A Better Lemonade Stand

The Great SEO Heist: How I Turned One Blog Post Into 250K

Richard Lazazzera — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 04:25:23 +0000

Every great heist starts with ambition—a bold vision of what life could be.

For me, it wasn’t about riches or fame. It was about freedom.

At the time, A Better Lemonade Stand was thriving—roughly 200,000 monthly visitors at the time, built brick by brick, keyword by keyword, post by post.

Years of consistent effort had turned it into a trusted resource for aspiring entrepreneurs.

But I wanted more.

The dream? Mornings on the Sicilian coast. A cappuccino in hand, the smell of lemons and saltwater in the air, and the world moving just a little slower. A life where the grind was a distant memory.

That dream felt far away until I found it: a golden keyword, hidden deep within my competitor keyword research.

This wasn’t just any keyword. It was driving significant traffic to a much larger competitor—traffic that wasn’t just abundant, but high-intent, money-making traffic. The kind that doesn’t just click; they convert.

It was the perfect target. Valuable, elusive, and fiercely guarded. And I knew if I could crack it, it would change everything.

Little did I know, this would become my version of the royal scepter, locked in a vault and heavily protected—just like in the movie The Score.

And I was determined to pull it off.

This is the story of how I did it.

The Target

Identifying the target is the first and most critical step in any great heist.

After weeks of digging through competitor research, crunching numbers, and analyzing opportunities, I found it. A single keyword, driving massive traffic to a competitor 10 times my size.

This wasn’t just any keyword—it was the centerpiece of their strategy. And it wasn’t just bringing them clicks; it was fueling their revenue, their partnerships, and their dominance in this space.

The odds were stacked against me. Their domain authority was towering 20 points above my own, their content was deeply entrenched, and their resources far exceeded mine.

But every fortress has its weaknesses.

I had three key advantages:

I knew their secret. They had no idea I’d identified this keyword as their crown jewel.
I had patience. A heist like this isn’t about speed—it’s about timing.
I had a plan. A strategy so precise, it would give me a real shot at claiming the prize.

This was my target. And I was ready to do whatever it took to make it mine.

The Blueprint

Every great heist begins with a plan.

This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I knew taking on a competitor this size would require more than ambition—it would demand precision, patience, and relentless preparation.

The keyword went straight to my “heist list”—a private Airtable of high-value opportunities I keep.

These weren’t just random keywords to target; they were treasures to earn. But “earn” is the keyword here. I couldn’t simply take traffic from my competitor. I had to build something so good that Google—and the readers—would have no choice but to crown my post the best in its class.

To dominate this keyword, I needed to do more than match what was already ranking. I needed to surpass it by an order of magnitude.

The Execution

Great heists aren’t impulsive—they’re the result of meticulous planning and flawless execution.

For six months, my assistant and I worked to assemble every piece of the puzzle. We scoured the internet for articles, interviews, case studies, visuals, and insights that could elevate this post far beyond anything else on the topic.

This wasn’t about simply creating another guide—it was about building something that would redefine the conversation entirely.

Here’s how we made it happen:

Depth That Outclassed Competitors: Most existing posts barely scratched the surface. Ours dove deep into every detail, from the initial idea to scaling a full-fledged business.
Real-World Examples: We scoured forums, interviews, and case studies to include relatable, actionable success stories. Readers wouldn’t just learn the steps—they’d see how others had successfully taken them.
Actionable Insights: The post broke down costs, timelines, and practical steps in a way no competitor had. It wasn’t just theory; it was a roadmap readers could follow.
Unique Value: To stand out, we included downloadable templates, checklists, and visuals that turned the post into a toolkit. This wasn’t just another article—it was a resource people could use to launch their businesses.
Design for Engagement: Clean headers, bullet points, and engaging visuals ensured the content was easy to navigate and digest, keeping readers locked in from start to finish.

Every piece was crafted with a single goal: to create the definitive guide.

Late Nights and Relentless Editing

The writing process was grueling. For weeks, I worked late into the night, tweaking every sentence and refining every section. Good wasn’t good enough—every word had to add value.

My assistant and I reviewed the post endlessly, cutting fluff, clarifying concepts, and ensuring every element aligned with the goal of creating the definitive guide. By the time it was ready, I believed it was the best resource on the internet for starting a clothing line.

After months of preparation, it was ready.

Launch Day

Finally, on a crisp Tuesday morning—my publishing day for years—I hit Publish.

This wasn’t just another blog post. It was a calculated gamble, the culmination of half a year’s work, and a bold attempt to dethrone a much larger competitor.

All I could do now was wait—and see if the plan would pay off.

The Heist

We did it.

The results came faster than I expected. By the second day, the post was climbing the rankings. Google began testing it, shifting its position up and down, gauging whether it deserved the crown.

I watched as our ranking bounced around as Google tested whether to recognize the months of effort poured into this one post.

And then, it happened.

We didn’t just claim the top spot—we secured the rich snippet, that coveted box above all the other results.

The heist was complete.

A Legacy at the Top

For years, our post reigned supreme, quietly dominating the search results and bringing in steady streams of high-intent visitors. These weren’t casual readers; they were entrepreneurs searching for actionable guidance. And they found it.

Traffic poured in—tens of thousands of high-intent visitors every month. Entrepreneurs didn’t just read our guide; they devoured it, bookmarking it, sharing it, and returning to it as their trusted roadmap.

But the real beauty of the heist wasn’t just the traffic—it was the partnerships it unlocked.

Through strategic affiliate deals, we channeled that audience to key partners.

To one affiliate alone, we sent thousands of hyper-targeted, high-converting clicks every month. This wasn’t just casual traffic—it was actionable, resulting in $5,000–$10,000 in monthly commissions from that single partner, month after month, year after year.

Advertisers lined up, eager to capitalize on the steady stream of motivated readers.

Between affiliate revenue, ad partnerships, and brand collaborations, this single post generated roughly $250,000 in directly attributable revenue over the next couple of years.

A Perfect Heist

This wasn’t just about money. It was proof that a small player—armed with patience, strategy, and relentless execution—could outsmart, outplay, and out-heist a giant.

As I watched the traffic numbers climb, month after month, I’d often think back to that Tuesday morning when I hit publish. It felt like cracking the vault open, walking out with the prize in hand, and vanishing into the night.

No alarms. No errors. Just pure, undeniable success.

What You Can Learn

This isn’t just my story—it’s a roadmap for anyone looking to take on bigger players, climb higher in competitive spaces, and turn strategy into results.

Here’s what you can take away:

Play the Long Game: Great results don’t happen overnight. This heist took months of preparation, but it was years of foundational work that made it possible. Be patient—success is a marathon, not a sprint.
Don’t Compete—Dominate: Good isn’t good enough in SEO or business. To win, you need to create something so valuable, so comprehensive, that it becomes the go-to resource for your audience.
Research Is a Superpower: Most people settle for surface-level content. The real advantage comes from diving deep, identifying unique insights, and offering something your competitors can’t replicate.
Think Beyond Traffic: Traffic is a means to an end. Partnerships, affiliate deals, and monetization strategies are what turn visitors into revenue. Plan for what happens after you get the clicks.
Success Requires Focus: Success isn’t about doing everything—it’s about doing the right things exceptionally well. Pick your battles, craft a strategy, and execute with precision.

The Foundations of a Great SEO Heist

The success of this single blog post didn’t happen by chance. It was the result of years of groundwork, persistence, and strategic effort.

Here’s what laid the foundation:

A Strong Domain Built Over Time: Years of consistent content and trust-building gave A Better Lemonade Stand the domain authority to compete against bigger players.
200+ Blog Posts: Each post built credibility, drove traffic, and contributed to the cumulative strength of the site. Without those earlier efforts, this heist wouldn’t have been possible.
Topical Authority in Ecommerce: Years of writing about ecommerce topics established ABLS as a trusted resource, signaling to Google that the site was an expert in this niche.
Six Months of Research and Writing: The post itself was a monumental effort, combining unique insights, comprehensive details, and actionable advice that outclassed competitors.
An Established Audience: Loyal readers amplified the post’s reach through shares, bookmarks, and word of mouth, further solidifying its success.
Patience and Timing: The heist wasn’t rushed. By waiting for the right moment, I was able to capitalize on a growing trend and ensure the post had maximum impact.

The Reality of Passive Income

Passive income exists—but it’s rarely passive in the beginning.

The success of this post is often seen as a single stroke of brilliance, but in reality, it was years of hard work, delayed gratification, and persistence that led to the win.

Hard Work and No Guarantees: For years, I wrote for free, working long hours without seeing any immediate rewards. Building trust, domain authority, and credibility was an uphill battle, and there were countless moments I nearly quit.
Strategy and Timing: Success isn’t just about effort; it’s about doing the right work at the right time. This keyword aligned perfectly with a strong trend, and luck played a role in my ability to capitalize on it.
Delayed Gratification: The results from this post didn’t come overnight, but they compounded over time, generating revenue and opportunities for years.

The seeds you plant today might not bloom for years—but when they do, the results can feel extraordinary. Passive income isn’t magic; it’s the outcome of consistent effort and long-term thinking.

Closing Thoughts

Did I achieve my dream? In a way, yes.

While I didn’t retire permanently, the years that followed this heist brought moments that felt like the dream I’d envisioned.

I did end up spending three months living on the coast of Sicily, mornings spent sipping cappuccinos, the salty breeze carrying the scent of lemons, and the world moving just a little slower.

It wasn’t a permanent escape, but it was enough to remind me why I started in the first place. Those quiet mornings on the Sicilian coast were proof that hard work and persistence can turn distant dreams into vivid reality, even if just for a season.

But unlike in The Score, this won’t be my last heist.

The thrill of uncovering hidden opportunities, outmaneuvering the odds, and turning strategy into success—it’s addictive.

There’s always another fortress to crack, another scepter to claim, another dream to chase.

So, while this heist might be my greatest so far, I’m not done yet. I’m just getting started.

The post The Great SEO Heist: How I Turned One Blog Post Into 250K appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

How to Start a Clothing Line: Your Complete Guide to Design, Sampling, Production & Packaging

Richard Lazazzera — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 23:38:44 +0000

Are you an aspiring fashion entrepreneur with a vision to create your own clothing line?

Whether you’re dreaming of a simple line of printed apparel or a full cut-and-sew collection, this comprehensive guide will walk you through the complex process of starting a clothing manufacturing business.

In this post, I’ve compiled the knowledge and experiences of dozens of industry experts, from successful crowdfunding campaigns and private label wholesalers to pattern makers and textile factories. Drawing on their insights, I’ll provide a step-by-step roadmap for launching your own clothing line, no matter your budget or level of involvement in sourcing and production.

In this post, I’ll delve into three common business models – print-on-demand, wholesale/private label, and custom cut & sew – and explore the pros and cons of each approach. You’ll learn the importance of choosing a niche, focusing on design and quality, and creating a strong brand identity that resonates with your target audience.

As you navigate the intricate world of clothing manufacturing, I’ll guide you through crucial steps in product development, such as creating tech packs, sourcing materials, and obtaining samples. We’ll also cover essential aspects of branding, packaging, and marketing, offering practical advice and resources to help you build a successful clothing brand from the ground up.

Whether you’re working with a shoestring budget of $100 or ready to invest upwards of $10,000, this guide will provide valuable insights and actionable steps to bring your fashion dreams to life.

So grab a notebook, get comfortable, and let’s embark on the exciting journey of starting your own clothing line!

There’s a lot involved when it comes to starting your own clothing line, so let’s jump into it.

How to Start a Clothing Line: Table of Contents

Conclusion

Deciding on Clothing Products You Want to Sell

You have a lot of choices when it comes to creating apparel and fashion products.

If you’ve always wanted to start a clothing line, you likely already have a good idea of the particular products you want to create and sell. For others, creating a clothing brand may represent a unique and interesting opportunity to design a product that represents your personal style—but you may be unsure of which products to sell.

Regardless of which category you fall into, it’s important to carefully consider all clothing and apparel options before deciding to move forward on one of them.

Some clothing and apparel products you may want to consider for your brand are:

Short-Sleeve Shirts
Long Sleeve Shirts
Hoodies
Pants/Leggings
Dresses
Lingerie/Underwear/Socks

Each of these clothing products presents their own opportunities and challenges when it comes to building a clothing brand around them, so it’s important to consider them carefully.

Keep this in mind as you continue through this article.

Below, we will look into some of the most common clothing line business models to get a better sense of the work, time, and monetary investment required for each.

Choosing a Clothing Line Business Model

If you’re ready to start your clothing brand, you’ll have some important choices to make at this point.

There are several directions you can take to create your own brand which are all pretty different from one another. And most importantly, the difficultly, costs, and time input vary dramatically between each option. Understanding the garment manufacturing process is crucial when selecting a business model, as it impacts production efficiency and scalability.

Let’s take a look at the most common options:

Print-on-Demand Clothing Line
Private Label Clothing Line
Custom Cut & Sew Clothing Line

Let’s dig into the advantages and disadvantages of each one below.

Type

Difficulty

Cost

Time

Print-On-Demand Clothing Line

Very Low

Wholesale/Private Label Clothing Line

Low

Medium

Custom Cut & Sew Clothing Line

High

$$$$

Very High

Factors to Consider When Selecting a Business Model

When selecting a business model for your clothing line, there are several factors to consider. These include the type of clothing you want to produce, the target market, the competition, and the resources available. It’s essential to choose a business model that aligns with your goals and objectives.

One of the primary factors to consider is the type of clothing you want to produce. If you’re looking to create high-end fashion, you may want to consider a custom cut and sew business model. This model allows for complete control over the design, materials, and construction of your garments, ensuring that each piece meets your exacting standards.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to produce casual wear, a print-on-demand or wholesale/private label business model may be more suitable. These models offer quicker turnaround times and lower upfront costs, making them ideal for trendy, fast-moving fashion items.

Another factor to consider is the target market. Who is your ideal customer? What are their needs and preferences? Understanding your target market will help you choose a business model that meets their demands. For instance, if your target market values unique, bespoke pieces, a custom cut and sew model might be the best fit. Conversely, if your audience is looking for affordable, everyday wear, a print-on-demand or wholesale model could be more appropriate.

The competition is also an essential factor to consider. Research your competitors and understand their business models. This will help you identify gaps in the market and create a unique selling proposition for your clothing line. For example, if the market and niche you’re looking to enter is saturated with mass-produced items, offering custom, high-quality garments could set you apart.

Finally, consider the resources available to you. Do you have the necessary funding, equipment, and personnel to support your chosen business model? Make sure you have a clear understanding of your resources and capabilities before selecting a business model. For instance, a custom cut and sew model requires significant investment in design, materials, and production, whereas a print-on-demand model requires less upfront capital and can be managed with fewer resources.

By carefully considering these factors, you can choose a business model that aligns with your vision and sets your clothing line up for success.

Let’s dig into each clothing business model a bit more.

Option #1: Print-on-Demand Clothing Line

The first and easiest option for starting your own clothing line involves printing your designs or logo on standard blank apparel.

This is an attractive option for people with a low budget (less than $1,000) and those wanting to benefit from being able to set up a nearly fully-automated business. The biggest drawback of this type of business model is the lower profit margins and the lack of ability to differentiate your product on things like material, stitching, and fit since you’re using standard wholesale clothing.

The print-on-demand or direct-to-garment printing process uses a special digital ink-jet printer to print ink directly onto clothing and apparel. These digital printers are able to produce full-color images on clothing items with extreme accuracy.

Print-on-demand printing produces high-quality printed apparel quickly and efficiently. Because of this, there are no setup costs, unlike screen printing. This means that it’s easy and cost-effective to print small orders (including just 1 unit).

Pros

No set-up costs
High-quality prints
Unlimited color options
Perfect for low order quantities or one-offs
Many clothing options (shirts, leggings, socks, dresses, etc.)

Cons

Not cost-effective for large production runs
Generally no volume discounts
Limited print product selection
Limited finishing options (tags, labels, etc)

Timeline: Days

Costs: $0-$500

Time & Energy Input: Very Low

Other Notes: To start a print-on-demand clothing brand, we recommend using Printful and Shopify. When utilizing a clothing and apparel printing company like Printful (which seamlessly integrates with Shopify stores), you can be up and running in a matter of hours for under $50. Once you receive an order for your online store, Printful will also receive the order automatically and begin the printing process and ship it to your customer on your behalf.

Read more about this process and learn how to set up a business like this step-by-step in my article on how to start a t-shirt business in under 24 hours.

To find more print-on-demand clothing suppliers, check out Dropshipping Suppliers Directory.

Option #2: Wholesale/Private Label Clothing Line

When sourcing clothing products through wholesale or private label suppliers, you are essentially purchasing clothing products from other brands and then selling them to customers from your own store. When you source clothing products this way, you’ll purchase pieces in bulk from a supplier at a discounted price, and then sell the items to your customers at a markup. This was another business model I have utilized previously for another ecommerce store in which I sold a wide variety of high end, stylized socks from brands like Bugatchi, Happy Socks, and Corgi.

With this option, you won’t be manufacturing your own clothing items from scratch, but you’ll be curating a selection of pieces that suit your customers’ tastes. You won’t be able to customize each clothing piece like you would if you were manufacturing clothing items, but you also don’t have to go through the lengthy and expensive process of having your own clothing items manufactured. The main disadvantage with this option, however, is that you have to purchase many stock-keeping units (SKUs) of clothing items in bulk and upfront, which means you’ll need cash flow.

Pros

Don’t need to manufacture your own items
Can keep up with changing trends more easily
Get to curate your own range of products
Volume discounts
Potential for good profit margins
You can brand items with your own hangtags, packaging, etc.
When working with a private label supplier, you will be able to customize the clothing tags with your own brand name

Cons

When working with a wholesaler, you won’t be able to customize the clothing tags with your brand name
Usually, minimum order quantities start at (at least) 10 units per color/size, if not 100 or 1,000 units – this will depend on the brand and type of clothing
You’ll have to manage inventory and shipping yourself
You’ll need cash flow to purchase many products upfront
Not all clothing manufacturers will offer this as an option

Option #3: Custom Cut & Sew Clothing Line

Custom cut and sew clothing means you’re doing everything. We’re talking about designing sketches, turning them into patterns, sourcing fabrics and manufacturers, and paying for a full production run (which could be thousands of units).

Making your own clothing isn’t for the faint of heart. It can be an intensive process that can take months (at minimum) to get up and running. You’ll need to find a manufacturer, you’ll need to work with a pattern maker, you’ll have to create tach packs, you’ll have to source and test fabric, and you’ll also likely have to create and test many samples before you even come close to a finished product.

Depending on the exact clothing items you’re looking to produce, just to get a few samples as finished products can cost thousands.

Once you have a finished product, you’ll also need to produce a full run with your manufacturer, you’ll need to stock your inventory, and even develop a shipping strategy to get your clothes to your customers.

