This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Side Hustle School Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. It's Chris Guillebeau. Our whole mission here, our goal is to help you build, grow, and succeed in a money-making venture without quitting your job by using the skill you already have without going into debt.
Of course, we have a global community of people out there from all over the world with different backgrounds, different ages. Today we're gonna hear from Beth from Ottawa, Canada. Ottawa, small little town. Also the capital of Canada, fun fact. Beth has taken the leap and launched an online store selling vintage clothing, and she's using Shopify.
Now Shopify is a platform many of our listeners are familiar with, but just like many who are starting out, Beth is feeling a bit overwhelmed. She's like, I got this awesome idea. I've got my store, but there just seems to be so much to do. So Beth is seeking tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of Shopify, specifically improving her store's layouts, better utilize SEO, search engine optimization, and gain a practical understanding of analytics. Like what do you actually need to know versus all the things you could know about, but might just kind of sidetrack you from your core mission.
Your core mission of course is to sell products and services, build a customer base, make money. So let's see if we can help Beth and anybody else streamline their Shopify experience to accomplish that much greater goal. Listener question, I feel overwhelmed by Shopify. Detailed question and my response coming up. [Music]
Hi, I'm Beth from Ottawa.
I recently launched an online store selling vintage clothing on Shopify. I chose the platform because of its good reputation, but I'm feeling overwhelmed with all the features and I'm not sure I'm leveraging it to its full potential. What are some tips for maximizing the effectiveness of this platform? Specifically, I'm interested in improving my store's layout, utilizing SEO better and understanding analytics. Hey Beth, Shopify can definitely be a bit overwhelming when you're just starting out.
I think we talked about this in a related question recently, but once you get the hang of it, it can definitely be a powerful tool for your online store. I'm a fan of them. I've known some folks who worked for Shopify before. I think at one point they did some ads on the podcast just to disclose that, but that was a number of years ago and I still think they're pretty cool. So in terms of simplifying, regarding your store's layout, so you probably know this already, but Shopify offers a range of themes, lots of different options where you can customize according to your aesthetic and such.
You really just wanna make sure your site is easy to navigate. You want really clear product categories. You want an intuitive checkout process. Just let clarity be the guiding value or the highest value. I think that's just an important principle, the most important principle for an e-commerce store.
And for SEO, start with keyword research. Just understand what your potential customers are looking for, include those keywords in your product titles, descriptions, meta tags. Shopify actually has some built-in features that will do this for you, so it doesn't have to be overwhelming. If you spend about 15 minutes doing the research, you're gonna have everything you need to just kind of take care of that, at least in terms of an introductory step. And then the same is true for analytics.
Shopify just gives you a whole bunch of data through its dashboard. So you're gonna get all these metrics, I would say pick a couple of them to pay attention to and ignore everything else. You might want total sales, conversion rate, customer acquisition, like where are people coming from, those are good things to pay attention to. You can always go deeper, but I think much more important to say here are the two or three things I'm gonna keep an eye on each week. And those are the metrics I'm gonna try to grow.
And if you do that, you're gonna grow a business. That's it, that's what's exciting. So if you really wanna master Shopify, like any tool it takes patience and practice, they've got lots of online resources, they've got Shopify courses, but really you've made the best decision in terms of moving forward with your vintage clothing store. So Beth, good luck, I wish you well. I'm excited to hear how it goes.
Listeners, if you've got a question or an idea or an online shop, feel free to include that and we can share it with listeners as well. Include the location, the website, whatever it is. sidehustleschool.com/questions, new episode every day. It's all completely free. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
We try to simplify around here as well. And of course, I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
