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.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business (and without hiring your own software development team): online ecommerce shopping cart software, email marketing software, and content management system software by Interspire.

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.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Basic SEO Guide for Ecommerce Websites

This is yet another topic that deserves a book to be written on it. The problem is that I can not recommend a book. In fact, this industry changes so quickly as Google tweaks their algorithm it is difficult to determine what the most important factors are. However, I will try to point out those that very few people will dispute as the big ones. Others are there just for your benefit to be aware of.

First off, there are two major categories in SEO. There is on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Generally, most everyone will start with the on-site SEO because you want Google to recognize what your website is about. If they do not, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword? These spiders that crawl your website will be looking at several different attributes on each page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google’s website.

Another note worth mentioning: What is a keyword? A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your website. I have been using a motorcycle website as an example throughout, so I’ll continue to do that. People could search for “motorcycle”, but they might also search for “buy motorcycle”, “black motorcycles”, “Harley Davidson motorcycle for sale”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases. However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note below that almost all on-site SEO has to do with is placing good quality keywords throughout your website where Google’s robots, spiders, or software might be able to determine what your website is about.

On-Site SEO Factors

1: The Title of the Page

2: The keywords used throughout the text on the website.

3: What keywords are used in H1 tags.

4: Keywords used in your domain name

5: Keywords used in the URL of a webpage.

6: Meta Keywords

Off-Site SEO

1: Links Pointing to Your Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a unique motorcycle, and you have it for sell, they may link to your website with “unique motorcycle” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

2: Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Harley Davidson’s official website or something along those lines.

3: The Age of Your Website

I listed this as an off-site related issue but really it doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks. I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this than Google does.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

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.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Capturing Your Target Market through Online Marketing

In the world of business and marketing, the most powerful form of advertisement is the word of mouth. And since business today can be done through the web, online advertisement now becomes very powerful as well. With a glowing fact that most of the people use the computer and get connected to the internet everyday, marketing the products and services of a certain business will be that easy. Given this, most businesses utilize online marketing approach to effectively target their potential market segment and save on marketing expenses. How can a business operation or any form of e-commerce capture the potential online market?

To start with, a company or a business retailer should have a website that contains information a customer would need such as company or business profile, products and services offered, benefits and disadvantages, availability, etc. To have a website that appeals to the customers, consult a trusted website designer who can provide you with different options and knows how to come up with a creative website appearance. Usually, how the website looks and its attractiveness is a big factor in getting big chances of being noticed.

Now that you have a website, another important step you need to do is place your website or link to directory listings like Yahoo and Google. The primary site should be on the list so that customers can still search for your link even after it has long been launched. In order to generate traffic in your marketing pages, an effective approach would be affiliate marketing. This means that you tie up with or partner with other websites that have the same potential market you’re targeting by adding your website as a link to their site. Make sure though, that the affiliate marketer does a good job in advertising your services.

Customers consider the values and benefits offered by a certain product or service before they decide to purchase. Where the product has more positive feedback or comments, customers would go for that particular product. So, in your online marketing campaign, it is very helpful to include testimonials from customers who have tested and proven the effectiveness of the product. In fact, testimonies are the most powerful technique to sell a product or service. This builds a certain level of trust among potential purchasers on what you are selling leading to product purchase. Testimonials should be convincing and persuading to make it even more effective.

There are customers who tend to question the truth in online marketing and so they become uncertain in their buying decisions. A good way to get them rid of this hesitancy is through guarantees. It could be a 100% satisfaction guarantee or a money back guarantee which is the more common way of making customers feel at ease with what they’re purchasing.

Online or internet marketing is indeed a modern means of advertising your product or services. Apart from easily targeting your preferred market segment, it doesn’t need so much effort on your part when it comes to dissemination of information about your product.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

How You Can Take Advantage of Social Media Sites

If you have decided to jump on the bandwagon and join thousand of people using social marketing as a tool to grow their business, then you are on the right track. Social marketing has proven to be effective and sustainable in influencing the target market to buy your products and services. One of the most utilized strategies is by tapping on social marketing sites that are popping up everywhere. Of course it is necessary to choose only those that are reliable and good for your ecommerce business. Among the most popular social marketing sites today are:

• Flickr: It is perhaps the best online photo sharing site in the world. It allows you to showcase photos to friends, family and even to those you do not know. Launched 5 years ago, it now has more than 3 billion photos stored. It is a great site to promote your business.

