The question that always haunts young entrepreneurs is how come someone else or a competitor in the industry can create and operate successful online ventures one after another. 

---
title: "The top traits of successful and informed online store entrepreneur's and what set them apart from the rest"
description: "The question that always haunts young entrepreneurs is how come someone else or a competitor in the industry can create and operate successful online ventures one after another. "
topic: Shopify
tags: e-commerce, online sales, conversion, audience building, brand marketing
---

# {% $markdoc.frontmatter.title %} {% #overview %}
{% $markdoc.frontmatter.description %}

While you struggle to get things off the ground for your initial launch day. Wonder what they have that we don't. And, naively, everyone wants to know that blueprint - the one we think gave them the shortcut to success.

> But unfortunately, there is no such thing as a blueprint or ten-step process to achieve what you want in business.

{%  imageTag src="https://ik.imagekit.io/whfv2swqzww/heyfromapp/blog/tr:orig-true/The_top_Traits_of_successful_online_entrepreneurs_-_heyfromapp.png?ik-sdk-version=javascript-1.4.3&updatedAt=1662590536153" caption="top traits of successful online entrepreneurs" /%}

The hard truth is that they would have wondered just like you did when they started. And expect someone or divine power for rescue. But, they learned everything through learning and doing things that matter to business in any given situation. And generally, they understood some ground rules governing the psychology of running a business in today's competitive environment, that it's normal to feel overwhelmed, find themselves disoriented in execution, and forced to deal with the thought of self-doubt and self-criticism more often than one would like.

They overcome this emotional barrier by realizing and understanding that struggles are universal to everyone. The very successful competitor in their niche has gone through the same thing. And understood that no one is immune to this feeling and exempted from facing those challenges.

The only difference is they didn't give up. And found a way to work through all the difficulties to reach where they are now. There is no magic bullet or golden nuggets of ideas to bail you out from whatever pickle you think you are in right now.

#### The myth surrounding successful entrepreneurs.

First, let's clear this fog to have a clear picture of what they have to offer. And what we can learn from them.

1. They have access to some magic wand, and flashing them would give them everything they seek to achieve in business.

2. Only they can do it. They possess an innate ability to handle the demands of running successful businesses.

3. Accomplished this seemingly insurmountable task by themselves without anyone's help.


#### How are these successful entrepreneurs different?

-  Not afraid to ask for help. They understood that seeking wisdom from people who have done it before shortcuts the time to achieve the goal.

- Have a team - Someone who understand the strength and weaknesses. And build a team that is relevant to goals and objectives, get the tasks done now, and grow over time.

- Have a system in place - instead of entertaining every thought and idea randomly, they put processes in place. Identify and plan things to do towards achieving the immediate goals. And they never stray from it no matter what.

- Understand what they sell - possess intimate details of product or service features, benefits, and advantages. And know how to position their business as a potential alternative to market competitors.

- Customer-centric - the customer and target audiences are at the forefront of everything they do to improve the chances of winning their minds and advance the business one step closer to achieving the stated goals.

- Educate the customer - don't be afraid to create and deliver content that helps the customer make purchasing decisions. While doing so, they ensure the content they offer help change the belief, attitude, and opinion about their products and business. As a result, they successfully nurture their audience from mere bystanders to paying customers.

 - Create value - clearly understand that their business of making money will only be successful when they create value for their customers. And they are not only successful in creating values in intrinsic products or services that their business sells, but they are also equally successful in creating the perception of values in the minds of their consumer.

The above list is some of the traits usually found among people who successfully navigated the process of creating an online business.

If they can achieve what they achieve through sheer determination, you can do it too. Always Remember, the only thing that could stop you from achieving anything is "You."

>So the work starts from "You".



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The top traits of successful and informed online store entrepreneur's and what set them apart from the rest

This post helps you see things beyond the checklist and list-of-things-to-do guides usually find online. Help you see The 'WHY' behind everything and the practical tips to prioritize and measure your efforts.

