Web Store Marketing Tips

Getting traffic to a new or old website can be a difficult task, at first, if you do not have a plan. One great way to get your website known is to start with your family and friends. Ask them to go to your site and check out what you have going on. Once they have checked out your site ask them to pass the info on to the people that they know as well. This will help generate some traffic flow to the site. A small community of user can quickly turn into a large number.

Once you get people there, you want them to continue to return as well. A great option to get people to come is to offer discounts or special onetime deals. Many sites offer a small discount on your first order. This is the kind of thing that a lot of users are looking for. “Buy one, get one” is a great tactic to get people to your site. People truly feel that they are getting a great deal with these kinds of offers. Free shipping on orders that are more than a certain amount is also a good way to get people to buy from you. If there are two products for the same amount, then the price of shipping could be the deciding factor. Eliminating the shipping will greatly increase your chances of a sale in a large market.

Placing your items for sell on sites such as eBay and Amazon will greatly increase the traffic and the possibility of sales. Your items on a popular shopping site with a back link to yours will allow the purchaser to search your site for more items. This will give you a higher percentage of a sale and a return visit.

Once you get people to your site, you want to use this opportunity to prompt them to return. Offering customers a place to sign up for newsletters or updates is a great way to remind people of your site since these reminders will go directly to their personal email address. Emailing new deals is a great way to increase your odds of returning customers. Emailing customers is great, but often times these emails are just deleted. Using a strong tag line offering a great deal will increase the odds of them actually reading the email or newsletter. Frees shipping or new product information is great way to get their attention.

While you are trying to get people to your site, you are going to come across things like AdWords offered by Google. This is a great way to generate traffic to your site, but these services are not free. Generating traffic to your site will mostly cost you some money at one point in time. Using a “pay per click” service is definitely a great option for getting your web address available for a lot of people to see. Though this kind of service is not a guarantee, it will still increase the odds of visitors. The more visitors that you have; the higher chance you have to make money. There is no way to guarantee how much money you will make, but this service gives you a better chance of visitors to your site on a daily basis.

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Easy Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

You have your website up. You realize it now needs to be marketed. You want to start making sales and you may even be slightly disappointed with the grand opening. You are way to early in the game to start being concerned at this point. Websites always take time to grow, to gain reputation, and generally it takes time just to be found on the internet. This is not a process that is going to happen overnight. Below are some tips that you can do to help get your website moving.

#1: Take action with the free marketing methods

A simple quick search on Google will give you hundreds of results on free marketing methods, but really there are several that I would encourage you to look into. Below I have created a short list and while they do not give a lengthy description of how to perform each one, a simple search will reveal how to perform each of them. Essentially, these are techniques used by some of the highest level professionals who run successful and profiting internet businesses. Generally, these do take a considerable amount of time, but you may find that it is worth it in the end. This is especially the case if you have extra time and you are simply unsure of how to draw traffic to your ecommerce website.

Article Marketing

Directory Submission

Social Bookmarking

Social Networking

#2: Get active within communities

Whether it is on a local level or on the internet you should definitely consider getting active within a community that would be interested in your products. It would be best if you did not limit yourself and simply tried to be active in every community that you can gain access to.

So what exactly does this mean? I am recommending that you step away from your little office and start doing some leg work. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you own an ecommerce store that sales lathes, table saws, and sanders. Spending time playing games on the internet all day does little to help your business. However, if you spent more time in woodworking forums and speaking with contractors in your local area this is a great way to spread the word and find potential buyers who might be looking for one of the items you have for sell. This does not cost you any money and many people find it to be the more enjoyable part of doing business online as you meet others who are passionate about the same things you are.

#3: Always test and analyze your traffic

One thing you certainly want to do is always analyze where your traffic is coming from and which traffic is converting. Use tools like Google Analytics to help you in this process as it makes it very easy to read and figure out. While you are reviewing the traffic, capitalize on what is working. After you have tested out some of the free methods, you should contemplate determining what is not working as well. In essence, you want to maximize the profitability of your time and investments. When things are not working, you scratch that off of the marketing plan and test something else out. You can even tweak those things that seem to be converting for you. Often times, simple things like colors you might use, placement of your advertisements on a page, and the words you use can all have a fairly big impact on how much traffic you get.

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Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – Link Building

If you are like me you enjoy being independent. Regardless of the reason, you probably came to this article to find out how to start the link building process for your ecommerce website. Whether you simply ran out of funds to have someone else do it or you would rather invest that money elsewhere, you came to the right place. While this next question may throw you off guard if you are not familiar with SEO at all, it does have a lot to do with link building.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a short name given to a any link that is from another website that has a destination of your website. Therefore, if you own an ecommerce website called johndoesbikeshop.com and the webmaster from reallycoolbikestores.com linked to it on his website. That link would be considered a backlink.

