Run your own freelance marketplace, no matter the niche, and you could profit

Run your own freelance marketplace, no matter the niche, and you could profit

If you've been noticing a big trend online, there are plenty of marketplaces popping up for freelancers, and the big winners are the people running the sites.  You can make plenty of money as a freelancer on these platforms, but you could make 100x or even 1,000x the amount of a freelancer if you do things right.

If you're an amazing programmer, you could get your marketplace set up and running today, but it's not necessary anymore, and that's because there are plenty of scripts and plugins that can help you run something like this.  A multi-vendor website is something that is popping up within every niche and industry, so it's time you lock something down and start profiting right away


You'll need to find the right niche
Finding a niche isn't the most difficult thing to do, but finding one that could use a marketplace is a bit tougher.  You can launch your marketplace in any niche you want, but some may not have any need for them, and that's why you need to do your research before launching.

What I like to do is figure out how many businesses are selling their products within the industry to determine if there is a need for a multi-vendor marketplace.  If there are at least a dozen big names within an industry, and there isn't a marketplace for everyone to sell, I'll take note of the industry and niche then move on to find another.

After I get around 5-10 industries within my list, I will go through them one by one and see which has the most potential, and these are usually the ones that are easier to rank in and expand on.  The more difficult the niche, the more complicated it can get in the long run, so start small and build up to bigger and better things later on

There are plenty of plugins, scripts, and themes to choose from
Like I mentioned before, you don't need to be an amazing programmer to get something like this going.  I have a multi-vendor marketplace running right now that focuses on a type of sport, and it does well because I didn't have any competition.  I used the Dokan plugin, which is one of the top of the line multi-vendor plugins but you can use whichever one you prefer. 

You can buy clone sites if that's something you'd prefer, but you should plan on dropping $2,000+ on something like this.  If that's out of your price range, go with a Wordpress theme paired with a multi-vendor plugin, and you will pretty much have the same thing as one of the clone scripts.

Be sure to have a mobile app ready for download
What I love about Wordpress is that there are so many things you can offer your visitors, and that includes a mobile app!  I won't get into too much detail about this, because I already wrote a discussion about that HERE, so be sure to check it out and get started by adding a mobile app to your website for both IOS and Android.  Oh, I forgot to mention that you can do this for free

Get super targeted with your advertising
When it comes to advertising, I tend to start with Adwords and Facebook.  I will have all my retargeting scripts and pixels set up before starting any campaign, which I suggest you do as well, and that allows me to show ads to anyone who leaves my site.  My ads will pretty much follow them around the internet in hopes of bringing them back in lol.

When it comes to targeting, you'll want to be sure you're bidding on exact match keywords and not broad match, but you can expand this later on if you want.  You'll want to be as targeted as possible in the beginning, so you're not burning through your profits too quickly.

Have an onboarding email sequence set up before launch
An onboarding email sequence is something that every business should have up and running, but not as many as you would think take the time to do this.  It's not that difficult, and most email services allow sequences, so be sure to do at least six emails for anyone that signs up to your newsletter or registers on your site. 

These emails can be anything from a welcome email to a newsletter, and even a coupon code for someone to come back and buy again.  Don't get too spammy with these, send out one per week, and you'll see that not many people are unsubscribing


Final Thoughts,
Running a multi-vendor marketplace isn't the most difficult thing to do, it's pretty much the same as running a blog, but you will need to deal with customer orders daily.  You can't forget about this marketplace, but you can hire freelancers to manage it, and that's one of the good things about working online lol.  Find a niche that needs a marketplace, find the right plugins and scripts, then launch when you're ready!


Thanks for reading

- Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey