Not everyone has a huge audience online. If you’re Justin Bieber with 33 million people hanging on your every word and a tweet saying “thanks” gets over 40,000 retweets, you probably won’t need to put much effort into it. But for the rest of us with limited audiences just starting out, you’ll need to try to harness the power of other people. When you don’t have a big audience online and you’re trying to sell online, you need to leverage networks bigger than your own.

If you have 10 Twitter followers, spamming them constantly probably won’t help

To anyone with a Twitter account, I definitely recommend tweeting your product to your followers. What I don’t recommend is spamming them. What do I consider spamming? Constantly tweeting products in a short period of time with no context. In addition to that, if you only have a few followers, I’d still recommend tweeting about your products, but you should know that it’s going to have a limited impact. The better idea is to try to get other people, with bigger followings, to tweet about your products.

Reach out to bloggers to write about it or do a giveaway

Blogging about your product can be a great way to get sales and talk about your product, but the same problem applies as with Twitter — if you don’t have a large following it’s only going to do so much. The better idea is to get people with a larger following to write about your product. For some bloggers, they will write about you just because they’re looking for interesting content. For others, they’ll need some convincing. Different bloggers will write about you only if you do a sponsored post, some might want you to do a giveaway. Influential bloggers talking about your product can be one of the most beneficial ways to promote it. They often have loyal followings who trust their opinion and taste, so getting an endorsement from them is incredibly valuable.

Take it to forums

While I’m not recommending going around spamming every place you find online, forums can be a great place to talk about your products. Forums usually have engaged communities that can be beneficial to get involved in — you just have to make sure that you’re adding to the conversation. Simply spamming your product everywhere and saying “ON SALE NOW WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!!!1!!” probably won’t lead to many sales and will hurt your reputation. It’s also really important that you engage in a relavent forum. If you’re selling makeup, trying to promote in a men’s health forum is going to be time wasted.

Reach out to friends

Something as simple as getting your friends and family to help promote your product can really help with sales. While getting someone like an influential blogger to promote your product is more ideal, even having your friends and family promoting it will mean that it’s getting seen by more people than in your network alone.

The biggest thing that you need to realize about selling online is that it’s not who you are, it’s who you know. While your network might be small, there are different things that you can do to harness the networks of people bigger than yourself. By standing on the shoulders of giants, your customer will be able to see you.

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Dan Kalmar

Community Manager at ShopLocket

Dan Kalmar is the Community Manager at ShopLocket. He also makes a mean cup of tea.

@dankalmar

Drinker of tea and doer of things at @ShopLocket. I dance like no one is listening and enjoy short walks on the beach.

@heatherpayne You can't fix perfection. - 17 hours ago

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