What Made Me Decide To Become An Entrepreneur?
I always wanted to be my boss. When I was in college, my inspiration was to open my bakery in Noirmoutier (a small island in France), where I am originally from, because I have always been passionate about food. So, I enrolled in internships from the age of 9 to 14, which allowed me to spend some days in the kitchens of all the restaurants, bakeries, and pastry shops.
At 15 years old, I left my parent’s house to start an apprenticeship in the bakery, a profession I am passionate about. I continued my studies until summer of 2017, when my father became ill and died a few months later. This tragic event made me realize one essential thing: life is short! I started to think about what I wanted to do with my life. Do I want to spend my entire life working for a boss with mediocre pay? Of course not! After this, I took my first step into entrepreneurship, joining an MLM company. Relationship marketing, whereby one promotes the company they affiliated with to get other people into it and earn commissions every time you convince someone to join. It seemed so simple that I did not hesitate a second to launch. Unfortunately, after 1 year of paying a monthly payment of €150, I managed to convince only 1 person to join us; thus, I decided to stop.
Two years later, I bumped into a video discussing drop-shipping and E-commerce 2.0. At first, I thought it was a scam but decided to look closer. I researched and found the business model very interesting and in agreement with my vision of life, with the possibility to work from anywhere in the world, with no stock and no boss. So, I decided to buy my first training, that of Yomi Denzel “ECOM PRO,” which allowed me to learn many things: the Mindset that a good entrepreneur must have to succeed, the basics that any E-merchant must have to declare himself, to create a Shopify store, to find a “Winner” product, how to create ads and to make his store known. I quickly took a liking to learning these new skills. Interestingly, I never liked school, but this time it was different. I had decided what I wanted to learn).
I spent almost all my money after a year of research and not a very conclusive test on Facebook ADS. I decided to take a break to think about a new method that would be less expensive to test and save time on creating my stores. So, I started talking to many e-merchants who were able to give me tips that I applied, and that allowed me to start making sales finally. I was really happy; after several months of struggling, staying locked in front of my computer, my efforts finally started to pay off. Until the famous Facebook blocks, 3 Business managers were blocked in 1 week at Facebook.
At that time, I was fed up with the drop-shipping on Facebook ADS, between the very high advertising costs and the durability of my business which depended on the goodwill of Facebook to let me make ads. After that, I decided to change my strategy completely and move towards E-commerce in SEO, with no more problems with ads and budget! I decided to create Frite à Pizza, a website specializing in selling equipment and utensils related to fries and pizzas. I am passionate about cooking and food, so it was the perfect compromise. To share with other enthusiasts through our blog by giving my advice and a favorite recipe or offering my customers quality equipment that would be adapted to their needs. Since that day, I have strived to offer quality content through my blog, always seeking to provide clear and precise answers to my audience’s problems. I always continue to seek better suppliers with quality products who will be able to deliver quickly. Customer satisfaction must be the priority of any good E-merchant who wants to make his business prosper long-term!
The challenges we face!
As you may have seen above, the road to entrepreneurship is bumpy. It’s a thrill ride with many sharp turns, steep climbs, and fast descents. So yes, it is better to have perseverance.
- Find an SEO niche
The first step before we even opened our site and the most time-consuming and complex was to analyze the market to find a niche that could be developed in SEO. There are a few important elements to take into account to find a good niche:
- Being interested or passionate about the subject (because you’ll spend many hours working on it, you can’t run out of inspiration).
- To have a wide choice of products to propose to our future customers.
- To have many transactional keywords available and without too much competition to be quickly well positioned by Google.
- To have many interesting subjects and sought by its audience to write and feed its blog.
Once we have found the niche that interests us and meets the four points above, we only have to look at the level of SEO of the competition and if the sites have been in place for a long time. Then, we must evaluate if it is possible to pass them in the SERPs and Ranked in the first position on our biggest keywords. (Sites like Amazon and Discount are easily overtaken when they are in the first position, so it’s good news for us).
- Search for the best keywords
Finding high potential keywords is essential in SEO because if there is no search volume on the keywords we target, nobody will click on our website so nobody will buy our products. It is long and repetitive work, but it is very important for the survival and longevity of the store. On the other hand, do not bet everything on keywords with high search volume. Because if you don’t have a site with quality content relevant to your audience, Google will favor your competitors who offer better quality content!
There are 3 types of keywords:
- Short tail = Many monthly searches / Longer to position on this type of keywords. Example: Pizza oven
- Medium Tail = Average search volume. Example: Electric Pizza Oven
- Long tail = low search volume. Example: Pellet Pizza Oven
It is important to have keywords from all 3 categories on your website, give preference to short tail keywords for the collection pages and, if possible, add one in the store name. Medium and long tail keywords are ideal for product page titles. For a product page, target only one different keyword per product page.
- Climbing in the search positions
If, like us, with Frite à Pizza, your only focus is on SEO as the only source of traffic acquisition. You should not give up. It can take a long time to be elevated to the top positions. In our case, it took 3 months before our keywords reached the first search position. Optimize for SEO all parts of your site, not forgetting the meta title, metadata, and alt text of all your photos.
- The search for backlinks and partners
Do not underestimate the power of quality backlinks, a site without external links may bring you some traffic and sales, but the expansion of your site will be limited. That’s why you should always try to make partnerships with other websites that are not competitors but work with similar niches (link exchange, guest article). To expand your community and make people talk about your store, it is possible to open an affiliate program that will bring you sales by offering a percentage to your affiliates.
Some advice to ensure success
To increase your chances of success, there are a few tips you should not overlook.
Always seek to improve and train yourself, to stay abreast of new strategies and techniques used in SEO.
Constantly promote and improve the user experience. Suppose your site is optimized for organic traffic, but your audience does not want to buy because the design is not ergonomic with good navigation. In that case, your potential customers will go to your competitors.
Always strive to offer quality content that is up-to-date with what your audience is looking for. The most important thing is always to persevere, a site based entirely on SEO is very time-consuming to set up, but once you are in place, it will be difficult for the competition to overtake you and catch up.
Sleep specialist
Using the acquired academic and professional experience, I advise patients with various complaints about mental health - depressed mood, nervousness, lack of energy and interest, sleep disorders, panic attacks, obsessive thoughts and anxieties, difficulty concentrating, and stress. In my free time, I love to paint and go on long walks on the beach. One of my latest obsessions is sudoku – a wonderful activity to calm an unease mind.
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