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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

I am sure you know this already, the Obama’s installed a playground in the WhiteHouse lawn on March, 4, 2009. Here is an image of a plaque which was put on the play system.

White House Playground Plaque

Image credits to blog.alignex.com:

A few days after the playground was installed in the White House lawn, The National Recreation and Park Association contacted the White House and advised them to implement playground safety and suggested that they install rubber mulch for the playground surface. The White House in turn contacted Rubberecycle.com to have them install the rubber mulch. Below you can see the before and after pictures of the playground with and without the rubber mulch.

Being that they are one of my clients, I wanted to take advantage of the moment and do some PR for them. I contacted Janet Thaeler aka newspapergrl, to write a press release for Rubberecycle.  You can read the press release about the rubber mulch on prweb.com.

I have used Janet’s service many times in the past, she does some great online PR, and I was very please with the success that we received from the latest press release.

As promised here are the playground before and after pics.

White House Playground Before

White House Playground After

Image credits to www.buzzfeed.com and

rubbermulch on flickr.com

Update April 2 2009 1:17 PM:

Janet did a guest post on tinychoices.com

Shoemoney just posted on his website that he is moving to Portland at the beginning of May this year. He states that his parent company ShoeMoney Capital, INC has been bought by the hanso foundation. Pretty interesting this is what wikipedia has to say about the foundation.

The Hanso Foundation is a fictional foundation in the Lost television series. It was formed by arms purveyor Alvar Hanso, who turned his attention from “keeping the world safe through the development of sophisticated weapons systems” to focus instead on the development of new technologies to “create a brighter future for all humanity.

You can see in the video that he mentions that he will be going to work via submarine to the Island, and at the end as the cameras zooms out to get more view you can see Shoe wearing a Dharma Jump suit. As the video comes to an end you can hear the lost music in the backround.

By taking a look at the commenst you can see that many people really believe that Jeremy would actually sell his company and go move to Portland and travel to work on an island via submarine. I tried posting a comment on the blog but I guess it was moderated and filtered out, so that no one else can see that this is an April fools trick.

Shoe is a big fan of april fools day and you can check out last years april fools day trick as well.

I sent shoemoney a tweet right after I read the post, but still did not hear back from him.

There were many clues that gave it away, did you fall for it or did you figure out that it was all a trick? Let me know how you figured out that the rumer is a hoax?

This is my first blog post ever (better late than never), I have registered this domain duvid.com in 2007 with the idea in mind that I will use the website to blog about my own personal web experience.

I am looking forward to blogging on a regular basis. The next blog post will be about the SES show that was in NY last week more about that later.

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