Whats a blogshop? I define it as a blog that catalogs a range of products on sale. What I observe is that it is a low cost, low manpower system of running a small time business. Hence it is easy to set up. And this thing is on the rise. The things you need for setting one up are as follows. A blog, a supplier and a little bit of time. You can sell things like clothing, accessories, handbags, shoes and tons of other stuff. Some blogshops transact using paypal or credit cards, while some others would meet up the customer and get cash on delivery of the product.
One trend is that it seems like there are alot of blogshops using the same supplier. Hence what you get is every shop seems to be selling the exact same thing, which is not good for business at all. Therefore, it is important to source for some unique product. I doubt there are any suppliers that would only do your business. I would say, this should be the trickiest part of this idea.
The second most difficult part of this business is the marketing. How are you going to tell the whole world that you are selling stuff at some awkward and hard to spell website address? I have a few suggestions:
1. There are apparently a lot of blogshop directories out there, but the problem is that those directories are themselves very low profile and unheard of.
2. Another way would be by word of mouth, but unless you've got awesomely incredible stuff to sell, I doubt this can get you very far.
3. You could also sign up for some wed advertising which would cost you money which you have no idea if you can ever recoup from.
4. And fourth would be to get your website listed in the search engines and rank it up high. But unless you are a pro search engine optimizer, this is going to be a tough journey for you. You could do it yourself, but there is a whole new school of stuff you need to know and learn. Not the type of stuff I can cover here without straying too far from my topic.
In summary, what ever it is, once you have an awesome product to sell, you have won half the battle. The other half would be the marketing.
Cost analysis of this would depends on how you intend to run this. If you can live with meager 1 sale per half a year kind of business, then its basically zero cost. However, if you intend to market the website aggressively with the help of search engine optimizers, the cost can rack up pretty high. And I will try to investigate a little on this cost in the near future. Do check back to see what I have for you.
So basically my stand is its worth a try only if I can get awesome products to sell. If i can't convince myself to buy 50 pieces of whatever it is, then I assume it would fail here.
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