Building a professional presence on a solo budget

As a solopreneur myself, my biggest takeaway has been that it’s possible to build a professional, functional business website with little more than an idea and determination.

It may seem impossible that you could steal some of Amazon’s sales from them (for example), but trust me when I say you can. And, relatively speaking, it’s vastly easier to go into business today than it was historically. Was it really a “simpler” time, when going into business meant a huge investment in brick-and-mortar before you even started?

The Internet has been the great leveler. You can start something meaningful and professional on a few hundred dollars (and that includes stock). It’s important to remember that a project started this way is very unlikely to pay your mortgage for a while. But it is a way to create a professional, functional presence that makes money, on almost no budget.

We’ll divide this into two clear sections:

1. Creating a store.
2. Marketing it for free.

A website is everything

Before you read any further, you’ll need a basic website in place. Our guru guides have plenty to help you with this already, from how to find the right domain name to how to choose the right hosting plan.

Your selling platform

Since the focus of this blog is turning your site into a professional store, we’ll start here.

My personal experience is with WooCommerce on WordPress. There are other options available (such as Shopify and Weebly), and they all offer much the same thing. 

Something I’ve been consistently blown away by on my own journey is the generosity of web developers, who have given mere mortals like us the keys to platforms (like WordPress and WooCommerce), without asking anything in return. I’m being sincere here.

While these two giants undoubtedly benefit from a version of the “Microsoft approach” (give enough for free, and eventually they’ll pay for something), you can easily get a fully-functional, professional store without paying either one a single penny. And that’s not to be sniffed at.

To digress for a moment on this point, we should never underestimate what these companies are doing, not just for small businesses but for the entire global market. By making it easy for anyone (regardless of coding experience) to start a small business, they are keeping big companies in check.

Indeed, the only cost incurred on a per-transaction level is the fee for your payment processor. Stripe and PayPal both integrate with WooCommerce and charge around 1.5% of the sale price plus a flat fee of 20p (depending on region). Alls to say, you can build a store and process payments securely in a couple of hours. 

And then the fun starts.

USP, listings, and pricing

I’m grouping these because you need a version of each in place before you launch. 

USP

Your Unique Selling Point (USP) doesn’t need to be anything groundbreaking, just something that answers the ‘why here?’ for any customer that lands on your site. Shows like Dragons’ Den (Shark Tank in the US) have popularized the idea that a business needs something truly unique to merit investment.

This isn’t true. I see my business’s USP as a combination of things: Low prices, daily dispatch (fast delivery), transparency, and peace of mind. So, more a set of values. Whatever you choose, make sure they are visible, and highlight them on a clear About page. While this goes some way to authenticating your business, I can’t overstate how much a Trustpilot page will do. More on that in a moment.

Listings

On WooCommerce, these are under the ‘Products’ tab, but there is an equivalent on each sales platform. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to how to structure your listings, but there are a few things to bear in mind.

• Good photos – My highest-rated pages on search engines are the unique photos I have taken. You may be surprised by how many businesses use the same old catalog photos released by manufacturers. Your unique image will catch the eye in a sea of identical product images. This is one area where spending money on a professional, especially on launch, is worth its weight in gold. 

• Detailed specs – The more the merrier. It can seem a faff. I kept products basic for years, favouring quantity over quality. It’s not that I regret this, but I have recently spent a lot of time adding EANs, sizes, weights, and anything to make the page more valuable. This is particularly key now that they are scanned by AI.

• Clarity for customers – Being clear about unit size, quality, materials, etc is not just good for making your page richer. It’s essential for making your customer feel confident in their purchase. It legitimizes that the stock is real, and they haven’t landed on a fraudulent site.

As you figure out your listings, incrementally add some Terms and Conditions (as you think of them). These might center around the products themselves, but must include a returns policy, delivery policy, and so on. Use a template, or AI, if you aren’t sure where to start. 

Pricing

Choosing the right price for your products is singularly the most important element. Your prices will both legitimize your products and also place your business within the context of the market around you. (Are you a premium brand, a low-cost brand, a bespoke brand?) Whatever your angle, there are a few things to consider when setting your prices, especially for the first time.

• Charge what you need to charge – The biggest mistake, especially at the start, is going in too low and losing money. You don’t just need to sell an item for more than you bought it for. You need to sell in a way that factors in other costs like packaging and other running costs. When you start, you might want to price slightly lower to make an impact, but do be careful when doing this. It can be a slippery slope. You need to buy more stock to replace the stock you’re selling. Also, don’t presume that low margins will result in high enough sales to get by. Unfortunately, things just aren’t that easy.

• Research prices – Can you charge the amount you need to (as calculated above) without pricing yourself out of the market? If not, you may need to find other products or other suppliers that sell things to you for less. One workaround might be grouping items. For example, selling in lots of three might encourage sales as it lowers the relative cost of postage per item.

• Pricing too low can have unintended consequences –Firstly, it looks too good to be true (anomalous), and that can make buyers wary. Secondly, a very low item price can lead to a lot of rubbish (especially if you do decide to use any Pay Per Click advertising). In this case, lots of people will click the lowest price because it’s the lowest, but these are less likely to be high-quality clicks.

Once you have established your pricing strategy and have a few sales under your belt, you can play around with things. Inevitably, you will place some items on clearance or on sale, and note how that changes things. In the end, you’ll find a way to balance prices that both draws people in and allows you to make a profit on hero items. It’s a plate-spinning game in the end.

