A Solopreneur’s Toolbox to Creating a Successful Online Business

2. A Keyword Research Tool

It doesn’t matter if you run an online store, a travel blog, a booking website, or what have you.

If you want to pull in visitors who are likely to turn into brand followers or paying customers, you need to uncover relevant keywords for your marketing campaigns.

Remember, keywords play a crucial role in connecting businesses with their audience in the online space. Whether you do SEO, PPC, or social media marketing campaign, one way or the other, you will need to work with keywords.

With a keyword research tool like LongTailPro, however, you can easily identify profitable keyword opportunities by expanding “seed” search terms into long variations with buyer intent.

All you have to do is enter these terms into the main keyword research tool and use “filters” to spot keywords with commercial terms, such as “buy,” “for sale,” “price,” and so on. 

Furthermore, LongTailPro allows you to link your domain to any keyword research project. This will tweak the recommended “keyword competitiveness” rating to suit your domain’s current ranking potential. 

By uncovering highly-relevant, yet, less competitive keywords, you’d be able to run your marketing campaigns with a good chance of generating sales or closing deals.

If you don’t feel like using LongTailPro because it is a paid service, then there are countless other free keyword research tools you can use to uncover profitable keywords.

3. Tools for Online Collaboration

Let’s face it — even if you label yourself as a solopreneur, there’s a good chance you’ll still hire freelancers because of the plethora of benefits they bring to the table.

Product copywriters, for example, play an important role in the pre-launch phase of your online store. The same can be said for UX designers, inventory managers, and graphic designers.

To make sure you’re always on the same page, use a secure messenger tool like Brosix — a desktop-based application with advanced collaboration features.

With Brosix, you can communicate with your freelance team via video calls, screen sharing sessions, interactive whiteboards, and broadcast messaging. It also features a customizable backend that lets you pick your own logo, assigns administrators, and design a “Welcome Module” that can help onboard new freelancers.

Another tool you can use to keep your team focused on your goals is Trello.

The platform is a straightforward project management app that allows you to organize tasks using cards, lists, and boards.

Basically, Trello Cards represent individual tasks that can be assigned to specific members of your team. It can contain pertinent details about the activity, attachments, and even deadlines to introduce a sense of urgency. 

4. Lead Generation Tools

Designing an online store is all about planning interactions that ease potential customers into a purchase decision.

If your game plan is to greet prospects with a product offer upfront, you’ll have a lot of disappointed visitors leaving your site in droves.

What you need to do is to concoct a carefully crafted lead generation/nurturing strategy that shows visitors what they want to see — when they want to see it.

For example, suppose you’re getting loads of web traffic from a blog post. Instead of shoving product offers down their throats, you should ask them if they’d like to receive more great content through a newsletter subscription.

Typically, an email marketing platform like MailChimp can help you build signup forms you can embed in your e-commerce site. This will streamline your lead generation process as new leads can be automatically added to your mailing list.

To maximize the impact of your signup form, you can configure it as a popup that triggers after a time delay, upon exit, or once the user reaches a certain point of the page.

Popup builders like EasyBox for Shopify or Popup Builder for WordPress are also great alternatives that also offer these features.

After you get visitors to sign up, the next order of business is to create a lead nurturing strategy that will guide them down the conversion path. You can send them special discounts, abandoned cart reminders, or cross-selling emails if you want to squeeze more sales from existing customers — MailChimp already has automation templates you can use for these objectives.

Conclusion

Always remember that even the biggest online retailer would be nothing without their trusty tools.

To wrap up, here’s a quick rundown of the tools mentioned in this post: