Building A Brand Presence - Selling on TikTok

It's been a few days since my last post. It is now April 1st, 2024, and I am starting this month off more educated and ready to generate more sales than ever.

I sold a few products on the TikTok shop, but it has been silent since those last couple of sales. I asked myself why.

We often wonder how our product is not selling as well as others, even though we think it's better than most. I fall into this boat, but I have a better understanding of why my products have not been sold. My two main issues are bad keywords and the need for more attention.

For bad keywords 

I've realized I haven't been using the right keywords that properly categorize my product to match current searches results on TikTok. I also haven't been talking about or making videos about my products on YouTube, which is just not smart, in my opinion.  

Lack of attention 

This coincides with the bad keywords because if people like and want to buy my product, they will not be able to see it because I'm putting it in a totally different space on TikTok that they're not going to look at because that's not what they want. So, this month will help prove or disprove my theory about these two reasons why I have yet to receive a lot of sales.

One thing about TikTok versus other platforms is that they really work hard to help you make sales by giving you data to analyze.  Because of the books I am offering on TikTok, I see many opportunities and educational and activity book sections.  There is little available, so this gives me the prime opportunity to make massive sales if I provide products that people will want to buy.  It's as simple as that!

My Research Methods

I like to browse different keywords I want to use for my post on TikTok.  I only use three to five keywords in my post, and I use the same keywords over and over again.  After looking at people who have done their own research to assess how TikTok works, I have gathered the best way for me to help myself is to use consistent keywords so the system can understand what type of content I am putting out and how to categorize me.  It takes a lot to narrow down to just 3 to 5 keywords, but my keywords are broad yet specific at the same time. 

While browsing on TikTok to help me with my research, here is the step-by-step of what I do

1. I go to the search icon and put in words that I would want to search to find the products I want to buy.  People don't come on TikTok most of the time to buy things; they come to learn and be entertained.

2. Once I find a video that aligns with the products I am selling I take a screenshot of the keywords used and make a note of which ones were used based upon the amount of activity and views that video had received.  I click on each keyword to see the number of videos attached to see if it would align best with me to go into my three to five keywords or if it's just a random keyword they're using just to be put somewhere to hopefully get views.

After doing this so many times, I realized that people put anything in their hashtags that has nothing to do with their products.  It doesn't matter if the person has a lot of views or no views. They always seem to just cluster all of their keywords to anything, even non-related things, in hopes of their video getting reviewed.  I have realized as well that none of those videos are properly categorized by TikTok, so I quickly understood this is not something I what to do because I want my video to populate in the category from search results.

3. While researching these videos for their hashtags, I'm also watching the videos to see how they have created the video and what they did to make people want to comment, give them a heart, like, and share.  

Since I am creating products to use with my kids anyway my only concern is I want to keep my children from being shown on the app.  So, I need to find a way to show my children using my products without being as salesy as my other videos were.  The goal is to be informational and to help people who want to teach their children at home find my product useful without me needing to shove it in their faces. 

4. Now that I have the hashtags and I understand the many ways people are creating their videos to promote a product, I'm going to take all of that and figure out my own strategy for making my videos and what three to five keywords I want to put on all of my videos consistently.  Now, that may be a time where I make a product that falls outside of those keywords, and I will find one hashtag keyword to include at that time only.

Another thing I have realized from a recently viral video on my other account is when people put the word of what I am trying to sell in their comments multiple times, and I say it in my video multiple times, it will help the algorithm know how to categorize my videos.  I just stumbled upon that based on my own experience and other people talking about it who sell courses and things.  

My Action Plan

My action plan right now for the month of April will consist of

1. Creating more activity-related products to post on TikTok.

2. Create YouTube videos about my products and how to utilize them to help parents who have younger kids learn while they are home before they enter traditional school.

3. I will post my products and videos on Pinterest to get traffic to my YouTube account, build up my subscribers, and hopefully become monetized this year.

4. Upload my products on Etsy, as this will help my brand get more exposure for free on this massive platform.

5. Heavenly promotes my website on the products I will sell through Etsy so I can direct traffic to my website versus only getting sales on outside platforms.  

I'll report back on what transpired.