What Do You Want to Achieve?
image credit: Darren Hester via Flickr
The first step in building or enhancing your online presence is to identify what you want to accomplish. What is the problem? What is your desired outcome?
Many people equate this step to choosing the correct tool for the job. If you need to pound in a nail, you wouldn’t choose a screwdriver (unless you’re my husband, but that’s another story). Not every tool is right for every job.
It’s easy to jump in and start blogging, but it’s possible that a blog shouldn’t be your first priority.
Take some time to think about what you want to accomplish with the use of online tools. I’ve come up with a few ideas off the top of my head; I know that you can likely think of many more:
- Make your store more visible to potential customers
- Offer your loyal customers perks and rewards
- Establish your store as “the experts” in a particular category
- Sell more copies of particular titles or categories
- Increase attendance at author events
- Entice your existing customers to visit your store more often
- Develop or increase sales through your store’s website
- Educate your local community about the benefits of shopping locally
- Serve your book groups and other communities within your store
- Spotlight the particular strengths of your store.
If you don’t mind, I’d love for you to share your thoughts with us in the comments. What do you want to achieve?
Booksellers Blog » Match the tools to the goals says:
January 16th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
[...] an earlier post, I wrote about the need to determine your goals before deciding on the tools to use to attain those [...]