Personal New Year’s resolutions are great, but how about some key things to focus on for your own business and, of course, your customers?

This year is going to be the best year yet if you want it to be. Make sure you implement these five New Year’s resolutions for your online shop!

1. Optimise your website

It’s an eternal truth: Business owners are always looking for more traffic to their website and more customers clicking the buy button.

Make website optimisation one of your New Year’s resolutions for your online shop. Of course, there are so many things to optimize on a website such as design, product descriptions, product images, website speed, content, user flow, your sales funnel, your mobile-responsive website, etc.

Since there are 12 months in the year, I suggest you focus on one area of your online shop each month and tackle optimisation in small bits.

I would start with optimising the mobile experience for your customer. Mobile commerce is big, and it will only keep growing (rapidly, too!).

2. Create better content for your blog

Set yourself the challenge of blogging more often. It could be once a week, it could be three times a week… but whatever it is, make sure you stick to it. If you plan your posts and publish them regularly, your customers will expect the consistent stream of content and will return often to read your latest posts.

At Pixc we usually use Asana to plan our content. I also recently came across CoSchedule, which could be useful.

Once you’ve created your blog post each week (or whenever you decide to do it), you can use this content for your newsletter. You should make sure you publish only quality posts rather than focusing exclusively on quantity. Not only will search engines pick up your quality content, but your customers will also love it and keep reading.

3. Do more of what you love

Life’s too short not to do the things you love, and although we have to do things we don’t want to do all the time, it’s important to do more of what we enjoy doing.

If you enjoy doing something, you’re probably good at it (or at least better at it than other things). This year, look at the tasks you can outsource to someone else (such as background removal of your product images). This will ultimately save you time and money so you can focus on what you do best.

4. Run a competition monthly

You might want to run a competition each month to keep your customers and fans engaged in your store and brand. Some competition ideas include running a ‘like’ or a hashtag contest, or running a ‘tag’ contest with user-generated content.

Of course, you’ll want to give away a prize that makes it worth it for your followers so they make an effort and want to join in. Customers love it when they’re competing for a valuable prize!

By the way, make sure you follow the guidelines when running a competition on Facebook. You can run your competitions with third-party apps such as Woobox.

5. Build your mailing list and send a weekly newsletter

A lot of people have said they want to send more emails. I’m all for email marketing!

Facebook has recently announced changes that will affect business pages. This means your post will only be shown to a select few people. You don’t want to lose your fans and followers, so get them to sign up to your mailing list ASAP. For mailing services, I am a big fan of Mailchimp, which connects to most store builder platforms.

I would suggest that you install Hello Bar or SumoMe to grow your mailing list rapidly.

Once you have a mailing list (even if it’s just five people), start sending an email once a week and get people engaged enough to click through to your store. Your newsletter can include your latest products, blog posts or other news from your business. Remember to keep testing your subject lines and delivery times, which you can do in a service like Mailchimp.

I hope this year is your year!

If you have any other New Year’s resolutions for your business, I would love to hear about them! Send me a tweet @hollyccc.

Let Pixc help you focus on what you do best! We’ll remove the backgrounds from your product photos for a stunning result. See what we can do for you with a free photo edit today.

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