Running any type of website online requires a great deal of work due to the competitive nature of the web, however, that work pays off for those persistent and innovative with their approach. For those running an ecommerce store online, your website is no exception … in fact, it may be even more difficult due to how much competition is online and offline.
Today, I want to talk about how to increase the traffic to your ecommerce store, so if you’re just starting out or if you’ve been running a store for a while, check out the following tips for inspiration and ideas you can apply toward your own projects.
Publish A Lot of Helpful Content
The number one thing you can do to increase the traffic (organically) is to create content and publish it to the web within your store. It’s important that it’s hosted somewhere on your website, because this attracts traffic from search engines, and it would do you little favor to host it somewhere else and try to force people back to your store — a pretty common mistake a lot of people make when they opt to create external blogs.
The idea behind the notion that content is king isn’t about sheer amount — the search engines have made sure of that by updating their algorithms, — but rather it’s about quality. Create content that provides people solutions to their problems, musing they might be interested in, or information they want or need.
Be helpful and you’ll gain the traffic over time, build your brand as a source of information, and move the products you hope to sell.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Aside from organic traffic, pay per click advertising is probably the absolute best method to increasing traffic to your ecommerce website. the downside is, it costs money … the more traffic you get, the more you spend, so be careful when venturing into the PPC arena or you might find yourself way past your advertising budget.
This method of building your traffic will attract a lot of people, but unlike organic, those people might not be the most ideal audience for the products you’re selling.
The best way to think about PPC advertising is this: While organic search traffic is slow and free, PPC is fast but pricey.
Share Your Content With Friends
Never underestimate your friends — the social networking world has enabled us to reach an awesome amount of people with the help of our friends. So whether you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, be sure to share your content. Ask for help every now and then — it’s perfectly acceptable so long as you don’t start spamming people with your promotion and information.
Friends are usually happy to help out if they see benefit in it for you, so be sure to tell them why they should share your content, bookmark it, like it, or plus one it. Tell them how their contribution will help you and that you appreciate it.
Share Your Content With Strangers
The other side of social sharing has to do with sharing your content with complete strangers. Though it may not be your first choice in marketing, it’s a tactic that has been proven to work — especially on Twitter and Facebook.
The key to finding success with this technique is to target specific groups of people, which Facebook makes pretty easy with their groups and pages features, and start sharing your content with them regularly. Over time, people will take notice your constant contribution to the niche and start delving into your content. At this point, you can drive them either to your blog, your main website (if separate), or your Facebook page.
Email Marketing
Don’t forget about one of the most powerful marketing tools available — email. Once you start building your email list, which we talked about extensively last week, you can start reaching out to your subscribers — the people that have told you they’re interested in what you have to say. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website during the seasonal rushes, the slow periods, or when you’re having a particular sale.
There’s a line, like all marketing, you need to walk with balance between over and under marketing, but you can tell whether you’re going overboard by the amount of unsubscribes you experience with your email marketing service metrics.
With these basic starters in mind, you should be able to reach out to your collective community and increase the traffic to your website. Have a few other methods you find useful, share them with the community of entrepreneurs here.
image credit: kilted01