There are a few reasons you might want to start up a shop on your blog. Firstly, it may be that you want to start making some money from the viewership you’re finding is growing on your blog or you may simply have creative talent and want to show this off and may as well charge people for it. Or you may simply already be selling products elsewhere and want to move those ideas/products over to your own blog.
Either way, setting up a shop on your blog is a fairly pain-free process and one that I managed to filly set up in around an hour. Do I expect it will make me a multimillionaire? No. Does it give me somewhere to play with my creative abilities and then sell digital products to people? Yes.
Below is a simple guide on how to set up your own shop on your website using WooCommerce, the most popular plugin for WordPress.
This article contains affiliate links which means if you choose to purchase any of the products via these links, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This does not affect my opinion of any of the products I have an affiliate with.
1. Install WooCommerce
The first thing you should do is install WooCommerce onto your blog. I recommend this as the first port-of-call because this is the most technically difficult bit. Therefore, you don’t want to get all excited, get all the imagery for your product, do all the research and then fall at the last hurdle of working through the plugin.
When you’ve got WooCommerce installed, there are a few forms to fill in to enable you to start making money. All of the details are fairly simple. If you’re confused by any of the technical terms, there are loads of financial blogs out there that cover these terms and details and give you examples of what to do already.
2. Research your products
Once you’ve installed WooCommerce and have it set up ready to display your products, the next thing I’d recommend is going and doing some research as to what prices people are selling their products for. I sell digital products only so I know I can’t charge a premium as I’m not offering a physical product. Therefore, I went out and searched for people who were offering a similar product and priced mine the same. Also, this gives you a chance to look at how they present their product. Feel free to check out my shop for some inspiration if you wish. It may not be overly full depending on when you visit it though!
3. Create your product and branding
Decide what it is you want to try and sell. I recommend going on Canva and going through some of their templates of different digital products and using some of these as a basis for the products you wish to sell. When choosing a template, note down the sizes it gives you as you’ll want this for the next step.
Once you’ve decided on a product – say you’re doing digital bookmarks – then create an image that you’d like to use to represent the product. You don’t want to just use the product itself as then this is easier to copy and past for people. E.g. I put all of my bookmarks on this free image I found on Canva to show them on a table-top.
4. Put your product on WooCommerce
Putting your product on WooCommerce is easy as pie. Simply navigate to “Products” on your WordPress dashboard and then “Add New”. Then go through the straightforward process of adding your product. If you’re adding a digital product, don’t forget to tick the digital button – this will bring up an option for you to add the PDF you have downloaded of your original product.
5. Add a detailed description of exactly what the customer is getting
It’s crucial that your customer doesn’t ever feel like they’ve been fooled. Describe your product well. Describe its dimensions, the fact it is either digital or physical, what they should expect upon receiving the product. You want to be able to say “well it does say that in the description” if anyone has any questions about the product.
There, you should now have your own shop set up on your blog. Depending on your theme, this can look vastly different, though WooCommerce seems to work well with nearly all themes I’ve tried.
If you have any additional questions, don’t be afraid to ping me a question on any of the social media comments below or email me.