What is link building?

Link building is any process that you take to obtain backlinks in effort to rank better within search engines. In a nutshell, anytime you are going out of your way to get a link from another website back to your own website (also referred to as backlinks) then you are link building. Therefore, there are many things you can do that could be considered link building.

How should link building be done for ecommerce?

Now that you know what backlinks and link building are we can move on to the more in depth stuff of the actual process. For an ecommerce store, it is imperative that the anchor text used in your backlinks is relative to the products or services you are offering. For example, many times people will get a backlink but the anchor text might be “click here”. Google does in fact count that as a vote to have your site rank when someone searches for “click here”. However, this does little to help considering you probably will not convert traffic that come to your site after searching for that term. Therefore, if you have any say in the process you should make the anchor text of all backlinks relative to your products or services. For example, if you are selling bikes, you want people who search for “buy bikes” or “bikes for sale” to find your website on the search engines. This, then, should be the anchor text used on your backlinks.

How do I start link building?

Link building is not a one time thing. You will never be able to say, “Okay, I am done with my link building for this website.” Instead, even if you are number one for a specific keyword, you will still have to do more link building because you know that there are other competitors trying to take your spot. Not only will they try, but if Google sees that there is more interest in their website than yours, you will quickly be replaced because Google will think that they are more relative than you are. It is safe to say this is a process that will never end during the time that you own an ecommerce store. You will constantly want to tell people about your site and gain links back to your store’s website.

The upside to this is that the methods of link building can be quite simple. Sometimes people will use services such as linkxl.com or text-link-ads.com but this has been spoken plainly by Google that they frown upon such services. Therefore, other methods can be taken that are also effective. Below is a short list of things you can do to help build backlinks for your ecommerce website.

1: Directory Submissions – Submit your website to directories online.

2: Article Marketing – Place content online at article directories with a link or two back to your ecommerce website.

3: Social Bookmarking – Link to content on your own site through sites like digg, delicious, and reddit.

4: Social Networking – Talk to others and link back to your website when you feel that your website is relative to the conversation.

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Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – On-Site Optimization

On-site optimization is a key element to any ecommerce website hoping to get traffic from search engines. Generally, search engines use software or robots that view your website. These robots then have to determine what your website is about based on what is on it. The problem is that if your website is not optimized properly it could land unfound in search engines or maybe even in search results that will never generate any buyers for you.

First, we must look at what a keyword is. Essentially, it can be a single word, but is typically a group of words that people might search for to find your website relevant to what they want. So for example, you may have an ecommerce website that sells curtains. A possible keyword would be “curtains for sale”. This might be a term that people would search for in order to find your website. I am not saying that this is a definite good keyword because you need to do research to determine if people even searching for that, how much competition, or if there might be better untapped keywords out there that you could rank easily for and convert into sales.

So now that we know that you have to have a keyword for on-site optimization, you may be asking yourself, “How does this relate”? Generally, it relates in every way because you will be using your keywords throughout your website. Let me give you a perfect example, the Title of your page is very important to robots. It is intended to be a brief overview of what your website is about. This title is the text that appears at the top of a browser but is generated through a tag in HTML within the section. If your title is “Welcome to my awesome curtain website” then you might rank well for “awesome curtain website” which probably has little traffic and is not relevant to you actually selling curtains.

Now here is the kicker, you do not want to use the same keyword on every single page. You should perhaps use your best selling and most popular items in the keyword on your front page as well as the actual page selling those items. However, if you also sell curtain rods or drapes on a different page, you can change that title and use a different keyword for that page. Google actually recommends this and you may hurt yourself if you simply throw a single keyword around everywhere possible. You must have a title and use keywords that are relevant to what is on that page.

Where else other than the title can I place a keyword?

There are numerous places that robots will look. Below are a few places that I would highly recommend using your keywords at.

#1: H1 HTML Tags – H1 tags are HTML tags that help outline a page. For example, when you were in English class you probably had to have an outline. Google prefers that you do the same thing on your own websites. H1 is generally an overview of what is below. The next level would be H2, which should contain contents of H1. H3 is generally the lowest level that website will go and it should be the littlest details. Below is a brief outline based on previous examples of a curtain ecommerce website.

H1 – Curtains for Sale

H2 – Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Pink Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Purple Ruffled Curtains

H2 – Straight Curtains

H3 – Pink Straight Curtains

H3 – Purple Straight Curtains

#2: Within the Content of Your Website

The robots these days are quite complex. They actually read what you have on the website including your entire content. The words on the page about having curtains for sale should indicate that you do have “curtains for sale”. You should have that placed somewhere in your content and you should make easily visible. At the same time there has to be a balance, your content should flow naturally and you should avoid placing your keywords in areas where it does not make sense or read well. The goal is to help your website visitors at the same time find what they are looking for.

