My last article discussed the 7 steps for building a profitable online store. Many website owners think that after their store has been built that it will attract traffic automatically. After several weeks of not generating any sales they realize something must be wrong but don’t understand why. Building an e-commerce website is just the first stage of making your store profitable. You must put a marketing plan into action to attract visitors.
7 Ways to Generate Traffic To Your Online Store
1. Optimize your web pages for the search engines
Search engines find pages by the keywords used. Include keywords in your meta tags, header tags (h1, h2, h3), file names, image descriptions, product descriptions, navigation, links and throughout your web copy. When the search engine spiders crawl your site they’ll find your optimized web pages.
2. Optimize each product page
Instead of just inserting a picture of a product in your store include an optimized description by writing a paragraph or two containing your main keywords. Include these keywords in the title meta tag, description meta tag and keywords meta tag of your product page. If you have 1000s of product pages you’ll have 1000s entry points to your site .This will result in increased traffic and sales.
3. Build backlinks
Search engines will index your website if it receives links from other sites. The quality and quantity of links pointing to a page will determine its rankings. Avoid getting links just to your home page. Try to build links to all your internal pages as well so it will strengthen the link popularity of your whole site.
4. Write and publish articles
Google and other major search engines thrive on new content. Write articles about your products and submit them to article directories based in your specific category. Keep in mind you can only promote your product in the resource box at the end of your article.
Ask ezine publishers and blog owners in your niche if they accept guest articles. If your article gets published in a popular blog or ezine you may receive a flood of visitors.
5. Build community with social networking
If you engage in conversations with your online audience they’ll get to know, like and trust you. Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to interact with people in your niche and invite them to your online store. It’s easier to sell them products once they know you rather than people who have never interacted with you.
6. Publish a newsletter
It’s easier to sell to people who have already bought from you than selling to cold contacts. If you warm up your cold contacts they will be more inclined to buy your products. Publishing a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your customers. Use it to announce sales, offer coupons, latest news and provide valuable content.
Use a professional email list provider to store all your contacts in an online database. It will also enable you to schedule the delivery of your newsletter at anytime (next week if you prefer) from anywhere you have internet access.
7. Monitor your traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of your online store. If you don’t continuously send traffic to your store it will never become profitable. Use the statistics package included with your web hosting account or install Google Analytics code on your web pages to track your visitors. It will show how many visitors you received each day, week and month, where they came from and what keywords they used to find your site in the search engines.
Traffic means nothing if you don’t convert visitors into buyers. Continuously test different components of your web pages (ie web copy, design, etc) to improve conversion rates. Higher conversion rates lead to more sales. Sign up for a professional email list provider to store all your contacts in an online database for easy access. It will enable you to schedule the delivery of your newsletter at any time from any location that has internet access.
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I certainly agree with the points above. Point 4 in particular is very true, it’s so important to continue to generate new and interesting content, not just for Google, but also for the visitors to your site.
Sometimes it is not a good idea to sell links on your blog, largely because search engines such as Google frown upon it. If they find out that you’ve been selling links on your blog, you might find that your page ranking moves down as a result. This can then make it harder for web users to find your blog when they are searching online, which could mean that you get less traffic, which means you’ll get fewer clicks on your already-existing ads and therefore less revenue. http://www.shelcorp.com/2011/09/should-you-sell-links-on-your-blog/