get a free one using site Rubrix without paying anything. I will do that in the next section.
Write quality content on your website (blogging)
Now I will assume that you do not want to spend money doing all the promoting of your site in order to be recognized online so you make a sale right?
You want to get money and start doing the ads maybe after right?
Yes it is possible and in fact blogging is the best free method to drive lots of traffic to your site.
What if I do not know how to blog?
Do not worry it is easier than you think, When I started my first site in 2016 I had no clue and I did not know how to be a blogger and that led my site to go nowhere.
It was only at the end of 2017 that I found a great training problem which made it easier for me to write good quality content on a daily basis without even thinking about it.
In fact, they the training is a full course which trains you how to start an affiliate marketing from scratch and you have the option of having a free membership.
In fact, I wrote a review about this training program. You can check it out here
If you are happy you can start a free website right now and start building while getting training. That is how easy it is to get started.
Writing content for your site
When you write content you use the jaaxy keyword research tool just like before and this tool will help you in finding the right keywords to write about om your blog.
The first step is to use Google instant which will help you see what people are searching for.
And the afterwards you check the traffic on jaaxy and the competition that’s all.
Let me show you how to do this. Let’s say you have now chosen your niche as sneakersshoes101.com and your site is ready.
Step 1 type in anything related to sneaker shoes. Let’s say I type in “sneaker shoes for” and type in one alphabet at a type and see what google gives you. You find a lot of ideas doing this.
Now let’s say I have chosen “sneaker shoes for men”.
I now go to do my keyword research for this keyword to make sure it has enough traffic and also that the competition is low.
The above screenshot show us that this is a great keyword to write about and it will rank better on google since the competition is low for the following reasons:
- The average traffic is 228, which is a value above 39
- The QSR is below 100, which means the competition for this keyword is pretty low.
You can keep doing this on google and you will find a lot of keywords to write about.
Other ideas you can explore are as follows:
- How sneaker shoes….
- Wearing sneaker shoes at….
- Best sneaker shoes
Finding affiliate programs
Now do earn from your site you will need affiliate program which you will incorporate in your writing content whereby if people click it and purchase you will earn a commission from the company.
There are many affiliate programs online which you can earn from and I will give you a list of some of the best ones.
- Amazon
- Clickbank
- ShareAsale
You can also search for your specific niche affiliate program just be type the following on google “YOUR NICHE+ affiliate program”
using our example before of the sneaker shoes We would type in the following on google. Sneaker shoes+ affiliate program”
As you can see there is a lot of programs we can choose, All you have to do is go to that program and register your account free and they will give you a link once you have signed up for free.
Once you have the link just put in on your content and you earn a commission when a person clicks it and buys. Simple and easy right?
Methods of getting traffic
Now when it comes to this online business, as I said earlier, traffic is what will make you succeed and there are 2 ways to get traffic:
- Paid methods
- Free methods
- Paid methods
This is what you pay a certain source to drive traffic to your site. This method is the fastest however if you do not know how to use it you could end up wasting your previous money.
I would only recommend this if you are clued-up about paying methods such as Facebook ads, twitter ads, linkendIn ads etc.
- Free methods
Free traffic methods are what I recommend for anyone starting out. Although they may take long to produce results some are very reliable if you work at them consistently like SEO (writing content which focuses on keywords) and posting on social media.
This is the reason that I have been talking about write good quality content which focuses on keywords.
Consistency for producing results
Now this is the other important factor you must implement in your business, Consistency.
This means you must blog or write content in a consistent level and this will help your site get recognized by google over time as an authority on your niche.
Google loves good quality and consistent content as it shows that you are helping people with your website and you are consistent with it.
Again this will be very easy if you focus on getting the right keywords that we talked about.
What can also help you is a community who are doing the same thing and can give you input on your content.
If you would like to learn how to do this with guidance like I am doing and be in a community of helpful people who are doing in successful I can help you.
Again you can have a free membership (no credit card details needed) and see if you like it or not and then you can decide yourself.
You can get you free account here and start working on your online empire like most of us are.
Final thoughts
Starting your business from home and earning a full time income has never been this easy and with the shoes industry estimated to grow so much you wouldn’t want to be left behind.
The two best ways to create an online business (Ecommerce and affiliate marketing ) are here to stay and they are growing yearly as more and more people are looking to escape their demanding jobs or earn an extra income.
The best way I recommend to getting started is affiliate marketing because it is pretty simple as you focus on natural traffic and there is no need to worry about stock and delivery.
I hope this article of how to sell shoes online was helpful and I hope you benefited from it. If you have any question or comments to add you are more than welcome to leave them below.