If you have an existing website and you want to optimize it using Search Engine Optimization or SEO, take a second look at your website again. You may have a good branding but the question is were you able to define your products and services properly? For sure you have thrown your posts on different social media platforms and you are spending hour after hour staring at your analytics. You may have enhanced your post for the sake of posting but not for the sake of giving values to customers or selling them to support your ideas. You have so much content for social media accounts but you have horribly abandoned your website. And that you are now guilty about it. Nowadays, business owners have relied on social media platforms to sell their products and services because of the exposure and subjective attention they are gaining from family and friends. Added to this is their ego being boosted for exhibiting their skills.

Owning a personal website has lots of benefits. You can build an online shop or share an informative travel or art vlog where customers can buy or advertise. But before it gets you excited, learn to assess your products and services. This is a traditional way of product development. As it may only require you analogue devices like pen and paper. Here is the process that I have established based on my experience for over 10 years of information technology and 5 years of graphic design. 

Business Analysis

Business analysis is a straightforward question. If you will create a product or service, is there anyone willing to buy or avail? You have a passion that you want to share to the community. But of course you need to sell them to support this hobby. One is to have a full time job so you have a monthly income to use as capital. Another one is to sell your products and services and lastly you can do both. How will you know if they are willing to buy? You can utilize Youtube by watching videos within your niche. For example if you like art journaling, there are products being brought to decorate art journals and you can make one similar to those products.      

Design

Design can be categorized into three – technical, functional and aesthetic. The technical refers to the infrastructure, hardware or physical component of the product. For example, if you will build an online shop, what platform will you use and how will it be hosted – cloud-based or onsite?

For functional design, this explains how a product or service works. If you have an online shop, what will be its features? These can be: 

• Register / Login Forgot Password
• Upload Banner
• Upload Product Photos
• Embed Videos 
• Define Prices and Discounts
• Create Promotion
• Purchase online
• Product Review
• Analytics

For the aesthetic, this is about your branding depending on your target audience. If you’re a corporate business, your design can be formal and sleek. If you are selling goth related products, it can be artistic by applying dark vibes such as Edgar Allan Poe literature of raven, crows, ghouls and graveyards.   

Marketing Strategy

Marketing is more than selling products and services. It’s creating a marketplace for interested customers. Oftentimes we are preoccupied with branding and designing our collateral. Before creating a campaign, study the demographics of your audience like location, age group, profession and interest. If you have an online shop of clothes for Southeast Asian countries you can sell more casual, comfortable summer clothes since most of asian countries are tropical. Or if you’re selling in North America or European countries, you can sell more winter clothes since there are snowy seasons and they need the clothes to protect them from the cold.

Once you have defined the demographics of your target audience, you can now create your branding. Branding is the process of creating the presentation of your products and services. This is where you create your logo, typography and color scheme. Collaterals are the materials that provide information about your products and services like business cards, flyers, brochures, websites and social media posts. They can be categorized into print, email, web and social media adverts.             

Analytics

Analytics is the metrics of the performance of your website, channel, products and services. It’s a default that any application has analytics. Wix and Youtube has built-in Analytics that can provide insights of your viewers such as number of impressions, click-through-rate or views, countries, gender, age, keywords and many more. From this, you can have an idea on how to improve your products and services. Analytics also answers the question if your marketing strategy worked.