Please note that Google claims to have roughly 200 things that they judge a website on to see where it fits best. Many of these are based on what you have on your website. While I just touched the surface on other places to use keywords, there are numerous other techniques that you may find beneficial for your website. Generally, if you follow the rules of placing keywords that are relevant Google and other search engines will reward you.

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Marketing Your Ecommerce Website

To be quite honest, marketing your ecommerce website deserves much more detail than this single article. There are entire books devoted to some of the smaller aspects of marketing a website. So for this section, I am going to go over some of the common methods that you will find to bring people to your website. Some of them may intrigue you and I would encourage you to read more on those individual topics that you think might be good avenues to take for your ecommerce website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably one of the more popular and most discussed marketing methods. You may be telling yourself that this sounds way too complicated or technical. Really, it is not.

To explain what it is, I first have to explain a little bit about how search engines operate. We will use Google as our example because it is the most popular search engine in the United States. When you go to Google, type in a “keywords” to search on, it pulls up several results, sometimes millions. Now, Google does not have little workers that manually go through each website on the internet and determine keywords that are related to it. This would take countless hours and would be unproductive. Instead, they have what people call the “Google algorithm”. As Google finds new websites through its software, it determines what it is related to. It uses a wide variety of things to do this, the title of the page, the content, and who is linking to the website, what keywords people are using in their links when they do link to it, the domain name, etc. There is a huge list of factors that play a role in SEO. The act of marketing from your end, is to make your website easy for the Google software to determine what your website is about. Therefore, ranking you better than many other websites that Google is unable to tell what their website is about. The end goal is to have your website listed in the top few results when they are searching for your products or services.

Direct Advertising

This is one of the most popular marketing methods. It is simply like a billboard except on the internet. You place advertisements for your products or services on other peoples websites that might have traffic who would be interested in what you offer. For example, if you sell motorcycles, you might place a banner on a forum that has people who are interested in motorcycles on it.

Pay Per Click

This is one of the quickest methods to getting traffic to your website. The problem is that if you do not know what you are doing, you may never see a return on your investment. I highly recommend you read a lot about PPC before you ever get involved.

The actual process however is placing your website within search results at places like Google when people are searching on keywords. For example, you could pay $2.00 per visitor for when someone searches on “Motorcycle” at Google. This would actually not be a good keyword to buy because it is too broad. But again, this is a simple overview and you should read more into PPC if you decide to take this route.

Smaller Free Methods

Generally, these methods are not quite as good. At the same time they are worth mentioning because you will read about them elsewhere. These take time and effort, but if you have time to spend to build your website up, you might as well do these to gain some extra traffic. Many of these are related to SEO, so you there are side benefits as well.

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Essential Internet Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

As you have started your online ecommerce store, chances are you are preparing for an extravagant opening. Advertising and marketing is necessary to inform others of your latest endeavor. Internet marketing is significant for retail stores.

Quit being on the low side and see your website gather cob webs. It doesn’t matter if you trade merchandise online or own a single-page site- there are essential methods to generate increased traffic from your online existence. Enhance your exposure through the following internet marketing tips for ecommerce.

• Press release
Among the most rapid method to let other be informed about your store, products and services is through submitting press releases. Media channels are entirely flourishing on press releases daily. The profusion of online report distribution services make it convenient for retailers to broadcast their latest product lines and special events.

• Product Feeds

Online sellers should be knowledgeable of the benefits of product feeds. This will assist you in widening audience reach. Product feed is merely a file produced from the site which contains product information like photos, pricing, descriptions and specials. These can be sent to shopping comparison sites and search engines.

• Share Your Expertise

There are several methods on how a seller can appear as expert in a particular industry. One approach is to host sessions, workshops or seminars. Another method is to agree to educate relevant continuing courses at local colleges. Online sellers are aware that a well known approach to share expertise and acquire additional exposure is to create content for gratis distribution. Article advertising has the capability to enhance awareness of the sellers existence offline and online.

• Send Out Newsletters

Newsletters and email marketing are the solutions to maintain communication with returning clients and potential buyers. It takes great effort to entice customers. Why would you let a visitor to leave your site without presenting a method to stay in touch?

• Website Submission

Most owners submit their websites to major search engines and relax to anticipate for visitors to come. Sad to say, there is more than just submitting your site. Website owners often overlook the entire directories available.

Search for dedicated link directories as well as niche sites to send your business details and site. This will not only enhance your link popularity, but will drive huge targeted traffic to the online store.

• Personalized Commercials

Online video marketing permits the retailer to expand the contact of their message with a bigger audience for a small investment. Compared with the conventional marketing, creating a unique online advertisement or video to express your message can get a high return of investment.

• Social Networking

LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking may be helpful in increasing sales and advertising your products. These are the areas where most of the target audience usually hangs out so you must also be there. Blogs provided on these areas assist the online sellers to be communicating with shoppers, generate announcements, or feature their latest promotions as well as merchandises. This will make it possible to meet new customers.