Site functionality

Let’s recap. So far, we’ve covered everything you need for a basic store: 

1. A site.
2. A platform.
3. A USP.
4. Listings (and T&Cs).
5. Prices.

But there are a few more things you’ll want your site to do before long, and you may as well sort them before launch.

Did you ever play SimCity? At the start, before you have the money to do everything properly, you need one of the most basic things. In the game, that’s establishing electricity, water, and transport. For your website, you’ll also want some version of the following:

1. Contact form – A way for customers to reach out to you. If you’re on WordPress/WooCommerce, something like FluentForms will do the trick.
2. “Subscribe to our mailing list” box – A way for customers who visit to plug in to what you’re doing. Even if you aren’t planning a newsletter/promo email anytime soon, gathering a list of interested parties is a good way to add value to your business. Mailchimp is a great starting point for this. More on this later.
3. SEO manager – Yoast is great for this, but really anything that helps you manage what gets sent to search engines.
4. Security monitoring – WordFence has a good free tier, and can help you detect attacks and login attempts out of the box.
5. Image optimizers – Minify your new images to improve site load times with something like Smush, and add alt text for enhanced visibility in search results with something like Alt Text AI.
6. Data collection – You want to know as much about your business as you can. The nature of business online means much of it is opaque without systems or plugins that monitor stats for you. Plugins like Jetpack can help you monitor visitor activity, sales data, and more. Gathering from your earliest days of trading will become invaluable later.
7. Product feed generator – A product feed generator (there are several good ones) allows you to present your product list to Google in a way it understands.
8. Trustpilot – Set up a Trustpilot account and fully integrate it into your site. The sooner the better. This link to a trusted benchmark is truly invaluable, and its site authority will also drive traffic to your site, especially once your score improves. You could even put a Trustpilot discount code on your profile to track who finds it that way.

As important as what you should include is what you shouldn’t. You’ll encounter plenty of businesses and individuals when your business is young who will offer to help you for a fee.

Even the plugins I mentioned above have paid tiers you don’t need. The ones I namechecked specifically have free tiers. If you are easily swayed, you can quickly rack up some hefty subscriptions that won’t really help your business. Leanness is key.

Free ways to grow your site

Paid marketing is the biggest money pit you will face. It’s tricky, persnickety, and can easily lead to debt. So, I’ll leave that can of worms for another day, and instead focus on free ways that you can spread the word about your business. And the first is simply making the most of every visitor to your site.

Turn new customers into returning customers

Exactly as it sounds, this is everything you can do for absolutely no money. It starts with existing customers. Every customer who visits your site for a browse is an opportunity. If you have set your site up with the mailing list subscription box (as above), you have a chance to reach out to even the most passive visitors later on who showed enough intent to sign up — even if they didn’t buy anything. 

Of course, when someone does buy, there’s a huge opportunity to instill a sense of loyalty. Print fliers offering discounts for their second order, and place these in the parcel along with their product.

Use every automated communication, including order confirmations and dispatch notes, to emphasize that you are a startup, and their support means everything. Nothing works all the time, but if you get 20% of visitors to sign up for a newsletter and 10% of buyers to buy again with a discount code, it soon adds up.

As the business grows, you’ll see new opportunities — could you introduce a loyalty scheme with reward points? Could you offer free postage over a certain amount? These are things that will come later, but never stop innovating and finding new ways to engage your most critical asset (your loyal customers).

Social media

This is the big one, and it needn’t be difficult. There are tools out there that can help you automate or get inspiration for social media, but essentially, by generating creative content, you are harnessing the huge inertia of these existing people-machines to your advantage.

You’re putting your site in front of eyeballs, and by virtue of simply creating a free profile on one of the big platforms, likely helping your site rank higher (albeit vicariously via the social pages) in search results.

If you do nothing else with social, it’s a good place to share new products and offer exclusive discount codes that you can track later.

Trustpilot 

I know I mentioned it just now, but I wanted to reiterate here, just because of the sheer impact it can have on your business. It’s possible to automate review invitations, and you can even consider incentivizing customers to leave reviews.

You will need to monitor your Trustpilot account. Not just set it up and leave it. One of the sad realities of being in business is that you will get some negative reviews, no matter how great you are. Manage these, and view each one as an opportunity for damage control. Most reasonable customers looking at your feedback profile will understand that some people are just tricky, and if it looks like you tried to resolve the issue, it’s all you can do.

Coupon sites and aggregators

Another great use for your product feed is submitting it to a site like Kelkoo. Many platforms allow you to do this for free, and it can really help people find your product, especially if you’re competitive on price. Don’t fall into the trap of using their paid tiers. I have found this to be one of the worst forms of PPC marketing that results in a lot of low-intent clicks on your lowest value products.

Elsewhere, submitting coupon codes can help bring in customers. Before long, you should notice others are submitting your codes on your behalf, and mentioning and linking to your site, and then soon, this side of things will hopefully take care of itself.

Blogs, interviews, content

All publicity is good publicity. Writing a blog that fills a gap in your marketplace can help your site rank. But similarly, posting video guides that demonstrate your expertise or solve pain points can be a great source of traffic. Consider posting these to YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms are opportunities to draw people to your site.

A journey of a thousand miles

So, can you build a professional online presence on a solo budget? Yes, absolutely. But you need to replace money with ingenuity and speed with patience.

Take your first step today, and get yourself on the path to success. OurSolopreneur Sale runs until March 23. Find a domain, hosting plan (all our options can easily work with WordPress and WooCommerce), site security, and all the tools you need to get going with up to 97% off. It’ll make your initial investment even smaller, and see what happens. What do you have to lose?