Prior to starting my wholesaling sock business stated in the previous section, I had a previous business in which we did just this. Creating out own sock designs, working with a designers, and a local manufacturer. Unfortunately this business ran its course when the local manufacturer (one of the last sock manufacturers in Canada) was sold to another company and we had to discontinue the relationship.

Pros

You’ll get a 100% custom product
Potential for increased perceived value from customers
Potential for increased margins
You’ll be 100% in control of branding

Cons

Very high startup costs
It’s a complex process involving several moving parts
It can take months or more to launch

Timeline: 3 months – 1+ years

Costs: $10,000+

Time & Energy Input: Very High

Other Notes: The second part of this post will focus on all the steps and resources involved in developing your own cut and sew clothing line so read on!

The Elements of a Successful Clothing Brand

Great clothing brands are great for a reason. Usually, they do one thing very well, and sometimes they do multiple things really well. Before starting your own clothing line, there are four important factors to a successful brand that you’ll want to consider:

Niche
Design
Quality
Brand

Let’s dive into each one of these elements a little more below:

Selecting a Clothing Brand Niche

Selecting a specific niche is important—and many times, vital—for success in the clothing and apparel industry. Blindly trying to target large groups of people will leave you with a brand that speaks to no one.

Focusing on a specific group of people has several major benefits:

It’s easier to market (since you can hone in on your target market more specifically)
It can be more affordable (since you aren’t targeting the wrong audiences)
There’s potential for less competition (the more you niche down, the smaller your competitive pool gets)
You can attract greater customer loyalty (because your audience knows that you’re focused on them)

For example: “Clothing with funny slogans” or “hoodies for men” are both too broad to attack since the markets are very developed. Niching down will help you better target your market, allow you to reach them more easily, and be able to create more value for them. So instead of “clothing with funny slogans” you might cater to a specific and passionate market like “clothing with slogans for nurses or firefighters.” Or, instead of “hoodies for men” you could focus on manufacturing ultra-thick/warm hoodies for people in cold climates.

Clothing Designs

Your designs—whether they’re printed, embroidered, or the design of the actual garment itself—are critical. Not only do your clothing pieces need to look great, but they also need to look great specifically in the eyes of your target market.

Ultimately, you’ll be the one who loses if your clothing designs aren’t aesthetically pleasing and appealing to your buyers. Your designs don’t necessarily need to be complex—in fact, many of the best-selling clothing designs are very simple—however, they do need to connect with your specific audience/niche.

Clothing Quality

You can fool someone once, but you can’t fool them twice. A pattern that fades and cracks over time or a piece that comes apart at the seams after one wash won’t create raving fans that’ll come back and repurchase.

Not all clothing is the same, there can be huge variances in the quality of clothing items. The quality and composition of the materials you choose will affect how the clothing wears, how it washes, how it fades, shrinks, and ultimately how long it lasts. As we mentioned above, quality is paramount to your brand and its success, so it’s important to educate yourself and choose your materials carefully.

It will always be tempting to sacrifice quality for higher profit margins but you need to consider how the quality will affect customer’s decisions to share your brand with others and repurchase in the long run.

Clothing Brand

Many clothing companies are built on a strong brand. Beyond the clothes themselves, a strong brand encourages and reinforces your target market to purchase, represent, share, and repurchase your clothing pieces. Your brand extends way beyond the product itself and encompasses what the brand stands for and the lifestyle associated with it.

Differentiating Your Clothing Line

The clothing design and apparel industries are some of the most saturated industries to be in. In order to effectively compete, you’ll need to have a point of differentiation that sets you apart in the market from all the rest.

Working out of a factory has also given me an upfront view of how many people get into this industry with absolutely no clue what it’s going to take to build a brand that is even remotely successful. Blaming ignorance isn’t entirely fair… We had absolutely no clue how hard it would be either. However, we started Stock with a clear reason of what differentiated us, why people would be interested in buying our stuff, and how we would go about selling. This is a step that I see a lot of aspiring makers skip.
– Jim Snediker | Stock Mfg. Co.

The good news is that there are multiple ways to set yourself apart from the crowd…

If you plan to have graphics or images on your clothing pieces, the designs (the style of designs and quality of designs) can help set you apart from others.

Example: Blackmilk Clothing made their name known and became one of Shopify’s largest merchants by creating uniquely designed leggings, while also partnering with major brands, in the case below, Dr. Who:

Fit/Style

If you plan to create your own clothing from the ground up, the actual fit and style of the clothes can be an important point of differentiation.

Example: Perhaps the original online brand that became famous and known for a better fit is Bonobos. Bonobos decided that they wanted to create a better-fitting men’s pant. Their better fit helped establish them early on and turned their brand into a 100 million dollar company.

Brand

With all else being the same, people are more likely to buy from a brand whose story they can relate to most. Furthermore, a strong brand alone that connects with consumers can allow you to demand a higher price point, even if the quality is relatively the same as other common or less expensive brands.

Example: Billionaire Boys Club throughout the early 2000s sold t-shirts for nearly $100 that simply said “Billionaire Boys Club.” Although arguably, their t-shirts were the same quality as hundreds of others on the market, consumers bought into the young, urban brand and its story.

Niche

The niche you choose to operate in and your target market (if defined well enough and if it’s under-served) can be in itself a point of differentiation.

Example: See Ya Never is a clothing live that targets digital nomads that work remotely and travel the world. Even with thousands of clothing brands on the market, there are very few, if any, targeting this particular group of people.

80s Tees sells exclusive designs from 80s movies and TV shows. Not only are the designs appealing and nostalgic, but many of the designs are licensed making them exclusive and nearly impossible to find elsewhere.

Finally, Canada Threads focuses on clothing and accessories that uniquely resonate with Canadians, including designs related to the beloved Canadian House Hippo.

Performance/Material/Quality

The type of material plays a part in differentiating your clothing pieces from the rest out there. How they perform for the wearer (are they comfortable, itchy, restricting, warm, light, airy, do they wrinkly easily, etc.) and their overall quality (including any seams, buttons, the weight of the fabric, etc.) will all play a role in your customer’s satisfaction.

Example: Unbound Merino ran a successful crowdfunding campaign raising $300,000 and are building their brand based on the performance of their clothing: Casual wear made from 100% super-soft merino wool which has superior breathability and odor-blocking abilities, allowing this line of travel clothes to be worn many times without washing.

Developing a Business Plan for Your Clothing Line

With some of the basics out of the way, the next step is for you to develop a basic (but critical) business plan to map out your decisions and the direction for your clothing company.

Some of the major elements you’ll want to consider when putting together your ecommerce business plan are:

Your Business Model
Customer Personas
Competitor Strengths & Weaknesses
Costs & Margins

Crafting a Brand for Your Clothing Line

The next step is to develop a brand for your new clothing company.

Crafting a brand for your new clothing company is paramount. With so many clothing companies and brands out there, you’ll need to differentiate yourself. Your brand will be a big part of that.

Ultimately, every business has a brand and every new business will have a brand. Crafting your brand upfront gives you the chance to better define and communicate your message and story.

If you’re planning on creating a custom cut and sew clothing line, you may want to consider hiring a dedicated branding agency to help you craft your brand. If you’re planning on a print-on-demand or a private label brand where your investment and budget are much smaller, developing your own brand can be a worthwhile and low-cost option.

At this stage you need to identify:

Who your market is
What brand would speak best to this market

Below, we will quickly introduce you to several key elements of developing your clothing company brand, however, for a complete breakdown of all brand elements, as well as the guide and worksheets to define all your brand elements, check out our branding guide, A Better Brand.

Defining Your Market

Defining your market is important for any brand, but especially for brands in the clothing and apparel market because it’s extremely saturated. By broadly targeting large groups of people, you’re setting yourself up for failure right from the beginning. What you want to do is niche down and create segments.

Some critical questions to ask yourself at this stage is:

What type of clothing and apparel products do I want to make?
Who is going to purchase my products?
What specific value will my product or brand bring these people?
What will be unique about my product?
Who is my competition?

Creating Your Brand Pillars

Brand pillars are a few key words or attributes (usually 3-4) that embody what your brand is about, and they serve as a starting point for developing your brand persona. Later, these words are used as a checkpoint against most activities of the brand. For example, when creating your website, an advertisement, or even a conversation with your customer, you should check it against your brand pillars.

Ask yourself: Does my design/website/ad/conversation represent the essence behind my brand pillar words?

Your brand pillars act as a simple tool for keeping your brand consistent throughout all of your activities and they serve as the foundation for your brand.

Develop Your Brand Visuals

Your brand visuals are the common brand elements that many people immediately think about when they think about a particular brand. This includes your company’s logo, brand colors, and fonts, as well as your overall design and photography aesthetics.

Create a Moodboard: A mood board is a perfect way to start pulling together the visual style you’re going for. Essentially a mood board is a collection of images, photos, designs, colors, and any other snippets of multimedia you find from around the web that serves as an inspiration for your brand. While there are many tools available online to help you collect these elements, the easiest way tends to be using Pinterest or Instagram.
Select a Color Palette: Your next step in the branding process is to narrow down a color palette to use. Selecting a color palette up front will help keep your brand looking consistent through all channels. You’ll want to start by paying particular attention to the dominant colors used in your mood board since these are likely colors that immediately caught your eye. From there we also suggest you use a tool like Adobe Color to review other community-inspired and voted color palettes to get some additional ideas. Finally, Adobe also offers a tool for helping choose and refine your color palette, check it out here.
Craft a Logo: When it comes to crafting a logo for your business, you’ll want a logo that not only represents your brand well but one that speaks to your target demographic, too. While we always recommend working with a respected logo designer to craft the perfect logo for your brand, those with a smaller budget can get started for almost nothing with a tool like Looka.

Additional Resource: Check out my Ecommerce Branding Guide to help you develop all the critical components of your brand including your brand persona as well as all of your brand visuals like your moodboard, color palette, logo, and photography style. This guide includes a PDF ebook as well as worksheets to help you craft the perfect brand for your clothing line.

Note: At this point, we will continue on the path of talking about creating your own custom cut and sew clothing line.

If you’re planning on creating a print-on-demand clothing line, you can skip several sections and go to Creating Your Online Store.

If you’re planning to create a private label/wholesale clothing line, you can skip to Branding Your Clothing & Packaging.

The Product Development Process for Your Clothing Line

For anyone who is completely new to the fashion business, it’s important to know that this is a hugely important step in the process of starting and running a cut-and-sew clothing line. At this point, we strongly suggest that you consider partnering with a professional who knows what they’re doing and how to do it properly.

Professionals such as pattern makers, tech pack creators, design partners, materials partners, and production partners are highly experienced in their respective fields and it’s their job to make your clothing line a reality in the most efficient way possible. Without the help of professionals, things like pattern making and tech packs can be a nightmare for not only you but for the future manufacturer you plan to work with.

This is where researching your manufacturer in advance pays off for you, though. Some manufacturers offer professional product development services, some will only manufacture for you if they have done your product development themselves, and others don’t provide these services but they have partners who they prefer working with. All of this information will be outlined on the manufacturer’s website or by contacting them directly.

When it comes to the product development of your clothing line, there is generally going to be a common path to follow with some common terminology no matter what types of clothing products you’re developing. First, we will look at what the general process of clothing product development looks like, then we will discuss the process in more detail. Pre-production planning and quality checks are crucial in garment production to ensure efficient production and high-quality garments.

Designs: This generally refers to the initial design concept and is usually represented as sketches either on paper or digitally. While your patterns might start out as concept sketches, eventually you’ll likely turn them into digital sketches using a program like Illustrator.
Tech Pack: A tech pack is essentially a blueprint for your apparel product, providing a manufacturer with all the details and technical specifications for production. This includes the designs, measurements, materials, and any accessories (zipper, buttons, etc.).
Pattern Making & Grading: Pattern making is the process of turning your technical drawings into patterns that can be used for production. Grading is the process of taking a single pattern and grading the pattern up or down to create the additional patterns for all the other sizes in your apparel line.
Sourcing: Sourcing involves finding, communicating, vetting, and working with multiple manufacturers to determine which one is best suited for the full production of your particular products.
Samples: This involves manufacturers producing a one-off or small batch of samples to provide you with a proof of concept, as well as for you to identify potential issues or improvements prior to a full production run.
Production: A full product run is the mass production of your apparel products. Depending on the products and the manufacturer, this can be hundreds of units, thousands of units, or even hundreds of thousands of units.

Below, we will go into greater detail about each of these steps in the process and provide you with more content and resources to get you started. However, it’s important to note that there are other resources available that will guide you through the full process, helping you at each step of the way.

Some of the most popular ones are:

Step 1: Design Your Clothing Line Concepts

Your clothing line will begin as sketches—most likely simple sketches in a notebook. This is usually the best route to get the ideas out of your head. As you begin sketching your clothing pieces, also think about adding any specific notes or unique ideas you have, as well as any special features or functionality. These notes will likely be part of tech packs later.

The initial goal is just to start developing your ideas and bring them to life.

Furthermore, the benefit of sketching out your ideas is that they can be shared. This is important because unless you’re a professional clothing designer, you’re going to likely need to enlist the help of a fashion designer or illustrator to help you pull together and refine your sketches into something more realistic and thought out.

Step 2: Create Patterns & Develop Tech Packs

You will need to enlist the help of a qualified pattern maker to take your idea and turn it into an actual pattern that can then be turned into an actual piece of clothing. A pattern can then be used to help create a tech pack.

A tech pack is essentially a blueprint for each garment. Your tech pack tells your manufacturer all the information required to transform your design into a final product. A proper and complete tech pack will reduce errors in production, save you money, prevent miscommunication, and ultimately, bring your product to life exactly how you envisioned it.

Your tech pack should include all possible details about your product, including (but not limited to) the:

Design
Fabrics
Measurements
Trim
Stitching
Artwork
Label & Tag Information
Packaging Instructions

Here’s an example of a tech pack for a better understanding:

(Source: Michael Smith Design)

Here are some pattern makers and technical designers who have been vetted and provided by Maker’s Row, to get you started:

Additional places to hire freelancers to help produce your tech packs:

Step 3: Research Clothing Manufacturers

The next step in this process is to research potential clothing manufacturers.

Find out things like their location, capabilities, heritage, reputation, and what other brands they’ve worked with to get an idea of what they can offer you. It’s important at this stage to really be thorough as small things such as location can have a massive impact on communication, turnaround time, and shipping when it actually comes to working with a manufacturer.

Not every manufacturer provides the same services so it’s important to know the pros and cons of as many manufacturers as possible so you can find the services you’re looking for without compromising on your brand values.

Maker’s Row: Maker’s Row has nearly 10,000 factories to explore, including over 3,000 in apparel, all based in the USA.
Sourcify: Sourcify has relationships with hundreds of Chinese manufacturers and will work with you to find and vet the right one for you.
Sqetch: Sqetch is similar to Maker’s Row but focuses on connecting you with European manufacturers.

Additional Resource: Check out my resource on finding clothing manufacturers to help get your search started.

Step 4: Determine Your Budget

Budgeting out product development and production costs is something you need to determine prior to selecting a factory to work with. You need to understand your budget availability and limits so you can map out all aspects of production, such as what fabric you’ll be able to use and whether producing overseas or in your home country is your best option.

Costs to consider in your budget include:

The price of professional product development services such as pattern making, tech packs, design development, etc.
The cost of making samples (bearing in mind that more than one sample is usually made)
The cost of materials such as fabric, buttons, zippers, hardware, and any other pieces used in the construction of your garments
The cost of transportation between you and the factory for meetings/visiting the factory
The cost of labor (determine the difference in labor cost between your home country and overseas labor cost requirements)
The cost of shipping between you and the factory and the cost of shipping the necessary materials to the factory
The cost of production and actually creating the clothing items themselves

After considering these factors, you’ll be able to communicate your budget to your future manufacturer and find one that fits your requirements.

Pricing out all of these costs is also helpful in determining whether or not producing in an overseas factory is more realistic for your business—bearing in mind that while the cost of labor may be cheaper, the cost of shipping between you and the factory will increase; as will turn around time. Nonetheless, understanding the cost of product development and production helps you and your future manufacturer make the best choices for your business.

Step 5: Select Clothing Manufacturers

Once you’ve researched a bunch of different manufacturers and have an idea of what’s out there, make a shortlist of manufacturers who seem like they’ll be a good fit for your clothing brand.

Maybe there are some manufacturers who specialize in the kinds of clothing products you want to produce, maybe some operate out of your local area, maybe some have raving reviews from past or current clients, or maybe some fit into your budget range better than others. Whatever is important to you in a manufacturer, narrow down your shortlist to ones who seem like they check off some of your most important boxes.

Step 6: Contact Clothing Manufacturers

By now you should have been able to narrow down a long list of potential clothing manufacturers into a shorter list of manufacturers who meet your needs when it comes down to what you require in terms of professional services, which manufacturers are actually able to create your future garments, manufactures in an accessible location, or ones who meet your budget requirements.

Now is the time to contact your potential manufacturers, but that may be easier said than done. Response rates for manufacturers differ, but producing a well-thought-out initial email and having a tech pack can increase your chances of actually receiving a response back from potential manufactures.

Here are some general DOs and DON’Ts when it comes to contacting a manufacturer:

DON’T come across as a “tire-kicker.” If your interest in manufacturing doesn’t seem to be serious or genuine you may not get a response. Manufacturers don’t want to waste their own time working with people who aren’t serious when they could be working with people who actually want to build and grow their business.
DO be polite. You and your manufacturer will be working together in this process—they don’t solely work for you—so treat them with respect and be mindful of their requirements, services, and processes.
DO be clear. In the best interest of yourself and your future manufacturer, it’s best practice to be clear about what you’re looking for, the services you require, your timeline, etc. Be upfront about what you need and don’t leave any room for ambiguities in the event that it will create more confusion down the road.
DO follow up. It’s okay to follow up after your initial email to ensure the factory received and read the message, so be prepared to send up to three follow-up emails spaced apart by a week or so to prompt a response from a factory. This will make you seem eager and serious to the factory which, if you’re new to this process, is what you want.
DON’T give them too much information. Introduce your company, the products that you’re looking to create with them, what services you’re looking for, and ask what further information they need from you. Give them enough information to know your intentions and that you’re serious about the inquiry, but don’t overload them with your brand goals, material choices, and timelines yet.

Click here to learn more about how to construct the perfect initial contact email to clothing manufacturers that will get a response.

Step 7: Screen Potential Factories

If you’re lucky, by this step you’ll have received responses from some of the factories you’ve contacted and now it’s time to narrow down your search.

Even if you only received a response from one factory, it is still important to make sure it’s the right fit for you. At this step, you should communicate further with the factories and learn more about how they conduct business and the quality of their products. You should be looking to evaluate whether or not you will get along with them personally and professionally in order to gauge your potential for success as colleagues.