---
title: "The right approach to start your Shopify Store."
description: "This post helps you see things beyond the checklist and list-of-things-to-do guides usually find online. Help you see The 'WHY' behind everything and the practical tips to prioritize and measure your efforts."
topic: Shopify
tags: Online Presence, E-commerce, Marketplace, Selling Online, Conversion
time: 5 Mins
---

# {% $markdoc.frontmatter.title %} {% #overview %}
{% $markdoc.frontmatter.description %}

My aim is to go beyond the usual monotonous checklist and unlock the purpose and relevancy behind every steps that one has to go through to setup successful digital presence using Shopify or any other your prefered platform.

{% imageTag src="https://ik.imagekit.io/whfv2swqzww/heyfromapp/blog/tr:orig-true/the-right-approach-to-shopify-store-heyfromapp_SyNAs1NgA.png?ik-sdk-version=javascript-1.4.3&updatedAt=1662244504067" /%}

### What is wrong with the checklist

A typical online help comes with a list of things to execute and thoroughly prescribes where to get the help and what needs to be done to achieve the expected outcome. 

It represents the best practices, and nothing wrong with it. Generally, it provides the guidance and framework to plan resources and execute efforts to achieve the ultimate goal of creating and launching an online presence.

In most cases, it's not a a problem to follow that, when the person doing it knows what they are doing and why.

Unfortunetly, most of us not belongs to that group of folks.

The harm is adopting these checklists blindly may cause unwanted effects. That could create problem in the form of distraction, friction for your user to get the experience they seek.

The reason why some of the checklist items is not required right away is simple.  Your business is unique. And the problem you are solving for your customer is specific. Apart from some foundational setup, the need for most checklist items is highly contextual and can be optional to your given situation.

So why waste an effort and valuable resources when it's not warranted in the first place and doesn't contribute to achieving the final outcome?

The worst part is that these unwanted effects could derail the chances of getting the conversion with the potential customer.

That being said, how do you know what efforts are required and which ones to avoid now? Well, this is where understanding the proper "The Why" behind every checklist items and formulating a simple "Ranking Model" come to your rescue.

Before we jump into that ranking stuff, let's ask ourselves what are the qualities of a successful online store and how you can achieve them in yours.

### The Digital Asset Qualities

Any successful e-commerce store must possess the qualities to produce the selling store.

- The value proposition is clear and understandable within five to ten seconds after landing on your site.

- Answer top questions within five seconds. And the site address them in the above-the-fold section of the page

- Call-to-action clarity and communicate what action needs to be taken to get the value the business offers

- Absence of friction, distraction, and irrelevant elements helps the user navigate toward potential conversion

- Motive the audience to take the most desired action

- Helps the user behavior change, which is in the interest of both the user and businesses.


### Ranking Model to Prioritize

As I said, you need a unique solution to your business's specific problem. You can't take what works for others and expect the same result. 

Because your business is different, the audience is different, the traffic source could be different, and your relationship with you audience and their awareness about your business and product are different. Then it's not a winning formula to apply other's solutions to solve your business problem.

So, to identify and build a specific solution to your business challenges, you need to rank the effort required against the criteria that apply only to your business context.

The ranking score will help inform whether or not investing resources will eventually help create a successful online store for now and lay the foundation for success into the future.

This you can do by identifing and asking relevant questions and assigning points against each effect that individual effort will produce.

The higher the score, the higher priority it should get for resource allocation and execution.

Some general variables should always be in the mix for the ranking model for effort prioritization. And here are they

- Is this effort to create or develop a brand image or enhance brand awareness?

- Is this effort to communicate and clarify the store value proposition?

-  Help eliminate bottlenecks or distractions that take away user focus on the desired action

- Help simplify the buying process 

- Introduce or strengthen the technical structure of the online store, which will ultimately result in better SEO ranking and data collection to understand onsite user behavior.

- Is it something easier to implement in a relatively short period?

- How much will it cost in dollar amount and in time?


