When you think about promoting your stuff, what you might not realize is sometimes your stuff itself is the very best marketing tool you have. If you have a quality product inside and out and provide good fan and customer service, it will result in the most lucrative type of marketing of all: word of mouth.

How, you ask?

I knew it was a mistake to ask Little Johnny to design my logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having a Quality Products Outside and In

Professional Appearance

What is your customer’s first impression of you and your stuff like? Look at what you have to sell and where you’re selling it with a critical eye to issues cosmetic as well as practical. There’s a few simple tweaks you can do to increase the chances someone who hears of your product actually commits to purchase it and they all come down to maintaining a professional appearance.

Design

Your website is usually the first impression that potential customers have of you and your stuff. Take a look at your site from an outside perspective. What would it look like to a potential buyer? Does the feel of the site, the design and style, reflect your stuff? Is it easy to navigate and, most important, to find out where to buy your stuff quickly and easily without having to do a lot of clicking or searching? Does it give reader a sense of your products and what they can expect?

Do the same things for other ways people might find you. What’s the first impression a potential customer would get from your social media profiles or your marketing materials? Are you presenting yourself, your company and your products professionally or does it look thrown together?

Taking the time to unify the design of everything into a consistent look can go a long way toward making you look professional. Even if you don’t have any design skill, there’s a variety of sites where you can get free stock images (PhotoXpress is a favorite of mine) that look slick and professional. Use any of the free image editing tools available online to add text and your name and you could have a simple logo or header banner to use in minutes. Once you have a custom logo, you can use that in your webstore, on your printed materials, in your social media profiles, etc and you’ll look much more professional than someone just using the default avatars and templates everyone else is using. If you’re not comfortable tinkering yourself, there are a host of logo, banner, theme and template generators online that will give you some customization options but do all the heavy lifting of creation for you.

Don’t obsess too much over the design. Simple and clean is always better than cluttering everything up with bells and whistles you don’t really need. And don’t fret about using a pre-made template or something you created using a generator. As long as it isn’t one of the defaults that comes with your web host or media profile, it should be different enough to give your stuff that professional look even if it’s similar to something others are using.

User Experience

Beyond how your site looks, what matters even more is how it works. If it requires a bunch of annoying plugins and updates to run, crashes or loads slowly, or has pop-ups, auto-ads or other annoying features, buyers may leave long before they even know what you’re selling. You want to make sure the user’s experience when they get on your site is as smooth as possible.

Make sure it’s easy for anyone visiting your store or site to be able to find where your stuff is for sale and buy it within a minimum number of clicks. The harder it is for them to find out about what you’re selling or to purchase it, the less likely they will.