These are things to look out for:

How they prefer to communicate with their clients (by email, phone, or personal visits)
Ask for references from other clients (to get a first-hand evaluation of what they are like to work with)
Ask for samples of products they’ve made (to judge if the quality of their products is at the level you’re looking for)
Understand how they charge for samples, services, and what constitutes extra charges
Get a feel for their timeline and availability

Now is the time to learn more about the factory, see their workspace in action, and communicate further with the manufacturer. This stage will give you an initial glimpse of what it will be like to work with this factory in the long run so it’s important to identify your respective strengths and weaknesses now so you can reduce the possibility of headaches and potential miscommunications in the future.

This is also now the right time to let the manufacturer in on your brand goals, where you see your brand starting off, what you see your brand scaling to, and let them know how you want them involved in that process. All the time you spent defining your brand in the first step should be communicated to the manufacturer to see if they understand where your brand is going and if they can get excited for your brand, too.

Step 8: Get Samples Made

Now that you can see yourself manufacturing your clothing line with a factory or two, it’s time to get some samples made so you can truly experience what your potential product will be like.

No matter how well-designed your patterns and tech packs have been, there are always opportunities for adjustments and corrections so it’s strongly encouraged that the sampling step is never skipped. It can be easy to want to jump straight into production—especially when time and money are on the line—but in the end, a whole line of garments that don’t fit properly will cost you more than just having a few samples done right from the start.

At this stage, it is appropriate to have more than one factory make samples of your garments. Feel free to shop around so you’re absolutely sure the factory you pick will be producing the garments you want at the quality level you want!

Understanding the Importance of Sampling in the Production Process

Sampling is a critical step in the production process of clothing manufacturing. It involves creating a small batch of garments to test the design, fabric, and construction of the clothing. Sampling helps to identify any issues or defects in the production process, ensuring that the final product meets the desired quality standards.

There are several types of samples that can be created during the production process, including prototype samples, pre-production samples, and production samples. Each type of sample serves a specific purpose and helps to ensure that the final product meets the desired quality standards.

Prototype samples are used to test the design and functionality of the clothing. They are typically created using a small batch of fabric and are used to identify any issues with the design or construction of the garment. This stage allows designers to make necessary adjustments before moving on to more extensive production.
Pre-production samples are used to test the production process and ensure that the garment can be produced efficiently and effectively. They are typically created using a larger batch of fabric than prototype samples and are used to identify any issues with the production process. This step is crucial for ironing out any kinks in the manufacturing process and ensuring that the production line runs smoothly.
Production samples are used to test the final product and ensure that it meets the desired quality standards. They are typically created using a large batch of fabric and are used to identify any issues with the final product. This stage is the last checkpoint before full-scale production, ensuring that the garments are ready for the market.

Overall, sampling is an essential step in the production process of clothing manufacturing. It helps to ensure that the final product meets the desired quality standards and reduces the risk of defects or issues with the garment. By investing time and resources into thorough sampling, you can save yourself from costly mistakes and ensure that your clothing line maintains a high standard of quality.

Step 9: Start Full-Scale Production

The final step of the manufacturing process is really just the first step of building your own clothing brand.

This is the time to work with your manufacturer and get your garments produced! At this stage, it’s important to stay five steps ahead of everything:

Make sure deadlines are adhered to
Be available to answer any questions your manufacturer may have for you
Be diligent with quality control

Once production for one season of garments starts, the planning for the next season begins—this is only just the beginning! But now that you have the right manufacturer for your business, let their skills and services help you build your clothing brand to where you want it to be.

Garment Quality Assurance and Quality Control Measures

Garment quality assurance and quality control measures are essential in the clothing manufacturing process. They help to ensure that the final product meets the desired quality standards and reduces the risk of defects or issues with the garment.

There are several quality assurance and quality control measures that can be implemented during the production process, including:

Inspecting Raw Materials: This involves inspecting the fabric, threads, and other materials used in the production process to ensure that they meet the desired quality standards. Testing raw materials at this stage can prevent issues later in the production process.
Conducting Regular Quality Checks: This involves conducting regular checks on the production process to ensure that the garment is being produced to the desired quality standards. Regular inspections can catch defects early, allowing for timely corrections.
Implementing a Quality Control System: This involves implementing a system that ensures that the garment meets the desired quality standards. This can include implementing a system for tracking defects or issues with the garment. A robust quality control system can help maintain consistency and reliability in your products.
Providing Training to Employees: This involves providing training to employees on the importance of quality assurance and quality control. This can include training on how to inspect raw materials, conduct regular quality checks, and implement a quality control system. Well-trained employees are crucial for maintaining high standards throughout the manufacturing process.

Overall, garment quality assurance and quality control measures are essential in the clothing manufacturing process. They help to ensure that the final product meets the desired quality standards and reduces the risk of defects or issues with the garment. By prioritizing quality control, you can build a reputation for excellence and reliability in the clothing industry.

Step 10: Brand Your Clothing & Packaging

The branding of your clothing line has everything to do with how you’ll be perceived by your customers. Branding tells the story of your company and your packaging is one of the few parts of your brand—besides your clothing items themselves—that your customers will actually be able to touch, feel, and see. It engages your customers, it can make them feel valued, and it can even increase the perceived level of quality your customers associate with your brand and your clothing items.

This is why it’s important to seriously consider how you package and present your clothing items, no matter what items you’re selling.

There are plenty of different ways to enhance your brand’s packaging and presentation and to make it unique and true to your brand.

Let’s dive into your brand and clothing packaging.

Step 11: Branded Packaging Options

There are two different types of options when it comes to branding your packaging: The actual elements that you use for the packaging itself, and the additional extras you can include with the package to elevate the unboxing experience.

The package elements are the more functional items that are required to actually ship your clothing pieces, whereas the added extras enhance the experience and help to make your customers feel valued.

Elements of a Branded Package

These are the functional parts of a shipping package that you’ll need in order to ship your items from you to your customers. You won’t need every single one of these items, but they’re all options that you can use depending on what you want your packaging to achieve.

Shipping Boxes

Depending on the clothing items you sell, you may have to ship them to your customers in a shipping box. Shipping boxes are sturdy and are a good option for shipping heavy or bulky items (such as coats) or delicate items that need to be protected throughout the shipping process (such as beaded clothing pieces, or items with 3D appliqué).

Shipping boxes, however, can add weight and size to your package making it more expensive to ship, but if it will protect your clothing items while they’re on their way to your customers, it’s a small price to pay upfront that should decrease the potential of damaged items and returned products in the future.

Keep in mind that your shipping boxes don’t have to be boring cardboard boxes. There are plenty of services available to entrepreneurs and small businesses that can create custom boxes for your products at competitive prices, whether you’re looking for something sleek, simple, and plain or something colorful, bold, patterned, and vibrant.

You can also use these services to get your brand name printed onto the box itself for a more professional unboxing experience.

Where to Source Shipping Boxes:

Poly Mailers

Another great alternative for shipping clothing items is shipping bags—otherwise referred to in the industry as poly mailers.

These are an ideal option because unlike shipping boxes, they don’t add much weight or bulk to your package, so you won’t be adding extra shipping costs to your package. They are less sturdy than a box though, so they’re a good option if you’re shipping clothing pieces that aren’t easily damaged and can be bent and folded throughout the shipping process. They do come in plenty of sizes too, so whether you’re shipping one item or a few at a time, you should be able to source a selection of different sized poly mailers to meet your customer’s needs. Plenty of brands ship clothing items to their customers in poly mailers, so it is an appropriate method for the industry.

There are plenty of places online where you can get custom poly mailers made for your business so you’re able to add your logo, brand colors, or fun patterns to make it more exciting for your customers.

Where to Source Poly Mailers:

Bubble Mailers

If your clothing items need a bit more protection but you don’t want to completely upgrade from a poly mailer to a full-on shipping box, you have another option: Bubble mailers. As the name would suggest, they’re like poly mailers but they have a layer of bubble wrap included on the inside of the mailer which helps protect whatever’s inside.

They don’t offer the same sturdiness that shipping boxes do, but they help to cushion the contents of the mailer throughout the process and are less bulky than shipping boxes.

Where to Source Bubble Mailers:

Tissue Paper

If using packing peanuts and crinkle paper isn’t your style, or if your products don’t need additional protection, or even if you’re using a poly mailer, tissue paper may be an ideal option to enhance the unboxing experience for your customers.

Tissue paper makes the unboxing experience feel more like a gift, which can make your package seem thoughtful and your customers feel valued.

Tissue paper is also an easy way to add to your packaging without adding any extra bulk or weight, and you can have it printed with your logo or choose colored or patterned paper to add some extra flair to the package. Use an everchanging assortment of patterns, colors, and styles to keep repeat customers interested.

Where to Source Tissue Paper:

Packing Tape

Depending on your brand’s style, using packing tape that’s colorful, patterned, or printed with your logo may be an interesting way to decorate your shipping box or package. Not only is it decorative, but packing tape is functional and adds another layer of security to keep box openings sealed throughout the shipping process.

Where to Source Packing Tape:

Stickers

If you don’t need something as heavy-duty as packing tape to seal your boxes or mailers shut, stickers can be an alternative option that can also add to the branded packaging experience. Get your logo printed on them, your brand’s tagline, mission statement, fun facts about your brand, or any other piece of info you want to share with your customers for an added layer of personalization. Alternatively, use stickers to brand plain shipping boxes or mailers, or include them inside your package for customers to use or share as they please.

Stickers are super versatile, so think about how you can use stickers to enhance your unboxing experience!

Where to Source Stickers:

Include Extra Branded Material

These aren’t necessary to include, but if you’re interested in elevating your unboxing experience, making it memorable for your customers, and making them feel valued, then including one or two of the following options can help you to start out in a positive way.

Promotions, Discounts & Deals

Including packing inserts that notify your customer of an upcoming promotion, or share a discount code or deal they can use for themselves or share with a friend is a pleasant surprise your customers will likely appreciate when opening their package. It shows thought and care from your end, and it’s also likely to encourage them to purchase from you again, which is advantageous for you.

Business Cards

If you want your customers to remember you, refer you to a friend, or send you feedback about their experience with your business or your products, consider including your business card so they can hold onto it or pass it on to others. It’s a small token, but it shows that you value their input and experience.

Custom Notes/Personalized Messages

This is the ultimate way to make your customers feel valued and shows an immense amount of consideration and thoughtfulness.

Custom, handwritten notes with personalized messages are a great way to connect with your customers and make them feel appreciated. While it likely won’t be possible to include a handwritten note for all of your customers, consider including them for your very first customers, your most frequent purchasers, for customers who leave glowing reviews on your website, or ones who have taken the time to send you valuable feedback. Your customers will likely feel very touched by your effort and will likely also share their experience with their peers or on their social platforms, which is positive exposure for your brand.

Gifts or Samples

Who doesn’t love to receive a gift?! Using gifts as a way to thank your customers for their purchase is a surefire way to capture their attention and make them feel valued. It doesn’t have to be anything big (some companies include candy bars to treat their customers) as you just want it to be an addition to the package, but something small can be just as appreciated by your customers.

If you don’t want to gift an item from another company, consider including a sample of one of your own products. Again, it doesn’t have to be anything big, but something that complements their purchase could be appreciated.

Step 12: Brand Your Clothing Items

Beyond the packaging of your clothing items, you can also add additional touches of branding to your clothing items themselves to ensure they’re as seemingly high-quality as possible and are presented in the most thought out way possible. The best way to do this is by adding custom labels and tags.

Clothing Labels & Tags

Clothing labels are a piece of fabric that’s attached to the inside of clothing items that typically include the brand’s logo. While it’s required in most countries for clothing items to have care and size labels, brand labels aren’t necessary but they add a thoughtful touch to the clothing piece. They also often help customers to remember where the clothing item is from once they’ve integrated it into their wardrobe, and they can add to the overall feel of the clothing piece.

Some labels can be scratchy and uncomfortable for the wearer, which can make the garment seem cheap, while others can be well sewn into the garment and made of a cloth material that’s much more high quality. Think about how you want your brand to be perceived and choose a type of label that fits accordingly.

Clothing Label Material Options:

Damask Woven Labels
Satin Woven Labels
Taffeta Woven Labels
Woven Patches
Cotten Twill Labels
Canvas Printed Labels
Nylon Printed Labels
Satin Printed Labels
Silicon Clothing Labels
Leather Labels
And much more

It’s also important to consider which label types exist and where they can be located on the garment.

If you want to increase your brand’s awareness, you may want to consider placing brand labels on the outside of your clothing items such as on hems or cuffs, but if you want to maintain relatively inconspicuous brand placement, you may just want to include the labels on the inside of your garments.

The types of clothing labels you can include on your garments include:

Manhattan Fold Labels: These are quite similar to Center Fold Labels in their appearance, except that the top of the label is folded over to give a more finished and high-quality look. This type of label is typically sewn into the collar of a garment.
The End Fold Labels: These have more of a finished and high-quality look to them because the edges are tucked in at the sides. These types of labels are typically printed with brand logos and they’re quite small.
Straight Cut Labels: These have no folds at all, which means they’re typically sewn on flat—straight onto the garment. They’re commonly also placed on the outside of a garment as a decorative patch, usually with a brand logo printed on them.
Center Fold Labels: These are the most common type of apparel labels. They’re usually made of woven materials and commonly attached to the inside of garment collars.
The Mitre Fold Label: These are similar to the End Fold Label as they’re quite small, shaped like a thin rectangle, and are typically printed just with a brand logo. This type of label, however, hangs down a bit farther than the End Fold Label instead of going straight across.
Loop Fold Labels: These labels are commonly sewn on the inside of garments, typically close to the hemline in shirts or the waistband in some trousers. This type of label is usually reserved for care and size information, not brand logos.

Clothing Tags

Clothing tags, otherwise referred to as hangtags, are usually added to the garment at the very end of production and are typically secured to the collar label of some garments, or otherwise gently pinned or secured to the garment by piercing a small hole through the fabric.

Hang tags are meant to be removed, and typically include additional information about the garment or the brand such as detailed information about the care requirements that can’t fit on the inner label, or the brand’s ethos, mission statement, or purpose behind making the garment.

Hang tags aren’t necessary but can add an extra brand element to your clothing pieces that can make them feel more high-quality to your customers. You can use hang tags made of thick card stock, manila ones for a vintage look, or even silicone ones for an ultra tech/high-performance type of look.

Where to Source Clothing Labels and Tags:

Step 13: Create Your Online Clothing Store

If you’re serious about building a brand or learning more about digital marketing, search engine optimization, and conversion rate strategies, you need to build your clothing store on a customizable ecommerce platform. We can’t recommend Shopify enough. Not only is Shopify one of the easiest platforms to get started with, but its app store is the most robust and has a host of print-on-demand clothing printers and dropshippers if you choose to go that route (read our Shopify Review to learn more about why we recommend it so highly).

Shopify enables you to build your own online clothing store wherever you are, with the ability to sell to customers all over the world. Setting up your store with Shopify is easy, and you don’t have to worry about your website’s security so you can be sure that you and your customers’ sensitive information is protected when shopping on your site.

Overall, Shopify is the most recommended ecommerce platform out there, and it’s your best option when it comes to starting your own clothing store online.

When setting up your clothing store on Shopify you’ll want to take your brand into consideration and make use of all your brand visuals. Implement your color palette, use your logo, take effective product and lifestyle photos of your garments, and create a glowing “About Page” so your customers can learn more about who your brand is and what you stand for.

These are the types of things that will make your clothing store stand out to your customers, so they’ll be more trusting when it comes time for them to make a purchase. You want your website to install confidence in your customers, so take that into consideration when setting up your online clothing store.

Your Store’s Theme

Another aspect of your online clothing/apparel store to take into serious consideration is your store’s theme. Themes are the general outward look and feel of your website, and depending on the products you sell, some themes may display your products better than others.

Since you’ll be starting a clothing/apparel store, you’ll want a theme that shows off your garments to their full potential so choose a theme that enables you to post lots of images.

Note: Shopify has some themes that specifically cater to clothing, fashion, and apparel brands, so check out their collection of Clothing & Fashion Themes on Shopify here. For more ideas, check out our roundup of the Best Shopify Themes here. And to see some Shopify themes in action, check out these 50 Successful Shopify Stores and see what you can learn from them.

Step 14: Create a Shipping Strategy for Your Clothing Company

Figuring out how to ship your products to your customers can be a confusing and daunting process if you’ve never done it before as there’s a lot to take into consideration.

What should you charge for shipping?
How much does shipping cost?
What about returns?
What shipping carrier should you use?
Should you start off with a shipping and fulfillment warehouse?
Will your customers get charged duty and customs fees?
What about shipping labels?
What about tracking and insuring your packages?

All these questions, and more, are valid questions to be asking yourself—and we’ll dive into them now:

How to Charge Your Customer for Shipping

These are your options:

Charge Your Customers the Exact Shipping Fee: This means that your customers will be made aware of the shipping costs while they’re checking out and they’ll have to pay the exact amount it costs to get their order shipped to them.
Charge Your Customers a Flat Shipping Fee: This means that you can instate a flat shipping fee such as $6 for domestic orders and $12 for international orders, no matter how many items each customer orders and no matter where they’re located domestically or internationally. Some orders will cost you more to ship and some will cost you less, but if you budget it correctly it should even out.
Offer Your Customers Free Shipping Over a Certain Threshold: For example, you could offer all customers free shipping if they spend over $100. This encourages customers to purchase enough products to meet that amount so they don’t have to pay for shipping. By making sure they spend a certain monetary amount, it makes it more worthwhile for you to ship their package for “free” because the cost of shipping is absorbed into your profit margin on the order. Check out my article on How to Offer Free Shipping & Calculating Your Free Shipping Threshold for more information.
Offer Your Customers Free Shipping Based on their Location: In this case, you could offer free shipping for all domestic destinations and any international locations will have to pay a calculated rate or a flat fee. This encourages your local customers to purchase from you without having to pay any shipping fees and depending on your domestic shipping rates you should be able to absorb the cost in your profit margin, assuming you price your items accordingly. For international customers, however, you’ll be able to fund the shipping cost fully or in part by their calculated or flat rate fee.
Offer Your Customers Free Shipping on Any Order: Some businesses choose to offer free shipping to all customers because it’s easier for them to calculate, more attractive to customers, and results in fewer cart abandonments. The cost of shipping will be absorbed by your profit margin, so take that into consideration when pricing your items.

Shipping is never free. No matter what it says on any website, “free shipping” is not free for the business—the cost is just being absorbed in some other way. It’s also no secret that shipping costs are one of the most likely reasons for shopping cart abandonments, so in order to combat that, many ecommerce stores offer free shipping to decrease shipping cart abandonments.

Take both of these things into consideration when pricing your products so you can gauge whether you’ll need to charge higher prices for your items so you can afford to offer free shipping, or at least a subsidized shipping rate.