• YouTube: This video social marketing site works wonders for any business. With YouTube, we can share videos for everyone to see. By uploading some videos, you will have people comment and share ideas on your page, which is a great way to understand your target market.

• Metacafe: It is the number 2 site for video social marketing. You can upload and share videos about your products and services so people will know who you are and what you have to offer.

• Digg: In this website, you will find everything you need- from articles, blogs, insights, etc. If you like to improve your marketing and sales, then you need to get started with Digg. This is especially helpful for those who are new to social marketing.

• MySpace: With the music and video now part of its package, MySpace has definitely become one of the top social marketing sites in the world. It has high exposure to most countries in the West and East. Asia is also quite into MySpace too. With so many people joining MySpace, it will be easier to find your target market here.

Social media sites are indeed very helpful in getting you on track with your business goals. In so many ways, they allow you to stay connected to your target customers through photo and video sharing, blogging, commenting, and many more. The important thing with social marketing is you need to be able to keep up with the demand. People feed you with information- they tell you what they want and what they do not want, and in return, they expect you to be able to address their concerns. As a good social marketer, you have to be ready for any challenges that come your way when you use these social marketing tools.

As any good social marketer knows, being prepared for anything is vital to the success of your business. If you can do this, if you can apply the techniques involved in the social marketing process, then go ahead and tell the whole world about your business. You will find that it is probably one of the best things you have ever done.

Grow your web business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

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.

Learn how you can increase your Internet business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Crushing the Marketing Competition

Everything is set for the launching of your online store. You have the items readied, an Internet Merchant Account and Drop Shipping Provider waiting for the first transaction, a Shopping Cart Software customized for your site and a perfect website and domain name to lure your prospect customers into buying. You are one step away from your most awaited day but before getting into it, make sure you make the necessary marketing strategies so that it would indeed be a grand launching.

With the vast resources that we have right now, most especially with the help of the internet, we can market our business as much as we can, anyway we want to. Here is a list of some of the best and most effective ways of campaigning your market to success:

Observe Your Competitors

Check out their websites and see what has made their site popular to people. Check their statistics and try to improve whatever they have in the site. Be as objective as possible- if you liked their business then chances are many other people also liked it. Be a recipient of their mailing list and see what’s inside their list which makes the customers go back for more. Don’t think of their success as your downfall, be positive and smart- bank on their success. Begin with what they have and improve it.

Blog Your Way to Success

Blogging is free so why not take this chance and sell your products through content filled articles which can boost your online sales. With a blog, you don’t need to acquire new items for the customers to return to your site, all you need are contents which the customers would look forward to. Try making articles about the hottest and best selling items, try to segment them into pieces, releasing them say once or twice a week- and that would give customers something to look forward to. Tips about your items and many other topics can be posted in a blog. Just see to it that they are all somehow related to our business.

Get Inside Their Inboxes

It may sound illegal but it’s not. You may send them newsletters by inviting them on your mailing list. With the help of your newsletters, you can constantly update them with what’s going on in your business, what items are on sale, what items could give them the best deal, and all those marketing strategies needed to gravitate them into visiting your site. Links are very important and should be included in your newsletter. That way, they won’t need to type the site and search for it. One click will do and they will surely love it.

Pay Per Click Advertising

A pay per click advertising is a very efficient and cost-effective tool in marketing a certain business. Unlike having your website published magazines and pay for them at a fixed rate, PPM allows business owners to have their stores advertised and pay for them not on a fixed basis but on the number of responses which customers have made. It makes advertising a lot easier and cheaper.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are very common nowadays and are being utilized by people of all ages. Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Multiply- all these are valuable tools which an online seller can use to make more customers. Imagine millions of people visiting these sites on a daily basis? Well trying your luck through these social networking sites is worth the effort. And by saying worth the effort, I mean social networking sites are free to use, and all you need is a little effort on your part to make an account and customize your profile to suit your business.

There are many other strategies which can make your online business boom into success like posting demo videos and audios, search engine optimization, and the like. The mentioned strategies are the easiest and by far the most successful ways to market your online store.

A modern day gold rush, as we may call it- the online selling boom has overgrown many businesses and has attracted many business men to venture into this rapidly growing market. Furthermore, competition in this very liquid market is as tough as it is in the real world of physical businesses. And just like an ordinary competition, there are ways by which one can gain an edge over the other.

Can’t wait? Well work on these stuffs and surely, your store’s future success would be really worth the waiting. Good luck on your business venture!

Learn how you can increase your Internet business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.