2 Things To Consider Before Adding An Online Store To Your Blog

While you can make a decent living from ad revenue on your blog, most bloggers realize that the big bucks lie in sponsorships and other ideas stemming from the success of your blog. A highly popular idea is to sell your own merchandise or products/services of some sort directly from your site. It opens up a new source of income, and you can be wildly successful.

Anyone can build an online store into their existing website, but there are two critical things I want you to think about before you set everything up.

Customer Security

Too many bloggers are so keen to make money from their online store that they rush into things and neglect all security measures. As such, it’s so easy for customer data to be stolen, or for people to pose as other identities while buying through your site. So, you need to ensure you put all the security measures in place to protect your loyal customers.

To start, you need to get an https connection on your site as this encrypts it and prevents personal data from being stolen. Secondly, you should take strides to ensure identity theft is prevented by getting KYC compliance. This is essentially the practice of knowing your customers, so you can be 100% certain they are who they say they are. Luckily, software like Netverify lets you achieve KYC compliance the easy way, so it’s not a difficult thing to accomplish. Now, your store will allow secure transactions while ensuring that nobody is posing as anyone else and using their card to buy things. It keeps customers happy, which will help your blog!

Product Quality

It’s far too easy to set up an online store and sell very bad merch for your blog. I’ve lost count of the number of t-shirts and clothing that are poorly branded with your blog logo or a simple phrase. Yes, these may appeal to your diehard audience members, but nobody else is going to buy substandard things.

Instead, you need to think about the quality of your products. Sell things that actually bring value to someone’s life; something they either need or will use regularly. This is how you appeal to your wider audience, but it’s also how you draw in traffic and sales from people who may have never even heard of your blog. As a result, you turn your online store into a little bit of an advert for your blog. People are drawn to the store first, then they see your blog and start reading. It’s an effective way of boosting your regular readership while also bringing in money from the store!

There are clear and undeniable benefits to having an online store on your blog. The obvious one is that it opens up a new revenue channel. So, even if the adverts and sponsors aren’t paying much for a period, you could still bring in money through online sales. Plus, as mentioned above, it can be used as a way of driving more traffic to your blog as well! For me, the secret to doing this successfully is ensuring you take customer security seriously and provide excellent products.