Calculating Shipping Costs

The cost of shipping depends on your carrier, where you’re shipping to, and where you’re shipping from. There are also other variables involved like the weight and size of the package as well, so your best bet is to use a shipping calculator to determine how much it would cost you to ship your packages. Many carriers have shipping calculators available on their websites so you can price out the cost of your packages on there.

How to Handle Returns

You basically have two options when it comes to handling returns for your customers: You can provide your customers with pre-paid postage in case they need to return an item, or you don’t provide your customers with pre-paid postage and they will have to assume the responsibility to pay for postage in the event that they need to return an item to you.

Providing pre-paid postage for customers offers them a seamless shopping experience with your company, however not offering free returns can actually affect customer’s decision to purchase from you at all.

Check out this blogpost from Shopify that discusses shipping returns in more detail to learn more about it and how it affects your business.

Which Shipping Carrier to Use

Most popular shipping carriers offer a business account program so businesses can get perks such as better order management, discounts on shipping, and/or free shipping supplies. Basically, it makes it a little bit easier and less expensive for you than just shipping packages without a business account.

Check out these popular shipping carrier’s business accounts:

Using a Shipping & Fulfillment Warehouse

Shipping and fulfillment warehouses can be a tricky service to use for clothing stores as there are usually many different SKUs (stock-keeping units) such as different sizes and colors for each item of clothing. Although shipping and fulfillment warehouses may be convenient services to use since they handle the entire picking, packing, and shipping service for you, there can be some drawbacks, including:

Inability to Use Your Own Branded Packaging: Some warehouses require that you use their own shipping packaging, so you won’t be able to use any boxes, poly mailers, tissue paper, stickers, etc. that have your own branding on them. It can also be difficult to add other extras such as promotional inserts, custom notes, samples, etc.
Cost: Shipping and fulfillment warehouses can take the shipping process off your hands but at what cost? It costs you to store your SKUs on your warehouse’s shelf space so depending on how quickly your product ships out to customers and how much product you’re selling, it may or may not be a worthwhile cost for you.
Handling Returns: Since your business is just one of many at a shipping and fulfillment warehouse, returned items may be handled in an inefficient manner, depending on the warehouse. Make sure you look into each warehouse’s return policy before you work with them.

However, there are also advantages to using shipping and fulfillment warehouses:

Shipping Costs: Shipping and fulfillment warehouses generally have to pay less to ship packages, so you’ll likely pay less too.
Simplified Process: No need to wait in line at the post office or deal with couriers to get your packages shipped.
Saves You Time: All the time that it takes you to pick, package, and send packages can be put to other uses such as managing customer inquires, advertising, or just growing your business in general.

Generally speaking, if you’re just starting your online clothing store: Handle the shipping and fulfillment process yourself, initially.

This gives you the chance to learn the best practices for shipping your own products, you can put your own personal touch on each package and you can use your own branded packaging materials. If you’re just sending out a few parcels a day, it won’t take up too much of your time to send them through post offices or couriers.

If you anticipate having a large customer base to start off with and predict that you may not be able to keep up with packing and shipping orders yourself, have a look into shipping and fulfillment warehouses to see what your options are.

Shipping & Fulfillment Warehouses:

These are some shipping and fulfillment options to consider, however, we encourage you to do your own research and due diligence:

To learn more about why third-party logistics providers are advantageous for your business, check out my Ultimate Guide to Utilizing a 3PL Provider for Ecommerce Fulfillment article.

Duty & Customs Fees

It’s important to be aware that you as a business are not in control of the duties and customs fees your international customers may be charged on their orders. Customs and duties fees are managed and imposed on your customers by their country itself, you don’t have the power to prevent them or influence their cost.

You do, however, have the ability to warn your customers about potential customs and duties fees they may face so that they’re not unpleasantly surprised when their order arrives.

On your shipping information page, include a section about customs and duties fees and let your customers know that they may be charged these fees by their county and that your business has no control over that.

For more information about customs and duties declaration, required forms, and policies, check out these pages:

Shipping Tracking & Insurance

Many customers now expect to have their packages tracked and expect to receive email updates on the whereabouts of the packages. If you’re interested in giving your customers a streamlined and professional shopping experience, look into what tracking options your shipping carrier has available. It almost always costs extra or will mean that you’ll have to upgrade to a more expensive service, but it could be very worthwhile for both you and your customers.

Most shipping carriers offer some kind of insurance, but it may not cover the entire cost of your orders—depending on the price of your items. If you sell high-priced items or just want the peace of mind that you’re insured for any lost parcels, it may be worth looking into a third-party shipping insurance provider such as Shipsurance or InsureShip.

It’s important to be aware that the shipping process can be complex, and it can take a while to set up and get used to all the different steps, systems, and processes. It’ll probably be a learning curve at the start, especially if you’ve never shipped a large number of orders before or if you’re launching to an eager audience, so give yourself time to set up your shipping systems properly so it doesn’t affect your business too much. Once you get a system going though you’ll likely get the hang of it and be able to make small improvements or scale your processes as needed.

Marketing and Promoting Your Clothing Line

Marketing and promoting your clothing line is essential to its success. There are several ways to market and promote your clothing line, including:

Social Media Marketing: This involves using social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to promote your clothing line. Share high-quality images of your products, engage with your audience, and use hashtags to increase visibility.
Email Marketing: This involves sending emails to customers and potential customers to promote your clothing line. Build an email list and send regular updates, promotions, and exclusive offers to keep your audience engaged.
Influencer Marketing: This involves partnering with influencers in the fashion industry to promote your clothing line. Influencers can help you reach a larger audience and build credibility for your brand.
Paid Advertising: This involves using paid advertising such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads to promote your clothing line. Target your ads to reach your ideal customers and drive traffic to your online store.
Trade Shows and Events: This involves attending trade shows and events to promote your clothing line. These events provide an opportunity to showcase your products, network with industry professionals, and gain exposure for your brand.

It’s essential to have a clear marketing strategy in place to promote your clothing line. This can include identifying your target market, creating a brand identity, and developing a marketing plan. By implementing a well-rounded marketing strategy, you can increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and drive sales for your clothing line.

Wrapping Up: Your Clothing Brand Journey

Starting a clothing brand isn’t just about making clothes—it’s about crafting a vision, building a story, and sharing that with the world. The process might seem overwhelming at first, but breaking it down into key steps—whether it’s choosing your model, building your brand identity, or perfecting your product—makes it manageable.

Whether you’re diving into print-on-demand for its simplicity, opting for wholesale for control, or going all-in on custom cut & sew for total creative freedom, the one constant is your brand identity. Know your audience, tell a story that resonates, and design a visual presence that sets you apart in a sea of competition.

Above all, quality matters. From the materials you source to the care you take in production, ensuring excellence in every piece will turn first-time buyers into loyal customers. And don’t underestimate the importance of a smooth, transparent shipping strategy—it builds trust and reduces friction in the buying process.

Launching your clothing brand is a marathon, not a sprint. But with the right mix of strategy, creativity, and dedication, you’ll not only build a brand but one that lasts, connects, and makes its mark. Your journey starts here—so make it count.

Key Takeaways & FAQs for Starting Your Own Clothing Line

Key takeaways for starting your own clothing line:

1. Choose the right business model for your goals and resources, whether print-on-demand, wholesale/private label, or custom cut & sew. Each has pros and cons in terms of difficulty, cost, and creative control.

2. Develop a strong brand identity by focusing on a specific niche, creating appealing designs, ensuring quality, and crafting a compelling brand story. Differentiate through unique design, fit, materials, or target market.

3. Create a detailed business plan covering your model, target customer, competitors, costs, and profit margins. Use this to guide your decisions and strategy.

4. For custom lines, work with experienced professionals on product development – from sketches and tech packs to sourcing, sampling, and production. Quality control is crucial.

5. Put thought into your packaging and branding, using custom elements to create a premium unboxing experience. Brand your clothing pieces themselves with labels and hangtags.

6. Set up an online store on a robust platform like Shopify. Choose a theme suited for showcasing apparel. Invest in professional product photos.

7. Develop a clear shipping and returns strategy. Decide how to charge for shipping, choose carriers, consider fulfillment services, and communicate policies to customers.

8. Market your line through social media, email, influencers, paid ads, and industry events. Have a plan to build awareness and drive traffic to your store.

FAQ for starting your own clothing line:

Q: How much does it cost to start a clothing line?

A: Costs vary widely based on your model. Print-on-demand can cost under $500 to launch, while custom cut & sew lines may require $10,000+ in development and production costs.

Q: Do I need fashion design experience to start a clothing brand?

A: Not necessarily, but it helps to have an eye for design and trends. Many successful brands partner with experienced designers and product developers to bring their vision to life.

Q: How do I find clothing manufacturers?

A: Online directories like Maker’s Row, Sqetch, and Sewport connect brands with vetted manufacturers. Attend trade shows, ask for referrals, and thoroughly research factories before committing.

Q: What’s the best way to build a strong brand identity?

A: Focus on a distinct niche, develop a unique design aesthetic, tell an authentic brand story, and maintain consistent quality. Your brand should resonate with your target customer.

Q: How important is packaging for a clothing brand?

A: Very! Thoughtful packaging creates a premium experience, builds loyalty, and encourages sharing on social media. Custom elements make your brand feel established and desirable.

Q: What should I charge for shipping?

A: You have options: charge actual costs, offer a flat rate, set order thresholds for free shipping, or build costs into product prices. Be upfront and keep rates competitive.

Q: How can I market my clothing line on a budget?

A: Leverage organic social media, build an email list, partner with relevant influencers, and encourage customer photos/reviews. Focus on channels where your audience is active.

Remember, launching a successful clothing brand takes time, planning, and adaptability. Stay true to your vision, obsess over quality and customer experience, and continually refine your strategy. With persistence and a strong foundation, you can build a fashion brand that stands out in a crowded market.

The post How to Start a Clothing Line: Your Complete Guide to Design, Sampling, Production & Packaging appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

My Superhero Origin Story

Richard Lazazzera — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:05:01 +0000

I almost missed it.

Last week, at 9pm on September 11, I was putting my daughter to bed when I realized—it was A Better Lemonade Stand’s birthday.

12 years old.

September 11th is actually the anniversary of many major events in my life, both good and bad.

It was exactly a year prior on September 11th, 2011, that I was laid off from my first career out of college, and it set of a chain of events that has dictated my life ever since.

The Layoffs

I was out in Vancouver, Canada, and for 5 years, I had been working for a local chain of entertainment complexes (Similar to Dave & Busters) and golf & country clubs.

I made my way up the chain pretty quickly, managing the marketing and operations for several locations with a few hundred employees.

However, in the years I was there, we faced increasing financial pressures.

The owner was a reclusive rich man who was buying up rich man things (Country Clubs) and was overextending himself.

By 2010, the financial pressure of his purchases became too much. The owner tasked the Vice President of the company with cutting costs significantly, and it was decided that this cost cutting would mostly come from layoffs.

The VP tapped me to assist in the layoffs.

Mind you, I was incredibly young at this time and had no idea what I was really doing, but the VP was also a mentor to me, and this was his way of throwing me into the fire and giving me a real-life business experience I would likely never normally get to experience.

And so it began—a slaughterfest.

We began laying off dozens of employees, starting with junior positions and quickly escalating to senior departments – management, operations, accounting, and marketing.

I had no say in who was getting cut, but here I was, as a 25-year-old kid, telling people twice my age they were being laid off.

The dread and guilt consumed me with every conversation.

The process wasn’t quick either. As the owner faced more and more financial pressure, the cuts continued over months.

Walking the grounds, you wondered what everyone was thinking about you. When they talked to you, were they just acting extra nice because they were afraid for their job?

Spoiler alert, they were.

At one point, both the VP and myself questioned if we should even eat at our own restaurant facilities anymore for fear of being poisoned.

As we slowly came to the end of all the cuts we could make without shutting down the businesses completely, I started to feel uneasy and mostly defeated from the experience. We were a company with a barebones staff, nervous employees, a diminished brand & product, and continued financial pressures.

The Turning Point

Then, one evening, I received the text from the VP that I instantly knew was going to change my life: “Richard, can we meet tomorrow?”

It was my turn.

The next day, September 11, 2011, I met with the VP to get a taste of the very same medicine I had helped dish out to over 100 others in the months prior.

While I can’t say I was happy, it felt like a definitive end to a very interesting chapter and exhausting few months in my life.

A New Path

In the weeks after being laid off, I purchased The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, which would set off the next chapter in my life.

I read the book cover to cover in a few nights and remember thinking with such clarity that this was my future.

I wanted to build my own business and be in charge of my own destiny.

Inspired by the book, I spent the next year building small ecommerce businesses—learning how to choose winning products, negotiating with suppliers in China, importing products into Canada, setting up an online store, and online marketing.

The Birth of A Better Lemonade Stand

Ironically, it was exactly a year later, on September 11th, 2012, that I registered abetterlemonadestand.com—mostly as a space to distill my thoughts, ideas, and experiences in ecommerce.

It’s wild that the one decision to start writing about my thoughts and experiences would change the course of the rest of my life.

Only a year and a half after I started blogging, A Better Lemonade Stand caught the attention of Shopify, and I joined the Growth team, helping them grow the Shopify blog from 200k to 2 million visitors during my tenure and experiencing the once in a lifetime opportunity of participating in a tech IPO.

As much as I loved Shopify, the product, and the people I worked with, I left Shopify just a year and a half later to pursue entrepreneurship full time and to continue charting my own path.

From Defeat to Determination

September 11th has always been a symbolic day for me—a day of both great losses and even greater beginnings. From losing my job and questioning my purpose to launching A Better Lemonade Stand and finding my passion again, each September 11th has nudged me closer to who I’m meant to be.

It’s a reminder that success doesn’t come without setbacks. In fact, those setbacks are what give the highs their meaning.

For me, this was never just about building businesses—it’s about building myself through the businesses I create, the risks I take, the lessons I learn, and who I become along the way.

Over the past decade, I’ve weathered storms that tested my resilience and experienced highs I never imagined. But the one constant through it all? My commitment to growth. Whether I’m helping someone launch their first product, navigating new digital landscapes, or creating a space where fellow entrepreneurs can thrive, I’ve always been driven by a desire to create something bigger than myself.

And that’s why, even after all this time, I’m still here. I’m still creating. I’m still learning. And I’m still showing up for that next chapter 12 years later.

The post My Superhero Origin Story appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

Surfer SEO Review 2023: A Comprehensive Look Into the On-Page SEO Tool

A Better Lemonade Stand — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 20:01:21 +0000

On-page SEO plays a crucial role in determining your website’s search engine rankings. With constantly changing algorithms, it’s essential to have a powerful tool that keeps up with the latest trends and provides actionable insights. That’s where Surfer SEO comes in. In this Surfer SEO review 2023, we’ll dive deep into this game-changing on-page optimization tool and explore its features, real-life results, pricing, and much more. Ready to uncover the secrets of high-ranking content? Let’s get started!

Short Summary

Surfer SEO is an AI-powered on-page optimization tool that provides data insights to help users improve their search engine rankings.
Its features include Content Editor, SERP Analyzer, Content Audit, and Surfer AI for content creation.
It offers a range of powerful features at different price points and can be integrated with other tools to expand its capabilities.

How to Start a Clothing Line: Table of Contents

Short Summary
Understanding Surfer SEO
What is Surfer SEO?
How Surfer SEO Works
Key Features of Surfer SEO
Content Editor: The Heart of Surfer SEO
SERP Analyzer: Competitive Analysis Made Easy
Content Audit: Reviving Old Content
Content Planner: Strategic Planning Assistance
Surfer AI: AI Content Writer
Surfer SEO in Action: Real-Life Results
Pricing and Plans: Is Surfer SEO Worth the Investment?
Comparing Surfer SEO to Competitors
Content At Scale Overview
Surfer SEO’s Strengths and Weaknesses
Integration Possibilities: Expanding Surfer SEO’s Capabilities
Summary
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Surfer SEO easy to use?
Does Surfer SEO work?
How does Surfer SEO work?
What’s a good score in Surfer SEO?
What are the key features of Surfer SEO?

Understanding Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a robust on-page optimization tool that evaluates more than 500 ranking elements, providing data-driven recommendations for content enhancement. Why is it so popular among SEO professionals? The secret lies in its ability to analyze the top-ranking pages for a given keyword and offer actionable insights to improve your content’s SEO performance. In this surfer seo review 2023, we will explore the features and benefits of Surfer SEO. In our surfer seo review conclusion, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the tool’s capabilities.

While there are surfer seo alternatives in the market, such as Page Optimizer Pro, Frase, and Scalenut, Surfer SEO stands out with its ease of use, content structure assistance, LSI keyword analysis, and the ever-evolving Grow Flow feature.

However, it’s important to note that the tool is not without its drawbacks, such as the less-than-optimal AI writing capability.

What is Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is a powerful SEO tool designed to optimize your content for improved search engine rankings by providing insights based on the analysis of top-ranking pages. Among various SEO tools, this one evaluates more than 500 on-page signals, including on page seo factors, such as:

TF-IDF
Meta titles
Alt tags
LSI
NLP

These insights help users identify the best target keyword to focus on for their content using the Surfer keyword research tool. Whether you’re a data-driven content creator or a professional working on scalable content, Surfer SEO is an ideal choice for you.

One of the most popular features of Surfer SEO is the Content Editor, which allows users to import content from a URL, create documents, and write pieces while following the formatted guidelines and terms provided by the tool. The AI-powered Outline tab in Surfer’s Content Editor generates sections of content based on competitors’ content, making it easier for users to create SEO-optimized articles.

Type	Difficulty	Cost	Time Input
1. Print-on-Demand	Very Low	$	Very Low
2. Wholesale/Private Label	Low	$$	Medium
3. Custom Cut & Sew Clothing Line	High	$$$$	Very High

How Surfer SEO Works

Surfer SEO works by evaluating multiple on-page elements, such as keyword utilization, meta tags, and backlinks, to provide actionable insights for content optimization. The tool analyzes various on-page factors and helps users enhance their website’s performance on search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the features of Surfer SEO is the Domain Planner tool, which helps users identify quick wins and missed SEO opportunities by displaying metrics like Content Score, monthly search volume, traffic, ranking position, and impressions.

To edit a page in Surfer SEO’s Content Editor, users can follow these steps:

Click the purple icon next to the page in the Domain Planner report.
Make necessary alterations based on Surfer’s recommendations.
Republish the page in their content management system (CMS).

The process is designed to be user-friendly and efficient, ensuring that your content is optimized for both humans and search engines.

Key Features of Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO offers a range of features to help users optimize their content and improve their search engine rankings. These features include:

Content Editor
SERP Analyzer
Content Audit
Content Planner
Surfer AI

Each of these features serves a unique purpose and adds value to the overall user experience.

In this section, we’ll explore each of these key features in detail and discover how they can help you create data-driven, SEO-optimized content.

