On any given day, I see dozens of small gear makers across various industries and around the world. A pattern that I notice across many of these makers is that they are great at what they do. They create their products with legit passion and craftsmanship. However, the unfortunate thing I see is that so many of them think they can put a product on a Shopify store, share it on social media, and expect it to sell.
While I'm sure this works to a degree, this pattern puts too much emphasis on social growth, which of course helps, but rarely moves the needle in terms of sales and business. How many gear makers out there are complaining about the loss of reach? Many.
A large part of me wants to help them, and I try to help when I can. This article started as an email to a friend who is starting a great little company in Ontario when I had the idea of making this into a full-blown guide and publishing it for all the makers I interact with on a daily basis. But it's tough to show the whole picture while sending small pieces of advice in text messages and over Instagram. If I've done this with you, I apologize hah. But marketing is as important as your product, if not more.
This guide is a very basic introduction to the work you need to do to start building your own traffic. This is not exactly how we do things here at BGDB, but it is a summary of what we have learnt in the past few years of running a content website. It assumes that you are a gear maker with a store up and running, maybe with a decent social account already, but are wondering how to generate more sales. In this article, we'll start with traffic generation, getting as many visitors to your site as possible, and how to do it for free.
Two Types of Traffic
There are two types of traffic: earned and paid. Paid is exactly what it sounds like—buying ads on Google or Meta to drive clicks from social to your website. This isn't a bad option when you've scaled or have a decent marketing budget and can build a business plan. But it's not realistic for most gear startups.
Everyone has the ability to generate organic traffic, but it does take some grit and definitely can take a long time to see the benefit of it.
The second type is earned traffic, also known as organic. Organic traffic is simply another way of saying people visit your site from search engines. A human opens Google, does a search for “bikepacking bags,” sees a result from your site, and clicks it. Everyone has the ability to generate organic traffic, but it does take some grit and definitely can take a long time to see the benefit of it. If you start today, you will start to see the benefit in a year or two, so get to it!
The easiest way to do this is to start a blog on your website. I don't care if you think you're too cool for blogging or whatever, but blogs work and are the only way to generate free, organic traffic to your site and products. Start to think of yourself as a writer and a photographer—actually get interested in it.
How Do I Start Blogging?
Depending on what store or website software you are running, chances are you have the ability to make a blog or pages on your site. Hit those buttons and get one up. Make sure you have a prominent link to your blog in your top-level navigation. You can call it whatever—it doesn't need to be called 'blog.' You can call it 'ideas,' 'writing,' whatever fits your brand best.
But Barry, don't I need to be a writer to write blog posts? The answer to that is a firm NO. No one is a writer until they learn how to do it. The easiest way to start is to open a ChatGPT account. Explain to ChatGPT who you are, where you are from, and what type of gear you make. The more context you provide to the AI, the better it will be able to help you. Then get it to ask you 5 questions about your product. This is essential training for the AI to know the details about what you make.
Once that is complete, tell the AI that I am interested in making a blog on my website to generate organic traffic. These words are in bold because they are literally the words you can use. Copy and paste them as prompts into the input field. Then ask for 10 ideas for blog posts that are essential to the type of gear I make. This should provide you with everything you need to get writing.
It is super important to note here: do not generate full articles with the AI and paste them onto the web. Search engines are clever things and will ding you for doing this. Always keep your reader in mind when putting together written content—and the more of your voice in an article the better. The easiest way to write is to build a list of bullet points, organize them into ideas, and ask the AI to help format them into paragraphs. Boom—you have an article. Now spruce it up with some awesome photography.
I see way too many gear makers create beautiful things only to use their iPhone and think that a photo is 'good enough.' Become a photographer. "Images speak a thousand words" is not an expression for nothing. I'll say it again: become a photographer! Also, think of other types of media you can embed in your new post—YouTube videos, RWGPS files, etc. Posts with media get classified by Google differently and are treated as interactive content—especially video. It is important to say here that the video does not need to be yours; you can embed anyone's video that is relevant to your post.
Before hitting publish, feed your article back into GPT and ask give me an SEO-friendly title. This is a super important step—if you have the wrong title on the article, you could be missing out big time. Now hit publish.
Getting Google's Attention
Now that you have your shiny new article online, you need to tell the powers that be that it's there. By powers that be, I mean Google. Love or hate them, in this world, Google rules (for now). It's actually in Google's interest that you succeed on the web, and they provide all the tools that you need to get your traffic going.
The next step is setting up a Google Search Console account. Google Search Console basically gives you the picture of what Google thinks about you and how the world sees your website. It shows you what keywords you are ranking for, and this can get quite deep. But for now, let's keep it simple.
Setting up your Google Search Console involves a few steps, with some verification that you do own your website. Depending on how your site is hosted, this can be anything from straightforward to damn well frustrating. But make sure you get it working. Once you have it all set up, copy your new blog URL from your website and paste it into the input field at the top of the Search Console Page. The input field should say something like “inspect a URL in yoursite.com.” Hit enter. Search Console will then search for your blog post, which could take a minute or two, and tell you that it is NOT indexed. Great! Simply hit the button that says 'Index Now,' and job done. You have told Google that there is a new blog post on your site. Well done for getting this far.
It will take a few days for Google to fully understand your post and index it. If you want to see if it has been indexed, simply go to google.com and put this into the search: site:yourdomainhere.com. A list of all your indexed pages will appear there. It takes a very long time to build up a reputation with Google. When you do start getting that recognition from Google, this step can be skipped, but when starting out, it's absolutely critical that you tell Google when you publish.
Watch the Traffic Roll in
Now that you have a blog article online and indexed, the last tool you'll need is an analytics service. Analytics measures how many people are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and what they are doing. Most people use Google Analytics, which is free and easy to set up, but a bit tough to navigate and understand in my personal opinion. At Bike Gear Database, we use a service called Fathom Analytics that emphasizes privacy and simplicity. We keep our analytics open for all to see because we feel that keeps us more accountable and transparent. Fathom is not a free service but worth every penny.
Wrapping Up
Now that you have that post out, Google knows about it, and you are watching people come into your website, you might as well tell your existing audience on social media and in a newsletter if you have one. This is such a simple step to do. Go back to GPT and ask for a summary that you can share on social media, and it will be more than happy to help you out.
There you have it—a super high-level idea of what digital marketing means. It can be easy and fun if you want it to be. But in today's world, generating content to drive traffic is an absolute must for most gear makers. Relying on social media growth alone is impossible. The key to this is to get started now. It doesn't need to be perfect—it just needs to be. And the reason for that is that it takes a long time to build that reputation with the search engines—and with people.
If you find any value in this article please, let us know. Helping small businesses is a passion for us and if this is well received, we could eaisly make this a series of articles that go deeper and more comprehensive into the topics.