Again to reiterate, the point of your store is unique, and finding an ideal solution requires you to develop a ranking model applicable to your business. That means identifying the list of variables that are relevant and using it in your ranking process to identify the most impactful efforts to prioritize.

### Understand "The Why and The Context" to help prioritize

#### Cusom domain 

The level of relationships with your customer and established trust is an important factor. Is it essential for your store? Can you live with the Shopify url - yourstore.myshopify.com? It depends, right? 

Imagine you are an influencer on one of the many social channels. Your followers won't mind using this Shopify domain url to buy from you. On the other hand, for a young startup, it became a trust factor and brand credibility issue. Having a custom domain to anchor your store is an absolute must.

#### Conduct a content audit

The text on your site is a powerful tool that sells your product. Research and written copy effectively convince your customer and convert the audience to paying customers. So, getting it right is critical from the get-go and is an absolute must.

Aim for the top-notch quality that helps communicate what you have to offer and convey what you expect them to do. So, compromising here is not in the best interest of your online venture.

#### Optimize Images 

Faster sites convert better. But, it's not one hundred percent a must to get it right in the initial launch. If your customer demographic is mainly from developed nations and areas, the internet capacity is good enough to deal with a few images downloaded on your site. So, you can slot it for future optimization experiments and run the test to validate the latter point in time.

On the other hand, businesses operating in developing countries and rural areas are better off investing in an optimized image rendering.

 {% link href="https://www.shopify.com/blog/shopify-store-launch-checklist" %}
      Here is the boilerplate version of the checklist. You can find it on the Shopify blog 
  {% /link %}

- Add your chosen sales channels
- Add a custom domain
- Review your checkout experience and payment options
- Prepare your standard pages
- Review your email notification settings
- Conduct a content audit
- Install an analytics tool
- Focus on e-commerce search engine optimization
- Optimize all images on your website
- Have a pre-launch marketing plan
- Adjust your tax and shipping settings
- Make it easy for shoppers to contact you
- Install only the essential apps
- Set up your billing information


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The right approach to start your Shopify Store.

The well-kept secret is you don't have to spend a single dollar on Marketing for conversion optimization. A bit of self-introspection goes a long way to impact your business bottom-line.

understand-improve-conversion-rate-heyfromapp_vrM2prvsx.png

Version 1

---
title: "What you can do today to both understand and  improve your conversion rate"
description: "The well-kept secret is you don't have to spend a single dollar on Marketing for conversion optimization. A bit of self-introspection goes a long way to impact your business bottom-line."
topic: Conversion Rate Optimization
tags: Conversion, UX, Online Sales
time: 4 Mins
--- 

# {% $markdoc.frontmatter.title %}
{% $markdoc.frontmatter.description %}

But the problem is that, almost always,  undertaking such an initiative is overwhelming. It's not an easy thing to do when taking a ten thousand-foot view of your business. And, It's hard not to entertain every other thought and idea that come to your mind. 

{% imageTag src="https://ik.imagekit.io/whfv2swqzww/heyfromapp/blog/tr:orig-true/understand-improve-conversion-rate-heyfromapp_vrM2prvsx.png?ik-sdk-version=javascript-1.4.3&updatedAt=1662244738143" caption="Understand and Improve Your Online Business Conversion Today" /%}

So, instead of pulling yourself in all directions, adopting a simple structure and methodology should help overcome this limitation. Break down the business and functions into meaningful parts and tackle them one at a time. 

> The critical thing to remember is this experimentation is purely optimizing your own opinions. It has inherent limitations. So, understanding and being mindful of this limitation is the key to optimizing your opinion for success.

### Your Opinion Doesn't Matter Much

Your opinion is not your customer's or target audience's opinion. And 
Your opinion is nothing to others. 

Your opinion, at best, represents the biased view of or story you tell to simplify what you are witnessing. So, the outcome you find is not the truth. So, it's essential to validate or invalidate with experimentation to confirm whether your view is accurate or flawed.

Ok, you might have bought into this argument about optimizing opinions and registered this experimentation limitation on your mind prominently. And even eager to tackle the next steps. But where do you start?