Content Editor: The Heart of Surfer SEO

The Content Editor lies at the heart of Surfer SEO, providing comprehensive real-time feedback, keyword analysis, and content optimization suggestions. By offering insights into how your content is performing and how to optimize it for SEO, the Content Editor becomes an invaluable tool in your content creation process. The interface is intuitive and straightforward, similar to creating content on Google Docs or MS Word, ensuring a seamless user experience.

As you write your content, the Content Editor provides you with a list of relevant keywords and phrases to include, which can help in optimizing your content for search engines. By following the recommendations provided by Surfer SEO’s Content Editor, you can ensure that your content is not only engaging for your audience but also optimized for search engine rankings.

SERP Analyzer: Competitive Analysis Made Easy

Understanding your competition is crucial in the world of SEO, and Surfer SEO’s SERP Analyzer tool makes this task easier than ever. By analyzing the competition for a given keyword, the SERP Analyzer provides insights into on-page factors that contribute to high rankings, such as:

keyword usage
meta tags
backlinks
average word count
the number of H2 tags of ranking pages
using a keyword research tool

The primary output of Surfer SEO’s SERP Analyzer is a graph illustrating the correlation between word count and average position over time. This data can help you identify the optimal content length and keyword distribution for your content, ensuring that you stay ahead of your competition.

The new feature in Surfer SEO’s SERP Analyzer that displays common backlinks for the SERP being analyzed provides further insights into the backlinks that contribute to high rankings.

Content Audit: Reviving Old Content

Reviving old content is essential for maintaining a strong online presence, and Surfer SEO’s Content Audit feature helps you do just that. The Content Audit enables you to:

Detect and rectify issues with your existing content
Receive data-driven recommendations for improvement
Identify obsolete data
Improve formatting
Avoid keyword stuffing

By utilizing the Content Audit feature, you can ensure that your content is up-to-date, well-optimized, and engaging for your audience.

As a result, you can boost the overall quality of your content and make it more appealing to search engines.

Content Planner: Strategic Planning Assistance

The Content Planner in Surfer SEO is designed to assist users in planning and strategizing content creation based on keyword research and search intent. By providing preliminary data such as monthly search volume and keyword difficulty for each cluster of related content, the Content Planner allows you to make informed decisions about which topics to cover in your content strategy.

This helps you focus your efforts on the most promising content opportunities, ensuring that you get the most out of your content creation efforts.

Surfer AI: AI Content Writer

Surfer AI is an AI-driven content writer that helps users create SEO-optimized content quickly and efficiently. By using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, Surfer AI analyzes the content of a website and creates SEO-optimized content, along with recommending keywords and phrases to be incorporated in the content.

While the produced content may not be as original or imaginative as content composed by a human, Surfer AI’s efficiency and speed make it a valuable tool for those looking to create content at scale.

Surfer SEO in Action: Real-Life Results

When it comes to real-life results, Surfer SEO has proven its effectiveness in improving search engine rankings and driving organic traffic. Authority Hacker, a well-known digital marketing company, reported double-digit growth in traffic after optimizing pages with Surfer SEO. This is just one example of how Surfer SEO can help businesses and content creators achieve their goals.

Another case in point is Surfer SEO’s Grow Flow, an AI-driven assistant that provides practical steps to enhance SEO visibility. While it’s not perfect and cannot substitute for quality tools and expertise, the Grow Flow feature can still offer valuable insights and recommendations to help users improve their website’s performance.

These real-life examples showcase the potential of Surfer SEO in helping users achieve better search engine rankings and increased organic traffic. By leveraging the tool’s powerful features and data-driven recommendations, content creators can ensure that their content is optimized for both humans and search engines, resulting in a winning combination.

Pricing and Plans: Is Surfer SEO Worth the Investment?

Surfer SEO offers four core plans:

Essential: Pricing starts at $59/month and includes access to the Content Editor, SERP Analyzer, and basic keyword research.
Advanced: Priced at $99/month, this plan offers additional features such as the Content Audit and Content Planner.
Max: Unlock Surfer AI and other premium features with the Max plan, priced at $199/month.
Enterprise: For businesses with unique requirements, the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing and includes personalized training, a dedicated customer success manager, and premium support.

Note: Annual discounts are available for all plans.

While Surfer SEO might be more expensive than some of its competitors, the tool’s robust features and data-driven recommendations make it a worthy investment for those looking to improve their website’s search engine rankings and drive organic traffic. By choosing the right plan based on your needs and budget, you can ensure that you get the most out of Surfer SEO and its powerful capabilities.

Comparing Surfer SEO to Competitors

When deciding whether Surfer SEO is the right tool for you, it’s essential to compare it to its competitors in the market. Some of these competitors include Content At Scale, Frase, and Scalenut, all of which offer similar features but differ in terms of pricing, capabilities, and user experience.

By comparing these tools, you can make an informed decision about which one best fits your needs and budget.

Content At Scale Overview

Content At Scale is an approach to creating a large volume of content in an efficient and effective manner, often leveraging AI-powered tools. This method can be utilized for marketing, product development, and social media management. Content At Scale provides a range of features, including AI-powered content creation, content optimization, and content analysis, as well as tools for content planning, scheduling, and tracking.

When comparing Content At Scale to Surfer SEO, it’s worth noting that both tools emphasize content creation and optimization but have distinct features and capabilities. For example, Content At Scale focuses on creating content at scale, while Surfer SEO’s primary focus is on competitive analysis and content audits. By considering the unique features and capabilities of each tool, you can determine which one is the best fit for your needs.

Surfer SEO’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Surfer SEO offers numerous strengths, including:

Its ability to provide superior data and recommendations for on-page optimization compared to other tools like Website Auditor
The tool’s user-friendly interface and well-designed dashboards make it easy to navigate and use, even for those who are new to SEO
The Content Editor, SERP Analyzer, and other features make Surfer SEO a comprehensive solution for content creators and marketers looking to improve their search engine rankings.

However, Surfer SEO is not without its weaknesses. While it is more affordable than Clearscope, starting at $59/month, some users may still find the cost prohibitive. Additionally, certain features like the Surfer AI may not be as advanced as those offered by competitors, leading to content that may not be as original or imaginative as content composed by a human.

It’s essential to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of Surfer SEO when deciding whether it’s the right tool for your needs. While the tool offers many benefits, it’s crucial to consider its limitations and compare it to other solutions in the market to make an informed decision.

Integration Possibilities: Expanding Surfer SEO’s Capabilities

One of the advantages of Surfer SEO is its ability to integrate with other tools, such as SEMrush and Writesonic, allowing users to benefit from enhanced capabilities and improved user experience. By integrating with other tools, you can streamline your SEO workflow and make the most of your content creation efforts. For instance, the Google Docs integration feature enables writers to view all of Surfer’s suggestions directly within the Google Doc, making it easy to optimize content in real-time.

Surfer SEO provides a public roadmap of their ongoing projects, which can be found on their Trello page. This transparency allows users to keep track of upcoming features and improvements, ensuring that they can make the most of the tool as it continues to evolve. By integrating Surfer SEO with other tools, you can unlock its full potential and take your content optimization efforts to new heights.

Summary

In this Surfer SEO review 2023, we’ve explored the various features, strengths, and weaknesses of the tool, as well as its pricing and integration possibilities. Surfer SEO is a powerful on-page optimization tool that can greatly benefit content creators and marketers looking to improve their search engine rankings and drive organic traffic. Its user-friendly interface, comprehensive feature set, and data-driven recommendations make it a valuable resource in the ever-changing world of SEO.

While Surfer SEO may not be perfect, its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, making it a worthy investment for those looking to up their SEO game. By choosing the right plan based on your needs and budget, and leveraging the tool’s powerful features, you can ensure that your content is optimized for both humans and search engines. So, are you ready to unlock the full potential of your content and reach new heights with Surfer SEO?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Surfer SEO easy to use?

SurferSEO makes it easy to generate a report and optimize content with detailed recommendations, so it is easy to use.

By using SurferSEO, you can quickly and easily create a report that provides detailed recommendations for optimizing your content. This makes it easy to make changes and improve your content quickly and efficiently.

Does Surfer SEO work?

Surfer SEO is a comprehensive on-page SEO optimization tool, complete with features like keyword research, content planner, content editor, SERP analyzer, and SEO audit. Its features make it an effective tool to optimize website pages and improve rankings.

Confirming that SEO works.

How does Surfer SEO work?

SurferSEO provides data-driven insights into a website’s on-page optimization, allowing users to compare and analyze their pages against what currently ranks on SERPs. It offers an accurate assessment of missing elements, allowing website owners to make more informed decisions.

What’s a good score in Surfer SEO?

A score between 67-100 is considered optimal for quality and relevance in SurferSEO, while anything below 33 may suggest low-quality or irrelevant content.

34-66 indicates decent quality and relevance.

What are the key features of Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO provides powerful features such as Content Editor, SERP Analyzer, Content Audit, Content Planner, and Surfer AI, allowing users to analyze their website’s performance and create effective content.

These features help users optimize their website for search engine rankings, improve their content quality, and increase their visibility online. With these tools, users can easily identify areas of improvement and create content that is tailored to their target audience.

Surfer SEO also provides detailed reports.

Sources

https://www.loremipsum.com/345234

https://www.lipsum.com/articles/nrg1575

https://www.loremagency.com/articles/nadwa5

The post Surfer SEO Review 2023: A Comprehensive Look Into the On-Page SEO Tool appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

15 Digital Marketing Tools to Use in 2022

Richard Lazazzera — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:25:08 +0000

Finding the best digital marketing tools can allow you to take your business to the next level. Whether you’re looking for tools for email marketing, social media, SEO, or even live events, you’ll discover tools that will help simplify your marketing efforts so that you can focus on other tasks at the same time. In this article, we will share our 15 favorite digital marketing tools that you can use for your business today. So, let’s dive in.

15 Digital Marketing Tools to Use in 2022

1. VEED

VEED.IO is an online video editor tool designed to make creating high-quality videos simple and fast. With an intuitive and user-friendly interface, it’s perfect for everyone, whether you’re a beginner or a professional. The platform offers essential editing tools, allowing users to trim, crop, merge, and resize videos effortlessly. You can also automatically generate subtitles and transcriptions in multiple languages, making your videos more accessible to a global audience.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud

One of the digital marketing tools to use in 2022 is none other than Adobe Creative Cloud. You’ll have access to the whole suite of tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, and other apps for social media, design, video, web, and more. Most marketers use Adobe Creative Cloud for social media, whether for TikTok and YouTube videos or Instagram posts. For example, an ecommerce marketer might also use Adobe Creative Cloud for product photography and videography. The digital marketing tools most often used by digital marketers who use Adobe are Photoshop for images and Premiere Pro for video. The whole suite of tools costs $69.99/month.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most popular digital marketing tools for businesses that attract audiences through content and SEO. You can do keyword research, competitor analysis, and SEO analysis for your own website. When analyzing your own site, you can see your Ahrefs ranking out of all websites in the world to know how you’re doing. On top of this, you can view the exact number of backlinks you have and which websites are linking to you. You can even see which keywords you’re ranking for. But the special icing on the cake is that you can even get a dollar sign for how much those keywords are worth in a dollar amount in case you’re planning to sell your business. You can run site audits to find broken backlinks, uncrawled pages, and the top issues of your website. You can also do a content gap analysis to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t. Overall, this is the digital marketing tool people in the SEO space use the most because of how comprehensive the features are.

4. Beamer

Digital marketing tools like Beamer allow you to send push notifications to your audience when they visit your website. You can also send boosted announcements, segment your user base, and monitor the performance of your marketing efforts. While push notifications aren’t as popular as they were a few years ago, they’re great at generating traffic back to your website or a specific page. Depending on its size, the influx of traffic you get from a push notification can sometimes even be comparable to your email list. Getting people to subscribe to push notifications is easier than convincing people to opt-in to an email list as it only requires one click.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the best free digital marketing tool you’ll find when it comes to your website analytics. This marketing tool allows you to view real-time traffic of your website so you can see the traffic in real-time when running an ad, sending an email, or going viral from a shout-out on TikTok. You can also view the demographics of your website traffic to understand who’s visiting your site. Age, gender, location, interests, and device are some of the audience details you can view for free in Google Analytics. You can also view how you acquired those audiences. For instance, you can see how much traffic came from social, email, referrals, organic, or even directly visited your website. And if you’re creating landing pages or blog posts for your website, you can view how many page views each page receives. Plus, how much time they spend on each page and the bounce rate of the page are also included in detail. Overall, every website should have Google Analytics installed on it, since it’s a free digital marketing tool that gives you a lot of data to better understand your website’s performance.

6. Dashlane

Every digital marketer knows the importance of storing your passwords securely. After all, hacks are becoming more common every day. You can no longer use “123456” or “password” as the passwords for your digital marketing tools, social media sites, and other log-ins. Dashlane is a password manager that allows you to store your passwords securely. You’ll be able to safely store all your auto-fills, passwords, and credit card details. If you work on a team with other marketers, you’ll be able to share the company credit card details safely as it is encrypted. Their password manager is used by 14 million people, making them a legitimate choice for password, credit card, and other confidential information. You’ll be able to create accounts for your team so that everyone can securely access passwords for team accounts.

7. Long Tail Pro

Long Tail Pro is an SEO tool for digital marketers. Like other popular SEO tools, you can use the tool to do keyword research to find profitable keywords to rank for. You can also track your rank position for your best-performing keywords, articles you recently did a content freshness on, and more. This tool also allows you to monitor your backlinks, which can be useful when doing backlink exchanges. You can also run a site audit with Long Tail Pro to help reduce the technical SEO issues on your website.

8. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most established digital marketing tools in the email marketing space. The affordability of the tool makes it one of the leading email marketing tools for small businesses and bloggers. MailChimp allows you to create email campaigns, manage email lists, and distribute emails to your audience. You can use a template or create your own to create a professionally designed email. The tool is no-code friendly, allowing anyone to type text in without needing a technical background. You can also automate email campaigns directly from your blog as new content is posted. Or you can choose to schedule your emails at a specific time of your choosing. Those who’d like to take their email marketing to the next level can even run A/B split tests, to better optimize the performance of campaigns to improve open and click-through rates.

9. Semrush

You can use digital marketing tools, such as Semrush, to help with SEO, content, market research, advertising, and more. This digital marketing tool allows you to do keyword research, on-page SEO, competitor analysis, and ranking tracking, just as other SEO tools do. However, it takes it a step further by offering features for other types of marketing as well. You can also optimize content, distribute it, and analyze it with Semrush. Now, if you want to take it a step further, you can also see your competitor’s ad copy so that you can improve your advertising campaigns. Not only this, but you can do some pretty detailed competitor analysis to determine what the best performing keywords your competitors are ranking for and more. If you’re currently running PPC campaigns, you can do your keyword research on Semrush, making this one of the most well-rounded digital marketing tools.

10. SERP Watcher

Digital marketing tools like SERP Watcher allow you to do keyword research, track your rank position, analyze your backlinks (and competitors), and analyze your overall SEO numbers. Some call this tool the “budget Ahrefs,” allowing you to do the same type of SEO work at a more affordable price. You can look up keywords for your business and see what keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can even track the ranking of your best-performing keywords to see if there’s been an increase or decrease in rank position. SERP Watcher also allows you to look up other websites as part of your research. If you upgrade your plan from Basic, you’ll also be able to have multiple people log in simultaneously for your growing SEO and content teams.

11. Shoelace

Shoelace is a digital marketing tool that specializes in ad optimization. The tool can be used to create retargeting ad campaigns and Google ads. You can even add workflows to improve the performance of your emails. If you don’t have an in-house ad team, you can use Shoelace to help create high-performing ad campaigns for you. The ads are split between acquisition and retention to ensure that you keep the customers you bring in. Each business gets a dedicated account strategist who helps manage the ad account, customer journey, and more. You’ll even get access to app reporting so you can view the result of your campaigns 24/7. If you’d prefer to use Shoelace for your email campaigns, you’ll be able to generate an average of 122% return on investment through the abandoned cart, post-purchase, and even welcome emails.

12. Social Bee

Social Bee is a social media management platform making it a worthy digital marketing tool for social media marketers. This platform allows you to manage social accounts like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even Google My Business. With this digital marketing tool, you’ll be able to create content, schedule it, analyze your post’s performance, reuse content, publish content, and collaborate with others on your team. This tool integrates with popular tools like Canva. You can actually design your social media post directly in Social Bee using Canva. The tool also syncs up with a calendar so you can quickly view your promotional social events at a glance.

13. Webinar Ninja

Webinar Ninja is a digital marketing tool that allows you to create webinars. Digital marketers often focus on providing value to their customers, which can come in the form of education like an online course or a webinar. Some of the biggest companies offer webinars to help educate their customers on their products so people can reap the most benefits from a product. For example, Shopify webinars help teach you how to start a Shopify store, how to use Google Shopping, and even how to move your store from Etsy to Shopify. With Webinar Ninja, you could do live webinars for special events or automated webinars that are pre-recorded and played at the same time every day.

14. Canva

Digital marketing tools like Canva allow you to design social media posts, slide decks, and other marketing assets. You could even design products like business cards, notebooks, and more in Canva. Some small businesses and entrepreneurs turn to Canva to design logos, flyers, posters, or social media posts on their own, without needing a professional designer to complete the design. Canva has a drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to easily add graphics, change colors, and even remove backgrounds at the click of a button. For those who aren’t proficient at using tools like Photoshop, Canva is a great alternative for digital marketers looking to quickly design something professional themselves.

15. Airtable

Airtable is one of the digital marketing tools marketers use to help them stay organized. It’s similar to tools like Trello and Asana but offers additional functionality, making it one of the best cloud collaboration tools for marketers. You can add your content calendar, create spreadsheets, and automate workflows. The advanced digital marketing tool includes apps that allow you to automate more processes, simplify your reporting, and help you view data in various ways. The tool is no-code friendly, allowing digital marketers to create advanced reporting without being technical.

Conclusion

Digital marketing tools can save you time and money while helping you hit your marketing goals with the kind of data you need to set you up for success. Whether you invest in an SEO tool, an email marketing one, one that helps you manage your marketing calendar, or all of the above is up to you. No matter what marketing obstacles you face, there’s a digital marketing tool out there that gives you the data, analytics, and competitive advantage to become a better marketer. So, which digital marketing tools will you be investing in next? Let us know.

The post 15 Digital Marketing Tools to Use in 2022 appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Is Better In 2022?

A Better Lemonade Stand — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 02:23:01 +0000

Shopify and WooCommerce are two of the biggest ecommerce platforms. Shopify was built with commerce in mind and offers countless innovative features to help simplify the experience of shopping online for both merchants and customers. WooCommerce is a WordPress plug-in that allows WordPress users to sell any type of product on their website. With tens of thousands of plug-ins you can add to your website, WordPress offers a ton of customization that you can’t find anywhere else. Today, we’re going to break down the differences between Shopify and WooCommerce to help you decide: Shopify vs WooCommerce which is better?

Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Is Better in 2022?

1. Price

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of price, the answer isn’t directly clear cut. Shopify offers a tiered pricing system starting at $29 a month, though as features get tacked on the price increases. The pro to Shopify’s pricing is that it includes hosting, which can get pretty expensive as your website’s popularity grows when purchased from a third-party. Shopify also offers unlimited products, use of sales channels, and more even on their lowest price plan.

WooCommerce’s pricing model is unique, mostly because there isn’t a cost to use it (or WordPress either). Those looking to save money when running an online store, especially in the early stages might be more inclined to choose WooCommerce as their go-to for price alone. However, building an online store isn’t totally devoid of any costs. You’ll need to pay for your own hosting on WooCommerce, which typically only costs a couple of dollars a month on a shared server and increases as your business grows with it. The risk will be on whether your website has a reliable uptime when running your online store, especially on Black Friday.

So in terms of price, which is better: Shopify vs WooCommerce? WooCommerce wins out if you’re an early stage business or testing out ecommerce. However, more established brands may turn to Shopify for an all-in-one bundle in terms of features and price.

2. Ease of Setup

Shopify and WooCommerce both allow you to set up an online store relatively easily. Their ecommerce website builder allows a non-developer to set up a website without needing technical skills or support. But is one easier than the other? Let’s find out.

When signing up to Shopify, you can follow a step-by-step process of setting up your online store. While most of the process is straightforward, some of the details get missed in early setup. For example, most Shopify stores get set-up with a .myshopify.com domain. However, having your own custom domain name is an important step that many people only do afterwards. You need to separately add your .com domain after setting up your Shopify store.

WooCommerce’s setup is also a bit disjointed. While adding WooCommerce to your WordPress site is pretty straightforward, if you’ve never set up a WordPress site before, you’ll also need to invest and point your hosting, which can take 24 hours. So, there are a few more moving parts, such as setting up WordPress, installing WooCommerce, purchasing hosting, and buying a .com domain, and then of course setting up your website.

When comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify, Shopify wins this round. Keep in mind that you can easily figure both of them out by reading their documentation, blogs, or watching videos to get some extra support in the early stages of building your Shopify or WooCommerce website.

3. Apps vs Plug-ins

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of apps and plug-ins, they both have their own add-ons that you can use to optimize, improve, and increase the features of your online store.

Shopify boasts over 6,000 apps on their App Store, which are all specialized in ecommerce allowing you to add sales channels, better market your website, enhance SEO, and much more. Shopify apps tend to be created by third-party developers who charge monthly subscriptions to use their app on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, this can dramatically increase the cost of running an online store. However, Shopify does have a collection of free apps as well.

WooCommerce also has its own collection of plug-ins, but because it’s hosted on WordPress, you can also tap into all of the plug-ins on WordPress too. WordPress, at the time of writing, has over 59,500 plug-ins you can install on your website. Ultimately, you’ll be able to customize nearly any aspect of your website. Just search for any plug-in to help you solve any problem you have. However, there’s an added benefit too: most of them are free or only require a one time payment. While some are recurring, it’s not as common.

So if you’re deciding on Shopify vs WooCommerce based on customization ability through apps and plug-ins, WooCommerce wins first prize here folks.

4. Theme Design

The look of your website matters. Depending on the type of website you design, you might find yourself browsing through countless themes and templates to find the perfect design for how your website will look. Both Shopify and WooCommerce have their own themes that you can add to your website.

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce, it seems that WooCommerce has a much bigger collection of themes to choose from because it’s hosted on WordPress. You can find thousands of themes that allow you to integrate content and commerce on popular sites, such as ThemeForest and WooCommerce Theme Store.

Shopify, on the other hand, has a smaller pool of themes to choose from. You can find some on the Shopify Theme Store. Shopify offers several free themes but the best ones have a fee attached to them. While Shopify allows store owners to blog, there aren’t many themes with good blog designs unlike WooCommerce.

On ThemeForest, you can find over 8,500 WooCommerce themes, whereas Shopify only has 1,400 themes available.

So, when comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify, WooCommerce has a greater collection of themes available to help you find a website design you love and that works for your business.

5. Payment Gateways

A payment gateway is the company that processes payments on your online store. For example, PayPal is an example of a payment gateway. However, around the world there are dozens of brands that offer payment processing services for different regions.

Shopify and WooCommerce both offer over 100 payment gateways, proving themselves to be the leaders in this space when comparing to other reputable ecommerce platforms.

The only difference between them is that Shopify tacks on an additional fee for payment processing. The percentage added depends on the plan you’ve signed up for. However, WooCommerce doesn’t charge any additional fees for payment processing. Therefore, WooCommerce is better in terms of payment gateways when comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce.

6. Website Maintenance

Shopify and WooCommerce both have regular website maintenance. However, their processes for doing so vary slightly.

On Shopify, you will never need to update your website for the latest version. Shopify automatically updates the website with new layouts, features, and bug fixes constantly. Since Shopify has a full-development team at the company, the process of updating the website is seamless for the merchant. You never have to worry about bug fixes because they’re patched without you even knowing. You also don’t have to worry about issues around big days like Black Friday because Shopify does code-freezes during that period. Ultimately, there’s no down time, loading wait times, or anything like that while using Shopify.

WooCommerce and WordPress have store updates as well. However, you need to choose to update to the latest version. The downside to this is that you’re liable if you don’t update your website for bug fixes and so on. The upside is that you decide whether or not to install a version in case you don’t like what the newest version offers. In this case, WooCommerce gives you the freedom of choice.

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of website maintenance, Shopify wins this round for not burdening users to have to install updates but we commend WooCommerce for letting us keep a version we love if we want to.

7. Scaling Your Business

Your business can continue to grow on both WooCommerce and Shopify. WooCommerce has had some huge brands on it’s platform. The only downside to it is that hosting costs will grow as your business grows, whereas you can stay on Shopify’s $29 a month plan even with millions of visitors. There’s tight competition when comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify in terms of scalability because both platforms have hosted some of the biggest names and brands you’ll find online. You can browse some of the most popular Shopify stores.

8. Content Marketing

Both Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to build a blog on their platform. With SEO being one of the biggest sources of website traffic for brands, SEO and content marketing are a crucial part of building a big name brand.

Shopify has several SEO apps in it’s app store allowing you to better optimize your website for search engines. It has a simple content management system that you can create blog content for too. You can easily change slugs, redirect pages, and more in Shopify too.

WooCommerce was built on WordPress so it’s safe to say that WooCommerce’s content marketing and SEO capabilities can stretch farther. WordPress has many of the best SEO plug-ins you can find online and many of them haven’t created apps for Shopify yet. WooCommerce also has many more blog-friendly themes that allow you to build a huge blog alongside an online store so that your blog readers can easily find your store. It also allows you to copy and paste documents from Google Docs without any formatting issues.

Overall, when comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in relation to content marketing and SEO, WooCommerce is the premier choice for merchants looking to scale through search.

9. Dropshipping and Print-on-Demand

WooCommerce and Shopify have plug-ins and apps that allow you to build dropshipping or print-on-demand stores.

You’ll find dropshipping apps that allow you to sell products from AliExpress on your own website in only a few clicks. However, Shopify allows you to do more than just AliExpress dropshipping. You could also install AliExpress alternative apps to dropship from Etsy, or create a print-on-demand business. You can add several different print-on-demand apps to include hundreds of unique products with custom designs on your website, only paying for each product sold rather than a monthly subscription.

WooCommerce has countless WooCommerce dropshipping plug-ins that allow you to dropship from AliExpress, Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. You can even find single apps that allow you to dropship from different platforms, making it more convenient in a lot of ways. You’ll also find pages of print-on-demand companies like Gooten and many more.

While Shopify has exclusive apps on it’s platform, WooCommerce still has plug-ins that offer the same functionality. Both choices are worthwhile if you plan on building a print-on-demand or dropshipping store.

10. Customer Support

With hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers on their platform, there’s always a way to learn how to maximize sales, fix issues, and receive support while building your online store.

Shopify offers customer support through live chat, email, and phone. Some of their support via email is available in multiple languages. In addition, Shopify has help docs, blog posts, webinars, and even online courses that you can access to educate yourself about ecommerce, marketing, and business in general.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a bit more complex when it comes to customer support. If you’re having issues with hosting, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider. If you’re having an issue with a plug-in, you’ll need to reach out to the plug-in creator. Themes purchased through a third-party will require you to get support from the creator. Overall, while it’s still possible to receive support for a WooCommerce theme, you’ll need to reach out to different companies for different components of your website making it more tedious and complicated.

Overall, Shopify’s support is more comprehensive and more convenient to get a hold of, making them the winner of this round.

Conclusion

So, Shopify vs WooCommerce, which is better? If you’re looking for an all-in-one ecommerce solution that allows you to easily set-up your website, get support, and still allows you to scale with ease, Shopify is the best option. If you’re looking for maximum customization, a content and commerce machine, and affordable pricing, WooCommerce is your best bet. Overall, both platforms are used by some of the biggest platforms online, so there’s no bad choice here. Choose the platform that works best for your business’ needs.

The post Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Is Better In 2022? appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

13 Best Print On Demand Companies for Your Online Store in 2022

A Better Lemonade Stand — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:00:11 +0000

Print on demand companies can do more than just sell you a custom t-shirt that you can sell on your online store. These days, print on demand services offer unique products, such as jewelry, makeup, leggings, notebooks, and so much more. If you’re looking to sell custom products that are still dropshipped from a print on demand company, then you’ve come to the right place. While you’ll still need some design chops to create a custom product, you can get on your way towards building a unique brand that stands out from the competition using the 13 best print on demand companies of 2022 we’ve compiled in this list. So, let’s compare these POD companies and start designing some custom products!

13 Best Print On Demand Companies in 2022

1. Printful

Print-on-demand companies like Printful offer a wide-range of items that you can add your design to. While most print-on-demand companies likely have t-shirts, Printful also has other items that are harder to find on other platforms. For example, skirts, dresses, bean bags, jewelry, fabrics, pet products, and more can all be designed using Printful’s services.

When it comes to labeling, your products can come in custom packaging. You could also add your logo to the inside of clothing to ensure that people wear your label.

Printful has integrations with some of the most popular ecommerce platforms from Shopify to BigCommerce to Wix, allowing you to add Printful to your website’s backend. You’ll be able to easily add products to your store in only a few clicks after the design has been completed. Printful also integrates with sales channels like Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, and more in case you want to sell on other social platforms.

One of the best features of Printful is that there are extra services you can also add on. For example, if you want custom photography for your website, Printful is able to take professional lifestyle or studio photos for you that you can use for social media, your website, or other marketing purposes. Not only that, but you can even use their video services to make custom videos for you.

Check out our Printful review for more information about this print-on-demand company.

2. Gooten

Print-on-demand companies, such as Gooten make it easy for you to create custom merch, personalized products, and to stock your online store with unique products. So whether you’re an on the rise influencer or an up and coming entrepreneur, you can use Gooten as your print-on-demand company.

Gooten boasts over 150 trending products that you can add your design to. When it comes to unique items you could sell, Gooten allows you to add custom designs to puzzles, kitchen accessories like tablecloths and tea towels, wall calendars, stickers, magic mugs, and so much more.

Gooten integrates with ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Etsy, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Though its preferred platform is Bigcommerce.

You can also use Gooten as a learning hub, and learn from their webinars, blog posts, ebooks, and other content on how to succeed in e-commerce.

3. Printify

Print on demand companies like Printify have countless products ready to ship with a custom design you made from Creative Market or Photoshop. Printify, specifically, has a collection of over 500 print-on-demand products.

You’ll find unique products, such as car seat covers, teddy bears, airpod cases, shower curtains, handbags, lamps, suitcases, and hundreds of other products. You can add any design on these items to make them a one-of-a-kind piece your customers want to buy.

You can use a mockup generator on Printify to see how the design looks on the product. Doing this will help you understand if you need to alter or make changes to your website in any way.

Printify integrates with eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and many other platforms to make designing and selling your products easier. Large enterprises also benefit from having branded customer support when using Printify so you can outsource customer support to the manufacturer who has better insight into issues.

4. Custom Cat

Custom Cat is a print-on-demand company you can use to design your own products. While most of their items are in the apparel space, they also offer housewares and accessories. Items like pillows, drinkware, blankets, towels, bags, and flip flops are among some of their unique POD products they offer.

Custom Cat integrates with traditional ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

When you create products, you can choose to order a sample of every item you create. You can then use the sample to create unique photos and videos with them for your online store and social media.

You can sell your products internationally to over 30 countries, and many of them include full tracking.

One of the benefits of Custom Cat is that fulfillment typically takes about a day and a half so that products could get to your customer much quicker.

5. TeeLaunch

Print-on-demand companies like TeeLaunch surprisingly offer much more than t-shirts despite the name. While you’ll still find plenty of t-shirts, tank tops, and other apparel on this platform. Their whole collection of products boasts some gems that could be great additions for your online store. You can offer print-on-demand balloons, car chargers, mats, cutting boards, plates and bowls, backpacks, headphones, die-cut metal signs, wall tapestries, and more. With over 300 products, you’ll likely find a few great items to add to your Shopify store.

This print-on-demand company integrates with Shopify and Etsy.

6. Redbubble

Redbubble isn’t a traditional print-on-demand company. Instead of owning your own website, you can sell your unique products on Redbubble’s website. One of the benefits of doing this is that you don’t need to pay for hosting or marketing. Redbubble will market your products for you. However, you’ll need to create a design that stands out on the marketplace so that people will want to snatch up your products because it can be more competitive.

You can design dresses, leggings, kid’s clothing, scarves, tech accessories, stationery, and so much more. Their product collection includes over 70 different items.

Once you upload your design, you can optimize your title to maximize views by optimizing it for search engines. You can then benefit from Redbubble’s existing audience to draw visitors to their site, when someone buys your product, they’ll ship it to them themselves. And finally, you get paid. As your products grow in popularity, you can have items featured under Gifts or your own artist page.

7. Society6

Similar to Redbubble, Society6 allows artists to sell unique products that they sell to customers. You won’t need to create your own online store, your audience will be Society6’s website visitors. While the platform specializes in wall art, they’ve expanded their product line beyond that to include furniture, comforters, office supplies, sunglasses, and more.

Your designs can get more visibility if your work gets included in a featured collection, such as “yoga and mindfulness” or “Black History Month.” You can also rise to the top by becoming a featured artist by becoming a best-seller, ending up on a curated list, and so on. New artists also get featured so you can get an early boost when you sign up.

8. Cafe Press

Print-on-demand companies like CafePress allow you to sell on their platform. All you need to do is design your product, they’ll market it for you, and you earn money. Your designs will need to be original as they do monitor for infringement, though.

Cafe Press’ website is divided into multiple categories that allow you to help increase your visibility in their searches. People can search by product, interests, pop culture shows like Star Trek and Peanuts, who the recipient is such as gifts for mom, and by occasion.

There are dozens of products you can add your design to, such as clothing, accessories, stationery, phone cases, stickers, home decor, drinkware, and much more.

9. Zazzle

Zazzle is another print-on-demand company that allows you to sell to their website visitors. They have an extensive collection of products you can add your designs to. For example, you can sell wedding invitations, party supplies, business supplies such as posters or promotional supplies, phone grips, flash drives, baby blankets, and seasonal gifts.

Zazzle has collections for gift guides, trending products, and much more that you can optimize your designs for.

If you’re a designer in the wedding or business niches, Zazzle could be a good option for you as that’s their area of speciality. Wedding, bridal and baby shower invitations tend to be one of the most popular items you could sell on the platform. Though, their product collections are quite extensive if you plan on expanding into other verticals.

10. Sellfy

If you’re looking for print-on-demand companies that allow you to have your own website, look no further than Sellfy. Using this print-on-demand company, you can sell products ranging from physical to digital goods all from one convenient website. You could charge monthly subscriptions and allow customers to stream videos without worrying about piracy.

Sellfy integrates with YouTube, Wix, WordPress, Facebook, and more. You can sell products on any platform using a link or Buy Button.

Their product collection includes t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and hats.

11. Spreadshirt

Independent designers looking for a print-on-demand company that acts as a marketplace can turn to Spreadshirt. You can add your design to products, such as clothing, accessories, stuffed animals, embroidered items, phone cases, mouse pads, and much more.

The website is categorized into collections, such as birthday gfits, baby gifts, graduation, wedding, and much more. Optimizing your designs for popular collections can help you get the most visibility for your products. By producing many items for a single collection, your likelihood of finding success increases.

If you’re not design savvy but are looking to create products that you can sell on your business, you can even invest in the design services that Spreadshirt offers. This will likely work well if you’re looking to create business swag or for personal use, though.

12. Teehatch

Teehatch is a Canadian print-on-demand company for those looking for a cheaper alternative instead of paying in USD. Their product collection includes trending products, such as face masks, t-shirts, polos, long-sleeved shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, pullovers, sweatpants, jackets, and tank tops. They also sell hats, tote bags, and aprons.

They’ll ship the products out to your customers for you. That means, all you need to do is design and market your products to generate sales for your online store and business. Right now, the tool only integrates with Shopify.

13. Printeez

Print-on-demand companies like Printeez offer a wide-collection of products that you can add your custom designs to. Popular products include t-shirts, leggings, jackets, tote bags, caps, and beanies among others. You can choose between screen, embroidery, and digital printing for your products.

Unlike other print-on-demand companies, Printeez offers add-ons, such as hang tags, hem tags, or sizing stickers in case you’re planning on selling these items in a retail store. You could also add inside tags for clothing. Folding and bagging services are also available for an additional fee.

Like other print-on-demand companies, fulfillment is available so Printeez will ship your items directly to your customers, retail store, or to your business. So as long as you’ve got the design covered and can handle marketing and customer support, Printeez will cover the manufacturing and fulfillment of your business.

Conclusion

After comparing the best print-on-demand companies, you might notice that many offer unique products you can’t find anywhere else. You could use a combination of different services as most POD companies don’t charge monthly subscriptions. Using their individual product fees, you can add unique products from multiple sites to create a comprehensive collection of products. You could build an everything store with unique designs no one can find anywhere else. So, which print-on-demand companies are you excited to work with this year? Let us know in the comments!

The post 13 Best Print On Demand Companies for Your Online Store in 2022 appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

Product Photography: The Ultimate DIY Guide in 2022

Paula Jakubik — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 16:00:32 +0000

Your product photography is by far one of the most important things for your ecommerce store. After all, visitors to your store can’t see, touch or smell your products in person, so it’s helps customers know what they’re getting. In this post, we’ll show you how to set up your very own DIY studio and shoot your own product photos. You’ll also learn some product photography tips on how to optimize your product images for ecommerce so that you can increase your online sales.

