October 26, 2016
4 min Read
Marius B.
Ananda Perwira explains how selling one unique Southeast Asian fruit helped his ucokdurian.id make $170K a month.
Horas! I’m Ananda Perwira from Medan, Indonesia. I loved technology since senior high school (at that time, I was crazy about video games, the Internet, and photoshop).
Before I built my own online shop, I did different jobs such as wedding photo editor, concrete factory worker, worked in wood / plantation industry, also as a freelance blogger, customer support, then I was trusted as marketing manager of Niagahoster – one of the fastest growing web hosting companies in Indonesia. Life is tough, right?
In 2016, I built a website ucokdurian.id where I sell durian online (a fruit mostly found in southeast Asia) from Medan to all Indonesia.
The idea came up when it was hard for me to find good durians in another city while working at Niagahoster.
Meanwhile, my hometown Medan – Sumatera Utara, is the largest durian producing state in Indonesia. I loved durian, so why not? To sell durian from Medan (smiles).
With simple research by using Google Keyword Planner, I saw a great opportunity for this favorite local fruit but no one was interested in growing this kind a business. They may say it’s too local or traditional. However, I saw Gojek, the fastest growing tech company in Indonesia, and I came up with a simple idea: to provide tasty durians to all people in Indonesia.
To start this business, I didn’t have to build something sophisticated or apps like what Facebook or Google does. The internet provided all tools I needed. To get my first users, I only needed to build a simple website with nice content. Almost everything is free. But I needed to read, try and learn a lot.
First of all, I learned English. This is an important part since the beginning. Internet provides a plethora of information, and the majority is in English. So I learn it independently from a dictionary and grammar books.
The second part was to learn about hosting and WordPress. I was 000webhost.com (hosting provider) free user since high school. I learned about web hosting and WordPress. It’s something that my school or college didn’t teach me. I did it as a hobby, I wrote a lot of articles, became paid blogger, and then I was hired as technical support. This experience gave me the knowledge I needed to build the website in a simple way.
No secret here, what I needed were:
Content is king. Good content is the way I convince visitors to buy my products. Good content is about good copywriting, good images, good icons, visible business address and contact. Where did I learn this? I love to read Hubspot, ConversionXL, Optimizely, QuickSprout.
No, I did web marketing. Growing your business online is not something you can do overnight. It’s about consistency in web marketing.
I learned about search engine optimization (SEO). Content is king. But SEO is queen. SEO is the way to maximize the impact of my content. It’s about optimizing web structures, content structures, keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, internal links, external links, page URLs, web page speed, backlinks, social shares, google my business, and so on. SEO is always changing so I need to stay up to date with the latest technology. Some good resources I read is Moz, SearchEngineLand, Yoast and KissMetrics.
Indonesian is mainly active on Facebook, so I took the opportunity. We regularly post nice pictures, promo and price updates on @ucokdurian.id fan page. We always try to reply all comments as soon as possible and buy some ads to boost the posts. Currently, we managed to reach more than 10M people, get more than 23K fans and 32K shares.
To convince people. Online transaction is about trust. However, many websites or online shops in Indonesia are just a scam. To convince people, we always provide real photos via facebook, WhatsApp, or BBM. We also registered and verified our address to Google Map or Google My Business.
The biggest sources come from Google organic search and social (Facebook). However, I needed to maximize all channels to convert web visitors into real customers. We used responsive and persuasive customer support via Whatsapp, retargeting Facebook, and Instagram ads.
The word of mouth also helped us a lot.
Yes, but I would do it sooner. I doubted the idea of this business at the first time. I have been thinking about it since 2015 but took action in 2016. Why? Because I was afraid to fail. However, if I didn’t try, I ensured my failure. So here are some tips for you who are just starting to learn how to sell online.
April 21, 2018
I would like to voice my gratitude for your kind-heartedness giving support to individuals that should have assistance with in this situation. Your real dedication to getting the solution along had become astonishingly helpful and has in most cases helped somebody much like me to get to their desired goals. Your new warm and friendly report signifies so much to me and additionally to my office workers. Thank you; from everyone of us.
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