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Social Marketing: The Key to Success for Any Business

Social marketing is the use of marketing strategies to promote a certain product or service to the society using their ideas, behavior and attitude. For example, you can put a sign “Drink in Moderation” right below a beer ad. In a way, you are promoting the product and at the same time giving a sound advice to the consumer. Social Marketing was created in the 1970s as a means to gain more merits by seeking the society’s approval through identifying their wants and needs.

There are many concepts involved in social marketing. They will help us get a better understanding of why it is instrumental to the success of any business.

• Its main function is to influence people. By being able to find out what the customers want from the product or service you are offering, it will be easier to adapt to that and be able to manipulate the way they think in a positive way.

• The focus is not the marketer but the target customers. Reach out and talk to them, or hire someone who will do that for you. You base your marketing strategy on their wants and needs, and nothing else. It should be from the customers’ point of view and not from the marketer’s point of view because these two things can be entirely different.

• When you get a better understanding of the wants and needs of the customers are, put them into action right away. It should be applied in the product or service by highlighting the benefits. It can also have something to do with the price. You can ask yourself if the price is reasonable or competitive after putting into consideration the level of quality your products have.

• Promote products in places where people can actually find out about what you have to offer. Aside from promotion, your product or service should also be made available to people at any given time. You may have very good “influence” on the target market but the products are out of stock most of the time so, what good will that do?

• Monitor the market and be wary of competitors who may give you negative publicity. You have to be prepared to counteract such problems for your social marketing to be effective.

• The marketplace is constantly changing and so programs must be regularly monitored and management must be prepared to rapidly alter strategies and tactics.

Many sites offer social marketing opportunities for businesses such as Flickr, Wiki, Bebo and MySpace. With these sites, individuals and organizations can seek better ways to talk to people, understand their needs and at the same time market their products and services.

Sometimes businesses hesitate to accept the social marketing concepts for various reasons. But people should be aware that since the birth of this concept, many have succeeded in their businesses by simply using social marketing as a tool to gain more sales. The reason is simple- social marketing gives people what they want and need.

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Online Marketing for Ecommerce Sites

Marketing is of huge importance in the online industry. This is a totally different ballgame than the typical businesses down the road from your house. Where in typical brick and mortar businesses there has been a standard of “build it and they will come”. This is not the case for the online industry. If you wanted to compare your internet business to an offline business it would be like building a store in the most remote location and the only way to get business is to drive a bus to and from your store.

Your ecommerce website is going to be unknown originally and the only way most people will know of it without any marketing will be if they just happen to stumble across it. The bus you are driving is the marketing method. To get it going, you are going to find people who are interested in your store and drive them to your website. If the people you were driving were interested in your store to begin with, it increases the chances that they will buy something once they get there. This is the overall concept of online business marketing. You absolutely have to jump headfirst into the marketing game to be successful.

It is all about testing

Now with the above analogy, hopefully you understand that you are going to have to market your business. The idea now though is to take a step back and be rational about your thinking. Not all of your marketing ventures are going to be successful. In fact, a good portion of them will not be. This means that whatever you are doing, you should analyze how much traffic you are receiving and evaluate your return on investment (ROI). If the ROI is not high enough, get out or modify the marketing plan.

The many places to advertise

There are numerous things that you can do online to drive traffic to your website. This topic alone deserves numerous articles and there are hundreds of lengthy books on this topic. I do not have anything to recommend to you, but rather, just get out there and start reading. Below, I have a few of the most commonly used methods to bringing traffic to a website.

Direct Advertising

Direct advertising is the term that is given to the method of going out to related websites and paying to place banners or links back to your website from one that already has a significant amount of traffic. The idea is that the advertising website has traffic that might be interested in your products. They will click your advertisement and hopefully purchase an item.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization has really become popular over the last five years. Google receives several million searches per day. A good portion of those people are likely looking to buy products that you have for sale. The problem is that your website is listed on the 15th page for “good smelling candles” and no one ever goes that far down the list to find your website. You have to invest time and often money into what is called search engine optimization (SEO) to get ranked higher.

Pay Per Click

Google’s system called “Adwords” has really helped many businesses that want to see immediate results from their efforts. Businesses who are in highly competitive markets may find this worthwhile. These are simply the advertisements listed on the far right when you do a search at Google, usually under “Sponsored Ads”. The businesses that advertise there are paying for each click on their advertisement that they receive. Too competitive of markets can make it a poor choice though.

Since the clicks are based on bidding, it is not uncommon to have to pay four to eight dollars for a single targeted visitor. Do as much research on this topic before you invest into it. Many people have lost their shirts off their back when not bidding properly or keeping an eye on their pay per click advertising.

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