Part 1: How to Shoot Product Photos

Understand Your Camera’s Capabilities

There’s no denying that DSLRs are capable of taking better photos than smartphones. However, smartphone cameras are getting better and better, and the trick to great product photography is actually in the setup. You can take high quality, professional-looking product shots on a smartphone. That being said, it’s important to understand what your camera is capable of so that you can use it to its full potential.

DSLR PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY

If you’ve invested in a DSLR, then you should definitely make the most of it and shoot manual. Start by getting familiar with the “exposure triangle”—aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. These three elements will determine how light or dark your image is, and the idea is to find the perfect combination for your setup and product.

The aperture is the opening in the lens that determines how much light your camera will let in, and it’s measured in f-stops. It’s pretty straightforward—larger openings allow more light to pass through the lens and subsequently produce a brighter image. The confusing part is that the larger the f-stop number, the smaller the aperture.

(Source)

So, why can’t we just use the aperture to control the brightness of the photo? The aperture also determines the depth of field, or in other words how much of the product is in focus. A small aperture will capture everything in the frame, whereas a large aperture is likely to leave the back of the product blurry. If you look at the two photos below, they were taken with apertures of f-1.8 and f/10 respectively.

The trick is to find an aperture large enough to produce a well-lit photo, but small enough to capture the entire product clearly. Start with f/8 or f/10 and work your way up/down from there.

The shutter speed is the amount of time the opening in the lens is open for. Outside of product photography, shutter speed is altered in order to determine the way a moving object appears in the photo. However, for product photography purposes, it’s important to use a slow shutter speed to allow for a smaller aperture. Once you’re happy with your aperture setting (i.e. the entire product is in focus), you should adjust the shutter speed until you get the brightness level you need.

The last element of the trio is the ISO, which is your camera’s sensitivity to light. Increasing the ISO will allow you to take photos when the lighting conditions aren’t great, however, this does decrease the quality of the photo. You should never exceed 400 as you’ll start getting some camera noise. If you can’t take a well-lit photo under 400, your light sources aren’t bright enough. Aim to use natural lighting where possible.

SMARTPHONE PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY

If you’re using a smartphone, avoid using any pre-defined filters and frames and don’t touch the digital zoom, which actually just crops the photo as you shoot. All of this will decrease the quality of the photo, so save these kinds of adjustments for the image production stage.

Take advantage of the auto-focus and tap on the product prior to taking the photo. There are also a number of iOS and Android apps that allow you to control some of the manual settings (though the results won’t be the same as using a DSLR).

And regardless of whether you’re using a DSLR or a smartphone, never use the in-built flash. If you know what you’re doing, you can use an external flash. But generally speaking, if your product is too dark, this is a sign that you’re using insufficient lighting.

Also, given the popularity of filters, keep in mind that this can change the color of how the product is perceived, which can result in refunds if the product doesn’t match what the image looks like. So avoid altering the colors of your product photos, so customers are given a realistic picture of what they’ll be getting.

Steady Your Camera

Even if you have the steadiest hands IN THE WORLD, always use a tripod or a smartphone mount. This will ensure that you have track-sharp images, even if you’re working with a slow shutter speed.

A fool-proof method of capturing clear and crisp photos is to use a tripod or mount and set a timer on your camera. When you press down on the shutter, or even lightly tap the capture button on your smartphone’s touchscreen, you apply downward/forward pressure to the camera—setting a timer will allow your camera/smartphone to re-stabilize. I like to use a 2-second timer because I find that it gives my camera just enough time to return to a steady position (and I’m too impatient to sit through the 10-second timer beeps).

Set Up a White Backdrop

When it comes to product photography, the key to a good setup is to shoot against a white backdrop. The white backdrop will reflect white light back onto your product and prevent any color spills. It’ll also ensure that your camera’s white balance calibration is on point, which will result in accurate colors.

Using a sweep is definitely the way to go, which is just a backdrop that seamlessly transitions from the vertical to the horizontal surface. For smaller products, definitely opt for a shooting table and do tabletop photography; it’ll give you more flexibility with how you position the backdrop in relation to the light source because of how portable it is. Buy a shooting table online or make your own with an old table, some scrap wood, a hammer and nails, spring clamps, and the sweep itself. I like to use white wrapping paper as my sweep because it’s smooth and reflective, but you can use anything you have on hand.

For larger products, it gets a little trickier. If you’re going to shoot frequently, buying a sweep with a stand will make your life a lot easier. If it’s a one-off shoot, grab an old sheet and find something to drape it over. I’ve used a DVD rack before!

Shoot Near a Window

Unless you know what you’re doing, avoid using artificial light sources. They require a lot of skill and expertise to use and it’s not worth the time or money if you’re just starting out.

Natural lighting is the way to go, just make sure you use it indirectly. Taking photos by a window and in a well-lit room tends to work best. In terms of positioning, the window should be to the left or right of the product, never behind or facing the camera. Natural light makes set up much easier as you don’t need to set up as much stuff.

When pairing natural light with a diffuser, you can create some beautiful product photography.

If you find that the lighting is too intense, you can diffuse it by covering the window with a white curtain/sheet or taping over it with white paper. You can also buy a diffuser for product photography online.

It’s also important to be prepared and get through the shoot as quickly as possible. The color and intensity of natural light changes throughout the day, so for consistent images, you need to be organized and work fast. Having an extra pair of hands will definitely help!

If natural light is your go to lighting source, aim to take all product photos at the same time every day, so your photos have a consistent look on your online store. However, you can edit your images in post production to help with a consistent branding.

Grab a Reflector

The only problem with shooting by a window is that the light will only hit the product on one side. To avoid harsh shadows and evenly distribute light across the product, you should use a fill light or a reflector. You can buy a reflector or create your own fill light with a white piece of card. Covering the card with aluminum foil will make it extra reflective.

You should place the reflector on the other side of the product, opposite the window. You’ll just need to play around with the angle of it to find what works best for your product and setup.

Part 2: How to Optimize Your Product Photos for Ecommerce

Remove the Background

A white background will really make your images POP. It’ll draw attention to the product and give the image a clean, professional look. Furthermore, white doesn’t clash with any other color, so you can reuse this same shot regardless of the website theme or platform design.

In post production, you’ll want to remove backgrounds for your images to maintain a consistent look on your professional product photography. The most accurate way of removing the background is to use the pen tool in Adobe Photoshop. It’s not the only way; there are a number of background removal tools online and you can try using the magic wand and quick selection tools in Photoshop too, but you’re unlikely to get a clean cut around the product.

To use the pen tool, select the pen tool and mark an anchor point on the edge of your product. The idea is to work your way around the product, creating what’s called a “clipping path” until you get to the first point and complete the path.

If you’re new to the pen tool, you’ll quickly realize that the tricky part is when the edge of the product isn’t straight. If you click and hold, you’ll see these two funny lines with dots at the end appear; these are called “bezier handles” and can be used to manipulate the curve of the line. You’ll have to play around with the pen tool yourself to get the hang of how they work.

Once you’ve completed the path, click “Selection” at the top and hit enter. You’ll see that the product has been selected.

Swap to the selection tool, right-click the selected area and click “Layer via Cut,” which will separate the background and product onto two separate layers. Delete the background layer and you’ll have the product on a transparent background (represented by grey and white checkers). If you’d like a white background, simply add a new layer and fill it in with white.

Although the results are amazing, unfortunately, background removal does take time and it is quite a fiddly process, particularly when it comes to more intricate and detailed products such as jewelry. It’s a good idea to outsourcing the editing so that you (or your graphic designer) can spend time on more growth-related tasks.

For those looking for budget ways to remove backgrounds, you can find Shopify Apps like Pixc which will remove backgrounds. However, if you’re looking to do it yourself affordably, you can find a background removal tool on Canva’s Pro Plan. All it takes is a quick one click button. The technology has come a long way, making it possible without Photoshop.

Keep the Editing Simple

There’s nothing more annoying than receiving your online purchases and discovering that they’re nothing like what you imagined. You’d probably return the item and never shop on that store again. Your product photography and post production editing needs to mirror what the product actually looks like.

Adjust the color balance of the photo to ensure that the colors in the photo match those in real life, and only tweak the brightness and contrast (or the levels if you’re Photoshop savvy) to give it a more professional product photography look.

Note: Learn more great ways to edit your product photography for your ecommerce store with our Step-by-Step Photoshop Tutorials for Ecommerce article and create perfect product pages with our guide to Product Page Design!

Apply a Template

Creating a product image template is an easy and efficient way to make your product images look consistent. Start by choosing a size you’ll use across your ecommerce store—anywhere between 1200px and 1600px on the longest side is ideal because it’s large enough for an effective zoom function and to use across social media.

Note that the size you choose will be applied to all your product images, so you should think about the shape of your product when you’re choosing your dimensions. If your products are longer vertically, a portrait template might be better. Similarly, if you have really wide products, a landscape template will help you reduce the unnecessary amount of space at the top and bottom.

Note: If your products are all different shapes and sizes, stick to a square template.

The easiest way to create a template is to create a blank file in Adobe Photoshop and to resize it to the dimensions you want. Use guides to identify the center-point by creating a vertical and horizontal line at 50%, which will help you position your products later.

Your products should take up around 90% of the canvas, so it’s also good to create equal guidelines around the edges. When you drag each individual product into the canvas, resize it until either the top and bottom or left and right sides of the product touch the guides.

Doing so will allow you to align your products, which is a lot more noticeable when they’re all next to each other on a white background. If you look at the two rows of product images below, it’s easy to see that the first row has been created without a template; the shirts are all different sizes within their own canvases. This is likely to happen when you resize your products by eye. On the other hand, it’s clear that the products in the bottom row were resized using a template, as the top and bottom of each shirt is aligned.

Reduce the File Size

As can be expected, large images take longer to load. When I say large, I’m referring to file size rather than the dimensions of an image, i.e. the value in KB, MB, GB, etc. Seeing as 47% of users expect a webpage to load in under 2 seconds, and 40% will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load, it’s important that your images are small enough to ensure a speedy site.

It’s possible to reduce the file size without significantly reducing the quality of your images. My favorite method of reducing file size without significantly reducing the quality of the image is to use Photoshop’s “Save for Web” function. Open your image in Photoshop and go to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)… A window will appear which will allow you to choose your export quality. I find that a quality of 60 works best because it drops the file size down to below a megabyte and there’s no noticeable difference in quality.

Note: ImageOptim (Free) is a great little app that will further compress your images just by dragging and dropping them on the ImageOptim application icon. It will re-save the file and can save you another 20-40% in file size on average.

If you take a look at the photos below, the left shot of the earrings was saved as a regular JPEG image, with the quality level set to 12 or “Maximum.” The shot on the right is an exported web JPEG, where the quality level was set to 60 or “High.” The difference between the two is barely noticeable; the right is simply a little less saturated in terms of color. Learn more about optimizing images for the web in this step-by-step article (that also includes a video walkthrough!).

A Few More Product Photography Tips

1. Take A lot of Product Photos

Product photography requires multiple angles and photos to help people clearly see the product they want to order. Taking photos of a product’s sheerness in clothing will help reduce unnecessary refunds. Every product has it’s quirks. It’s important to capture the many sides of a product, so customers aren’t surprised when it finally arrives. Taking multiple product photos will also help you find the best photo to use to best represent the product. Plus, if you aren’t hosting video on the product page, you’ll want product photos of the sides and back.

2. Take Lifestyle Shots

Depending on the product, lifestyle photos might be a great addition for your collection. It could work well for fashion, beauty, or even outdoors products. When it isn’t clear what exactly a product is, a lifestyle shot can help people see an item being used to better understand its purpose. Alternatively, lifestyle shots can be used on social media to promote the product on your website. So while you don’t need to use lifestyle shots for your online store, you might use it to promote the product visually in other marketing channels.

3. Group Other Products

While this doesn’t work for all product photos, in some niches like fashion, combining other products in a single photo can help with a buying decision. Taking photos of a two-piece outfit, with footwear, and jewelry can help you sell more products on your online store. It can also create a better visual appearance seeing an entire look put together, so that people want to add all those items to their cart. Plus, great photos aren’t always about a singular product. Sometimes, mixing and matching other products together can create high quality images that push sales, which is what you want your product photos to do anyway.

4. Avoid Mixing Lighting Types

If you’re using artificial product photography lighting, you won’t want any sunlight in the photo. Mixing lighting types can create an unappealing product photo. So choose: natural or artificial light. If you use artificial light, take your photos in a dark room. If you use sunlight, turn off artificial lighting. It’ll just make photo editing that much easier.

5. Show Scale

One of the challenges of shopping online is that you can’t see an item in person. Ultimately, showing an item’s scale can be a great way to accurately represent your product. You don’t need a fancy product photography setup to do this. Even having a ruler or common object in the photo to show the item’s size can help people understand how big or small the item truly is. Don’t do photo editing that tricks people into thinking something is bigger or smaller than it is. It’ll only result in refunds. Be as transparent as possible for your product photography.

Product Photography Conclusion

So what are you waiting for? Grab your camera, set up your studio, and snap away! Although optimizing your product photos for ecommerce may seem like a lot of extra work, the results are worth it!

Take the time to get them right, because amazing photos will make your ecommerce store look a lot more professional and you’ll also be able to use them across social media to drive traffic to your store. Plus, once you get into a routine, you’ll be pumping out retail-ready product images in no time. Once you master the art of taking great product photography, take the next step and write great product descriptions, too!

The post Product Photography: The Ultimate DIY Guide in 2022 appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

How to Build Backlinks: 20 Ways to Get Backlinks to Your Store

Richard Lazazzera — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 16:00:57 +0000

Backlinks are an essential part of a well put together SEO strategy and learning how to get backlinks can help boost your website’s traffic in a variety of ways. As an essential part of SEO strategy, building backlinks is a mandatory task for every website owner who’s looking to build and maintain organic traffic to their website over time. The most difficult and time-consuming part of getting backlinks is figuring out how to get backlinks and doing so in a way that’s acceptable by search engine standards (AKA: Whitehat techniques). As backlinks need to come from sources outside of your own website, convincing other website owners to link back to your site in a way that’s honest and mutually beneficial can be tricky. In this post, we’ll discuss how to link building techniques and strategies for more linkbait content.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one website to another website.

For example: In one of our previous articles, a Shopify Review, our opening sentence reads:

“It’s been long overdue that we post a Shopify review on A Better Lemonade Stand.”

In that sentence, we included a link to Shopify, the business that we’re making reference to, and that’s a backlink for Shopify.

Any link from another website to yours is considered a backlink to your site. Any link on your website to another page on your website is called an internal link. As a website, your goal is to get quality (more on that soon) backlinks from other websites because it increases your website value, so you increase your ranking position in search results.

Why Backlinks are Important

Backlinks are important because search engines read them as a way of websites vouching for one another which helps to improve the rank and domain authority (think of this as credibility) of the linked site. However, these days, site owners practice link building with sites in relevant industries because relevancy is an important factor. So, it’s not as simple as getting links from any site.

In the example mentioned above, when we’re linking out to Shopify from A Better Lemonade Stand, Google reads that and come to the conclusion that:

Shopify is likely a reputable website because A Better Lemonade Stand is linking out to them, and;
A Better Lemonade Stand is likely in the same industry as Shopify.

Backlinks are recognized by search engines as a vote of confidence and the more reputable websites that link back to your own website, the more reputable it makes your website seem to search engines by association. To simplify this, a link from CNN is seen is much more credible and valuable than a link from Joe’s random thought blog that he started 2 weeks ago.

When you have other websites with high domain authority vouching for your website it helps to improve your organic search engine ranking, you get indexed faster and you also get direct referral traffic from websites that are relevant to yours which means targeted traffic gets passed on to you and you’ll experience a lower bounce rate.

How Backlinks are Measured

That being said, different websites are ranked differently in a variety of ways when it comes to reputation, and that, amongst other variables, affects how backlinks are measured.

No backlinks are created equally. They depend on a variety of ranking factors that are, for the most part, speculated.

DOMAIN & PAGE STRENGTH

Website authority can be measured in two different ways:

The overall strength of the domain
The strength of the URL

This means that, for example, abetterlemonadestand.com has its own rank of website authority as one entire domain, whilst abetterlemonadestand.com/blog (or this particular blog post) will have an independent authority that’s connected to the domain but separate still because it is its own page.

Bonus: To better understand domain and page authority, check out this free website and page authority checker. To use it, just enter some of your favorite websites to see what their domain and page scores are.

NOFOLLOW & DOFOLLOW LINKS

Backlinks can also be measured by being either nofollow and dofollow links.

Nofollow links are when a website links to another but it doesn’t boost the external website’s page rank or change it’s placement in search results. Nofollow links are often used by websites if they’re linking to an unverified source for any reason, don’t want to be associated to the page they’re linking out to, or in the case of paid sponsorships, as per Google’s advertising guidelines, they require those links to be nofollow.
Dofollow links exist when one website links to another one and they want search engines to consider that link as a vote of confidence for the website they’re linking out to. Dofollow links are common when websites or blogs are linking out to other websites or blogs and see no detriment in being associated with that website in the eyes of the search engine.

Note: Generally most links are DoFollow links unless the author of a website, post, or page specifically decides to make a link or set of links NoFollow. NoFollow links are identified by adding the nofollow attribute to the link code.

For example:

A DoFollow link will look like this: https://www.shopify.com”>Shopify
A NoFollow link will look like this: https://www.shopify.com” rel=”nofollow”>Shopify

One important exception to note is easily self-attainable backlinks from self-posting sites/forums and social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, or comment sections of blogs) are almost always NoFollow.

Bonus: To get a better idea of which links around the web are DoFollow vs. NoFollow, download the NoFollow for Chrome extension. It will highlight all links and show you which ones are DoFollow and which ones aren’t.

LINK PLACEMENT

Link placement is also thought to play a role in how search engines rank backlink authority. If a link is included in the context of written content on the page of a website it’s thought that search engines place more emphasis on it because it’s more likely to be relevant to the content of the website overall and is likely to be clicked more than links that are placed elsewhere on a webpage such as in the footers or sidebars.

ANCHOR TEXT

What words the link is linked to on a page is also thought to be an indicator to search engines of how relevant it is, this is known as Anchor Text. For example, anchor text is the words where the link is tethered to. For search engines, these words are indicative that they’re relevant to the content and likely to be clicked.

As another example, in the yellow bonus section above we purposely linked to a free website and page authority checker and specifically chose the words that were linked. Google and other search engines read and register the words that are linked (anchor text) and these words help search engines better understand what the page or website you’re linking to is about and what it should rank for in search engine results. By specifically linking the descriptive words like “free website and page authority checker,” we have provided that website with a quality backlink that helps search engines better understand what they are and what they do, and we help that website rank higher for some keywords that are important to them and to other people finding them.

