7 Ways To Generate Traffic To Your Ecommerce Website
June 14th, 2009
Most people are always looking for ways to drive traffic to their ecommerce website. Many times people tend to overlook the basics of ecommerce marketing. I would like to review the 7 basic ways to drive traffic to an ecommerce website.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) - In most cases PPC can run you a very high bill in a short period of time, you need to be very careful when you first start out with it. You should always make sure that if you are bidding on keyword on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing Or Microsoft AdCenter, you should maker sure that the keyword that you are bidding on is aligned with your ad copy and the landing page. To Achieve that you should keep your ad groups small with a limited amount of keywords. So that every keyword can be in the ad copy and on the landing page. Putting the big 3 aside there are some second tier search engines which can drive some PPC traffic your way as well such as 7search.com but keep in mind that you won’t get good enough quality traffic to make significant conversions. In light of that there are cheaper PPC programs out there, which allow you to target your visitors more precisely such as MySpace Ads and Facebook Ads, I have already reviewed Facebook ads a few weeks ago so go ahead and read it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Optimizing for ecommerce can be a bit hard since you won’t get to many links, but the same goes for your competitors. Make sure you have the proper title tags, h1 tags, atl tags for your images as well as unique product descriptions for your products. Don’t use the same product description as your competitors. Creating a blog for your site will add a lot of unique content and can be very useful to link to your products. Optimizing your site and getting ranked well can take some time but its well worth it. Don’t just try to rank for the generic terms, your goal should be to optimize your product pages so that they rank well when people are searching for the specific products.
- Affiliate Program is a very cost effective way to drive traffic to your site, you are able to select the % of the sale which you are willing to give away to the affiliates imagine if you were able to do that with Google Adwords. If you start an affiliate program don’t start off with a high commission because you won’t be able to lower it in the future, in addition don’t start to low because no one will want to try and market it. Two other things you should consider is, try to find an affiliate program that uses 301 redirect so that it can help your SEO efforts, in addition you should create a product data feed to give out to your affiliates so that your affiliates have easy access to all of your products.
- Email Marketing - Instead of only looking for new customers bring back your existing visitors and existing customers. Make sure you have a newsletter sign up form on your home page and offer something in return for signing up. Email your customers on a regular steady basis so that they remember you and come back to your site for their future purchases. The emails you send them should not only be about self promotional, instead offer something useful.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) - Be involved within your niche weather it is a forum or other blogs. Use twitter.com and facebook.com as a tool to drive traffic to your site. Don’t always write about your self share information about the community and spread the word…… Get people to follow you and occasionally post a link to your site.
- Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) -There are many comparisons shopping sites out there that can drive traffic to your site. Each CSE has a different “advertising” structure some work on a PPC basis while others work on CPA basis, and google.com/base is completely free.
- Banner Placement - find websites which pertain to your niche and get purchase a banner ad directly, you should look for sites which get decent traffic and don’t lock yourself in. Make sure that these sites are worth while and that the traffic actually converts in to customers.
This sums up the basics, I would like to go through each of these in detail with in-depth info and detail on how to get inexpensive but great traffic to your ecommerce website.
How do you generate traffic to your site? Let everyone know in the comments below.