### When Optimizing Own Opinions


Well, Let's start with some ground rules. 

The first is to understand that **"Not All The Optimization Effort and Outcomes are The Same."**

If you imagine this scenario, it's easy to see that optimizing traffic flow to your website is not the same as making an effort to optimize copy at the checkout page. The latter is more measurable and could impact the bottom line. It's easy to quantify your return on effort invested.

The second one is to keep your research and **"Optimization effort close to the money."** Start optimizing from right to left instead of the traditional and vanity-producing metrics of the left-to-right approach – Traffic, Call-to-action, Conversion, Sale.

And always plan to **"optimize for the entire process, from start to end"** - whether it's new customer onboarding or customer support functions to build loyalty and retention effort, or whatever it's that you want to see improvement from the current level.

You never know where you will find the holes in your funnel. The key to success is Identifying the spot of the experience breakdown and remediating them with an optimal solution.

### Four Key Understandings

1. When optimizing based on opinions, findings need to be validated or invalidated with evidence.
2. Not all optimization efforts are the same.
3. Optimize end-to-end process
4. Optimize close to the money

### How to identify high opportunity score ideas and problems

Here, the aim should focus on making more money from existing traffic. That way, the business makes even more when the floodgate is opened up with paid marketing or social media promotions.

#### Start asking the following questions and document the findings to identify the current problem areas in your business.


- Does your landing page meet your expectation? Content and design quality sufficiently communicate your product's value and promises.

- How does your copy on the landing page align with overall business objectives and operations?

- Do you answer customers' top questions with clarity and evidence to support it? Remember to address top priority questions in your landing page's above-the-fold prime real estate.

- Is your copy tailored to serve a wide variety of target audiences and motivation levels?

- What is your understanding of the target audience's difference in awareness level? The five awareness levels - are Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, Most Aware, and Not Aware. How do you address them differently via your content copy?

- Your company might exist to solve a specific problem. At any given time, a business is having difficulty improving the conversion among the audience that content is not addressing them directly. Would you be able to spot that gray area in your content?


- Does your call-to-action prominently displayed? Are you motivated to take the action recommended on the landing page?

- What is your company's foundational marketing assets look like? The quality of the landing page, The depth of the Content Strategy, the scale of SEO, The level of PPC optimized setup, The reach of Social Media Strategy, etc...

- Do you know who your customers are? What do they do or don't? What motivates them? How much do you know about their onsite behavior?

- Are you convincing your audience to change the behavior in your favor?

- How much do you value your customer inputs? What steps are already taken to ensure they are a vital part of the influencing element on product design, roadmap, continuous improvement, etc.?

- In other words, do you see your business as **customer-centric?**

- Are you reasoning with the logical or emotional part of the brain to convince them to buy what you are selling?

- What is your level of understanding of the role of human psychology and cognitive biases in customer decision-making?

- Did you have a functioning digital data-collection setup- a.k.a, Google analytics adequately configured to capture all the relevant events for your business?


> the amount of probing questions you may ask is limitless. So, I conveniently leave the rest to you to figure out.


### So, What's Next

Ok, you have made it this far. The most important task is finding the optimal solution and methods to remediate the most pressing problems your business is facing today. And probably, the list is very long for your comfort. 

And you can't realistically address all the issues. This is where the art of prioritization comes into the picture. The idea is to identify and execute truly impactful changes in order of importance. 

So, the task is to isolate all the problems experienced by most of your audience and customer and confirm the solution's impact on your business's bottom line. And at the same time, the solution should be easier to plan and implement. 

And, for the rest, leave them on the backlog. Pick them only when your time and resource permits. And consider only those you see generating a meaningful and measurable return on your investment.

### Final Takeaways

- Your business has a specific problem. You can't solve the problem using someone else solution.

- You don't need new traffic to optimize your current rate of conversion.

- Any unanswered questions will always kill the conversion.

- Always remember, the business is an exchange of values. 

- Value - What the business can do for the customer.

- Call-to-action - What the customer can do for themselves.



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