LINK RELEVANCY

Finally, link relevancy also plays a role in determining the strength of a backlink. Depending on several factors that search engines are well equipped to measure such as anchor text, other outbound links, keywords, H-Tags, the context surrounding the links and more, each of those helps determine whether a link is relevant to the overall content of the page and therefore whether the backlink is relevant or not.

Search engines place an emphasis on rewarding websites with authority via backlinks carefully and measure the relevancy of links in a variety of different ways to ensure that the backlinks are authentic and not spammy to encourage well-constructed content by websites that are relevant and helpful to searchers so they find what they’re looking for. Search engines reward websites that meet their demand with higher domain and URL authority as well as relevant organic traffic.

Low-Quality Links & Spam

Acquiring links from websites or web pages that have been deemed by search engines to have low domain strength because they’re any combination of being low-quality sources, inappropriate, or spam can result in penalizing your own website. It’s important to not fall into the trap of thinking that more backlinks from more sourcing all pointing back to your website will increase your website’s rank authority in the eyes of search engines. It’s the quality of backlinks that counts more than the quantity. Aim to get links from authoritative sites that are relevant to your own in terms of subject matter and search engines will reward you with increased search traffic over time.

How to Get Backlinks

Now that you have a background on what backlinks are, why they’re important, and how they’re measured by search engines, let’s dive into the ways you can build backlinks for your own website.

1. Reddit Social Proof Method

For those who haven’t already started using the forum Reddit for your business, now is the perfect time to start getting acquainted with it. It’s a very particular kind of forum with savvy users, so if you’re unfamiliar with their content policy, what “subreddits” are and proper “Reddiquette”, get familiar with it before you start using these next two methods to build backlinks

The purpose of this method is to give value, get upvotes, and then replace the content of the socially-proofed post with a link to your site.

Here’s how to perform it:

Create a remarkable piece of content (more on that in our Content Strategy article).
Find the subreddit within Reddit that best suits the niche you’re trying to target (make sure to thoroughly search through all the different subs to find the right one (or ones) that is relevant to your content. Relevancy is key as Redditors don’t appreciate spam and this method won’t work if the right niche of people aren’t engaged with the post).
Create a post to that subreddit following that sub’s community guidelines (this step of the process is crucial. You have to approach your post on the subreddit very carefully. You cannot just post a link to your content and expect the subscribers of that sub to see the value in it, you have to give value first).
Whilst creating the post, include all the valuable information you discuss in the remarkable piece of content you created. Your goal is to tell people the details you discuss in your piece content, why it’s interesting and why it’s relevant to them, and then, after you provide a thorough few paragraphs of information and if the community guidelines permit it, include a link to your piece of content and let users know they can click on that link for the full article.
Once you’ve created that post, publish it to the subreddit.
Once the post has been up for several hours and it’s generated a significant amount of upvotes and comments, edit the original message of your post to just include the link to your piece of content so that users will then have to click through to your web page to view the content. This only works if you’ve generated a significant amount of upvotes and comments.

Links on Reddit start off as nofollow links and as we discussed earlier in this article, that means that there is no link juice transferring over from Reddit to any outgoing links, unless, and this is the important part, a certain amount of upvotes are achieved and then those links become dofollow. The actual number of upvotes isn’t public knowledge, but through educational speculation and testing, it’s widely believed that this theory is true. Getting a dofollow backlink from Reddit is hugely beneficial as their rank and domain authority is very high.

Test out this backlink building method for yourself but remember not to be spammy on Reddit, follow the community guidelines, give value and get social proof first then leave a link to your piece of content and hopefully get some high-value link juice and referral traffic.

Example: Below is an example screenshot of the /r/entrepreneur subreddit. You can see from the highlighted link colors which ones are DoFollow (Purple) and which ones are NoFollow (Red).

2. Create Remarkable Content

If you post remarkable content consistently that’s interesting, engaging, valuable, and helpful, you’ll get high-value websites linking out to you organically without having to ask for a backlink.

This is a difficult method because it takes a lot of time to produce helpful and valuable content consistently and to sustain it over a long period of time. Even if you publish high-value content on your website from day one it’s going to take a while for others to take notice of your effort and in the meantime, it’s easy to get discouraged due to lack of an engaged audience. The difficult part is providing value on a consistent basis over a long enough time period to generate an engaged audience that supports your efforts. Once you reach that point you’ll start to see backlinks from other high-value sources start to come in and that’s when you reap the rewards of the work you put in creating remarkable content from day one.

Until then, you just have to create content that’s interesting, engaging, and helpful, promote it via every possible method, and work on every other link building method.

Bonus: For more on how to create remarkable content, check out our content strategy blog post where we share all our secrets with you.

3. Create Linkbait Content

Link building works best when you don’t need to do a lot of upfront work to get it. A simple hack to get quality backlinks to your site is to create linkbait content. For example, statistics and studies are some of the most linked to pieces of content. By creating content around industry stats for your niche, you can have more people linking out to your content. Depending on your industry, you can also collaborate with a local university or college to do a study in your industry so people link out to your content.

Alternatively, you can also create custom linkable images like infographics with stats compiled. That way, if the research isn’t your own you can include it with a source section on the bottom of the page but still benefit from quality backlinks while ensuring the source gets credit.

4. Get a Link from Your Manufacturer/Wholesaler/Supplier

Depending on your manufacturer, this may be an easy method to build a backlink. Basically, you want to reach out to the manufacturer who you source your products from and ask that they link you as a retailer of their products on their website, or link you as a business that they work with. Manufacturers are likely to have aged domains which are thought to be a high ranking factor by search engines. The older the domain the more authority it keeps.

The difficulty of this method is middle of the range because your manufacturer may not have a place for this kind of link on their website or they simply may not want to link out to you. If your manufacturer is open to the idea it’s an easy link to get but if not, you’re out of luck.

Beyond the difficulty of this method, the value of this backlink also lays in the middle of the range. It won’t be a low-value or spammy backlink by any means, but it also might not give you super high-quality link juice like you would be getting from a high-authority domain. That being said, if you can get your manufacturer to link out to you then it’s relatively easy to acquire and it’s one more backlink than you had before.

Before you reach out to your manufacturer make sure you have a reputable-looking website with some valuable content on it (like we discussed in the previous method) so the manufacturer is more likely to link out to you. They want to make sure they’re linking out to a reputable website as well so make sure you look like one.

Example: Below is an example of Beardbrand’s list of online resellers. When you sell other branded products, it’s usually in the best interest of the supplier or manufacturer to link to you, providing your store with a valuable backlink.

5. Interview Authorities in Your Niche

Seek out “authorities” in your niche, whether they be bloggers, influencers, speakers, entrepreneurs, creators, etc. and interview them. Post the content to your website and reach out to whomever you interviewed and let them know about the content you created.

More often than not the person will share your content, whether it’s on social media or, if you’re lucky, on their own website, and you’ll generate a backlink from it. People love it when they get noticed, even if it’s by a smaller player in their niche, so you will likely be recognized.

The trick with this method is to be persistent in every way. Persistently pursue influencers when you’re reaching out to interview them and persistently pursue influencers when you’re reaching out to share your content with them. It’s likely that they have a lot of emails coming in at any given time, so persistently follow up with them. The more eager you seem the more likely they will be to engage with you. Always be polite, don’t get upset or offended if they aren’t getting back to you, but do be persistent.

If they have a press page also ask to be featured on there as you’ll get a prominent backlink that is likely to have high authority. Build a relationship with the person you interview, generate some good content, and then work on getting the backlink.

6. Republish Old Content

Don’t let great content that you’ve created in the past go to waste. There are some websites where you can syndicate content which means that articles that you’ve published on your own website can be re-published on other websites relevant to your niche that have a much larger and diverse following than your own website. This enables you to get your content out in front of a larger audience and the original source of the content (your website) will get a link back to acknowledge where it was originally published.

Well known websites where you can syndicate your content include:

While it’s commonly thought that content syndication can lead to penalization from search engines for publishing duplicate content, that isn’t the case because there will be a link back to the original piece of content acknowledging its origin. Oftentimes the original creator of the content will also add a new introduction or title to the content as a means to differentiate it from the original post, but that’s optional.

Look for high-quality sites you can syndicate your content to (like the ones we mentioned above) so that you get valuable link juice from an authoritative domain. This method is also likely to generate social shares and put your content in front of an audience that’s interested in your niche so you’ll be gaining valuable referral traffic as well.

Bonus: For an additional 46 publications that accept republished content along with the appropriate contact info, please see this list, originally curated by the good folks at Sumo.

7. Reach out to media sources

You can get a lot of high quality backlinks by reaching out to the media. Keep in mind that while media sites have high domain authority, most of the time they aren’t relevant. So don’t focus on this strategy exclusively to ensure that you have a well-rounded backlink profile.

You can build links using sites like Help A Reporter Out (HARO). This tool will send you emails three times a day (morning, noon, evening) with various reporters reaching out for sources for their articles. Not all pitches are accepted, so aim to put a unique spin to your response.

Alternatively, you can also reach out to niche magazines to promote your blog, business, or app for a potential feature. Not only will this help you get a backlink but it might also help you generate more sales too.

8. Guest Posting

One of the most authentic ways to build a backlink is to guest post on someone else’s blog and earn a link back to your website in the byline or add some relevant contextual links to your website throughout the piece of content. When you guest post on someone else’s website you’re able to showcase your expertise in front of a new audience and control which pieces of your own context you link out to. It’s also a mutually beneficial relationship for you and the website host as you provide them with valuable content and they provide you with a quality backlink.

Securing guest post assignments isn’t always easy and you’ll likely have to start small and build a portfolio before you earn guest posts on larger blogs. Your best strategy is to be persistent, polite, eager, and let the website hosts know what value you have to offer. Always lead with what value you have to offer them, not with what you’re hoping to get out of it as they’ll be much more receptive to your guest posting pitch if they see that you genuinely have value to give and want to share it with their audience.

If you plan to reach out to other websites to guest post for them make sure your own site has valuable content already published on it so they have some way to gauge whether you’d be a good fit for their audience or not. Make sure your website looks professional and like you would fit into their niche market. Don’t forget to peruse their website and see if they have any guest post requirements or any particulars your guest post would need to meet such as a specific word count or formatting.

9. Promote on social media

Those wondering how to get backlinks should consider promoting their website on social media despite some of the no-follow links pointing back at your site. Link building on social media means that you’re guaranteed a link and might also get some decent website traffic back.

If you’re promoting blog content, the two easiest social platforms to promote links on are Pinterest and Quora. The cool thing about Pinterest is that it’s a search-based image site for links. You can use a keyword research tool to find the site content with the most search volume and start posting those links on Pinterest first. While you won’t get high quality backlinks from it due to no-follow, you can generate a lot of traffic back to your site. Plus, when something goes viral on Pinterest, it typically ranks higher in search results too. So double win.

Quora is also pretty laid back about including external links to your site on their platform, as long as your response is at least a few of paragraphs long. Link building strategies centered around social media tend to be beneficial for traffic too, so it’s an additional bonus to link building.

10. Broken link outreach

Using SEO tools, you can find websites with broken links based on keywords. For example, say you own a fitness app, you might search for articles that link to the “best fitness apps” and scrape a tool to find broken links in the article. Then, you reach out to those sites and tell them that you found a broken link on their website and your site could replace it. This is a link building strategy that’s really effective for cold, outreach emails.

You can also use a target keyword for other pages that your article has. For example, if someone links to a study that has a broken link, you might promote one of your statistics webpages with a newer updated link they can replace it with. You don’t need to do a Google search to find this information, but you can also do it manually if you can’t find free tools that do this.

11. Product Reviews

If you have a certain product you’d like to promote to an audience, getting a blogger, influencer or another website to publish a review of your product is a valuable way to not only have your product featured in front of an audience that’s relevant to your niche, but a great way to get a contextual backlink as well.

As per search engine ranking systems, product reviews garner high ranking backlink authority because they fulfill many of the high-value ranking requirements such as optimal link placement (within the post itself, not in a sidebar or footer) and link relevancy (within a relevant niche). If it is a sponsored product review, which depending on the website you work with they may only accept sponsored product reviews, as per Google guidelines, the link will have to be a nofollow link as opposed to a dofollow link, which isn’t ideal for a backlink but is still thought to provide some ranking power.

Make sure you reach out to reputable websites for product reviews, and as we recommended with guest posting you may have to start with being featured on smaller websites before you’re able to get onto more popular ones. Approach potential product reviewers with some fact-based data of your product such as how many units you’ve sold, what your customer/market demographics are or how much revenue you’ve earned so you can give reviewers a way to gauge the demand of your product or what target market would be interested in it. Always lead with what value you have to offer the reviewer, be persistent, polite, eager, have a valuable product with some reputable reviews or data backing it up, find reviewers that serve a relevant niche to yours, and have your own professional looking website.

Product Review Sites:

12. Try influencer marketing

Every company has potential influencers in it. It could be your content creator, social media team, founder, or even product person. By using the spokespeople in your company, you can get backlinks from making statements and being included in expert round-ups.

Those active on social platforms like LinkedIn or on your website’s blog, could easily be quoted by another website, with a backlink included to their personal website or workplace. You can get more links by being active online and creating quotable content. If someone links to your social media instead, you can look up your brand mentions and ask for a link to your website instead.

13. Reach out to “Resource” pages

Many popular websites have resource pages. In the ecommerce community, many people refer to them as “partner” pages. By looking up listicles of popular blogs, websites, or even Shopify Apps, you’ll find countless resource pages.

You can then reach out to those companies who have set them up and ask to be included. This is an easy way to get a backlink to your website from a company who is willing to give them out. Often, resource pages show that a company is backlink-friendly.

You can find resource pages manually by going through lists of websites in your niche, browsing app stores, or through a Google search. You can also try the broken link tactic for these pages too if you notice that another site featured in the section is no longer active.

14. Request a Link

Search for blogs or websites that have conducted roundup lists or compilations of products, businesses or websites in your niche and ask to be added to the list.

For example, we occasionally get requests from businesses operating a graphic design service to add their website to our blog post, 200+ Free and Premium Graphic Design Resources. From our perspective, this is a mutually beneficial request: It enables us to keep our list up-to-date with the best resources out there and the business is able to get a dofollow backlink without having to guest post, comment on our blog posts, pay for a product review or republish their own content, and the link placement and relevancy is perfect. It’s also a simple request, you’re asking to be added to the already existing post, so it’s a fairly simple request for businesses to fulfill.

Look for posts where your website would just be a simple addition to the post, you’re not looking to re-write it. Find posts that are roundups or ones that have numbers in the title. See what your niche has to offer and just reach out! Make sure your website or product is relevant though, there’s no point if it’s not.

15. Unlinked Mentions Method

One of the ways on how to get backlinks is by doing the unlinked mentions method. As your website grows in popularity, you’ll notice that people start mentioning your website, app, or brand. Sometimes, they link to another article about your website whereas other times there aren’t any links at all.

If you’re looking for a good link building technique, you can use tools for online mentions and reach out to websites asking for a link. You can get high quality backlinks to your website using this method. If you notice that a link was missed, these sites can be added to your list of referring domains.

16. Contact competitor’s backlinks

Using SEO tools, you can easily see all the backlinks your competitor’s get. You can find countless referring domains for any popular website on the internet. By looking up all your competitors, you can sort through their referring domains to determine which sites link out to competitors the most. Then, you can contact those websites and ask for links to your site.

By looking at the website before reaching out, you can create a more personalized message. You can also look up the best ranking content on their site to see if there’s any alignment with your articles and business. Find out if there are any link building opportunities by doing cold outreach or by contacting the SEO employee at that company.

17. Subreddit Moderator Method

This is a very little known method of generating backlinks on Reddit and is lower in difficulty than the last method because you don’t have to generate social proof as a means of turning the backlink into a dofollow link. Even if you have no previous experience using Reddit this is an accessible way to get backlinks without having to engage with subreddit communities.

Here’s how to generate dofollow links to your website from Reddit:

Create your own subreddit (please note that your Reddit account will have to be at least 30 days old and you’ll need to have a small amount of positive karma).
Once you’ve created your own sub, you don’t have to post anything to it ever (if you don’t want to) but the value comes from linking your content in the sidebar. As a subreddit owner/moderator, you have the ability to add relevant links and information to your subreddit’s sidebar.
Every time you have a new piece of content or a webpage you can to link out to, add it to the sidebar of your own subreddit and that will generate dofollow links to your website from Reddit.

As we’ve said above, Reddit is a high-value domain to receive link juice from, so a dofollow backlink from Reddit is beneficial and this is one of the easiest ways to get them. Please note, however, that your subreddit’s webpage will have a much lower authority than Reddit’s domain authority, but you will still acquire link juice and a backlink associated with Reddit.

18. Create more webpages

This might be a given, but the more webpages your site has the easier it is to get backlinks. Having a static one-page website will be much harder to get backlinks to than a website with landing pages, a blog, or multiple product pages. Content marketing is an important part of link building. Without tons of content, it’ll be a harder ask for backlinks. So, if you want to know the secret on how to get backlinks: build a blog.

A quick Google search shows that there are tons of topics you can write about that are relevant to your niche. You can use a free tool for keyword research to come up with ideas. But by writing relevant content in your space, search engines will understand what your website is about and you’ll rank higher in results in that industry. Relevant sites will be more likely to start link building with you. So write some long form content on a regular schedule and stick with it for years to come, so people can rely on your expertise in your industry.

19. Add your own internal links

While building links can be quite a challenge, there’s an easy way to get links to your site: practice internal link building. While you won’t get the same elevation in ranking from an internal link, there are many benefits to adding links to other pages of your websites, such as lowering bounce rate and keeping people on your site.

You can add internal links easily. The more content you have, the more likely that keywords you’ve written about show up in an article. Relevant websites will typically have multiple topics in the same area which makes internal linking easier.

20. Rank higher in search

You can attract links by ranking higher in search. Most people don’t do thorough searches when linking out to another website. If creating link building campaigns and doing cold outreach scares you, you’ll want to rank high in search results to get a few links organically. Referring domains typically pick the top articles to link out to or the article with the exact search intent they’re looking for.

Keep in mind that without backlinks, it’s hard to rank high in search. So if you’re playing the organic game, it’ll be a slow climb up. How many backlinks you get organically will depend on how many articles are ranking in the top three positions in search. But it is possible to earn backlinks organically without doing outreach.

Conclusion

Now you know the top 10 ways you can build backlinks to your website. We encourage you to try out each method for yourself and see what response you get. Don’t forget to be persistent, polite, and eager whilst still providing value when reaching out to other websites. Building backlinks is a marathon, not a sprint so be diligent about building a link here and there over time and they’ll begin to accumulate. First things first though, start working on remarkable content, a valuable product, and a beautiful website if you haven’t already so that you have something to direct potential collaborators to. Remember, it’s the quality of backlinks that count, not the quantity, so aim for quality.

The post How to Build Backlinks: 20 Ways to Get Backlinks to Your Store appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.