|
Marketing and Improve Traffic For Your Store |
|
|
Ideas and available options for the online reseller to get traffic and sales.Overview
As a business owner, you have a wide range of options available to you to promote your business. In general, it is important to have a marketing plan or at least a good idea of the kinds of strategies you will try, as well as how you will measure the results. This guide will give you an overview of some of the tools and options that are available to you in the online world.
We will start by outlining some individual strategies you can use, and then suggest how you can tie them all together to run a successful business. Be sure that any service your work with for your inventory and your website gives you the tools you need to do all of these things. The Inventory Stores platform has tools for all of the activities below and more.
Leverage existing traffic
It is no secret that you can take advantage of the existing shopping sites that handle the task of getting shoppers to the website and facilitate the sales. For example, you can place your products for sale on eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and a host of other ecommerce sites and shopping malls. These services will allow merchants to list products for sale and handle the transaction for you, and their main focus is getting the shoppers into the virtual stores, relieving you of that task.
The benefits of this type of selling are clear: you can leverage existing traffic and marketing and focus on simply supplying the products and support. However, it is important to realize the costs of this type of marketing. In exchange for the convenience they provide, these services all charge a commission for each sale, and in some cases, an up-front fee as well.
For example, let's say you sell 100 different items and you want to list them on eBay. At an average listing fee of $3, it will cost you $300 right away just to list the items, with no guarantee of selling. Then, for anything that sells you will pay up to 5% of the price to eBay for selling your item. Obviously, this could get out of hand quickly if you just list everything, so a strategy is always necessary, no matter what marketing method you are using.
In addition, many internet malls and shopping sites will charge large commissions for processing the sale and the payment, sometimes 15% or more. This is a lot of your margin to give up, especially on low margin items like electronics.
In short, 3rd party shopping sites such as auctions and malls can give you access to thousands or millions of shoppers, but for a price. These outlets should definitely be a part of your strategy, but it is difficult to build a successful business around these sites alone. To really grow a stable business, you need your own website.
Get Your Own Traffic: Your Website
To realize the full profit potential from your online business, you will need to build some traffic and sales of your own. To do this, you need a website that will allow you to sell all of your products in a single location. Having your own site has many advantages, and at the cheap price of hosting these days you only need a sale or two per month to cover the entire cost of running your site.
And, the best part about a sale on your own site is that it is YOUR customer and you keep ALL of the profit.
Setting up a website can be very easy if you do your research (but good research is not always easy to do). For example, if you choose to use the Inventory Stores platform, you can launch a professional-looking site that is 100% customizable to your needs, even if you don't know HTML! Building your own site is easy, and if you want something that is beyond your abilities, there is plenty of help out there to ensure you get the exact look and theme that you want. Inventory Source can help you with this process.
To learn how to realize the full benefit of your own shopping site, keep reading.
Get Your Own Traffic: Search Engines
There are two basic components to your search engine strategy: registering and optimizing. Registering your site on search engines is very easy. There are hordes of free services that will allow you to blast your new site out to every major search engine on the market. While this is a key component, it is important to realize how exactly search engines work to ensure you get the full benefit from your listing.
Search engines fall into two basic categories: true search listings and directories. Yahoo, for example, is a directory structure that lists sites and results by the categories they are in, using a drill-down approach. Google, on the other hand, is an example of an indexed search engine, where the contents of each page are stored, ranked, and displayed appropriately. Making sure your listings show up to search users is the optimizing part of your search engine strategy.
There are many businesses that can help you with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). These services will guarantee you placement in the major engines, but usually at a very high cost. You can do much of the optimizing work yourself when putting your website together initially. The two main components you should focus on if you are doing it yourself are "Meta Tags" and the actual content of your pages.
"Meta Tags" are keywords and descriptions that are in the behind-the-scenes code of your web pages. They tell certain kinds of search engines what the description of the particular page is and what the relevant keywords are. You can find a wealth of information online about using these tags if you will be building your site yourself. Any service that designs your site for you should include this part of your pages.
The content you use on your site is very important for search engines like Google. Google has software that will "read" your pages and analyze the content to determine what the relevant search terms for each page are. The formula used is complex, but to make it simple there are a few things you should be concerned with. Make sure your text about your site and in each main page uses your desired "keywords" repeatedly (but do not simply repeat words in a row! That is called "keyword spamming" and will hurt your site traffic). Text in bold or a heading is given more weight, so be sure to choose the text you use across your site carefully to allow search engines to appropriately categorize your site.
Some other key factors for your search engine rankings involve what other websites you link to and what other websites link directly to you. So, having affiliates and partners linking to your site gives you direct traffic as well as increasing your search placement.
While this is a very general overview of search engines, these are the basic concepts you should be aware of. If you are interested in more information, a little bit of online research can get you all the details you need to know about optimizing every aspect of your website.
Get Your Own Traffic: Cost-Per-Click
"Cost-Per-Click" (also called "Pay-Per-Click") advertising is just what it sounds like: you pay a service to send targeted traffic to your site based on keywords you choose. You can select what terms and keywords you would like to market to, and provide a price that you will pay for each person that clicks through to your site.
This is a very effective form of advertising because you are able to specify exactly when you show up to a potential shopper. The more you are willing to pay for each click-through, the higher up in the results your link will appear. Some of the more established CPC services are Overture and "Google Adwords", which will allow you to promote your site across many of the search engines and other websites on the internet.
As with everything else, it is VERY important to have a strategy when using CPC marketing. You will get a lot of traffic, but it can get very expensive if you are not strategic in the traffic you buy. For example, if you pick a very popular term like "computer" and agree to pay 50 cents per click, you will get loads of traffic, but you will spend a lot of money. Much of the traffic that comes to you may not even be shoppers, in which case you have wasted lots of money.
So how to you get your money's worth on the CPC services? You should start by identifying what kind of traffic you want (be specific!) and then target your advertising directly at those people. You should pick specific products and categories that you have in good supply, and buy traffic for only specific terms that will only reach the internet users that are searching for exactly what you have.
For example, you could have dozens of very targeted keywords that will send shoppers to specific pages within your site for the particular products they are looking for. Each one may only result in a small amount of traffic, but that traffic will be very targeted and give you a very high conversion rate on your advertising.
One form of CPC service is price comparison shopping. There are many services that allow merchants to show the products and pricing they offer, and the buyers can compare the pricing across different sellers to find the best price. You will still pay for each click, but if someone clicks on your listing it means they have seen your products and your price and like what they see, so it is probably the most targeted traffic you will get. However, if your prices aren't great or your margins are low, price comparison cannot do much for you.
In general, it is important to start small, develop a plan, and test the plan out. If you find a system that works for you, you can then increase your spending and activity based on your proven system. It is a learning process, so don't be afraid to try new things!
Build a Loyal Customer Base
Once you have gone to the effort of getting shoppers to your site, it is important to provide good service and keep that customer coming back. Having a regular newsletter that you send out with specials and coupons is a fantastic way to remind your past customers that you are still there and ready to service them. Be sure not to "spam" and send unsolicited emails, and that customers can always unsubscribe from your regular mailings.
You can also allow potential shoppers on your site to join your mailing list. This will give them the opportunity to receive your specials and discounts, and will grow your potential customer base even though they have not yet purchased from you.
Service and support are essential to providing a good experience for your shoppers and to make them want to come back. Be sure to respond quickly and treat your customers they way you would want to be treated as a customer.
Tools to build and manage a mailing list are available through various services. If you use the Inventory Stores platform, a mailing list application is built-in for free.
"Old School" Marketing
When you have your own website, you can also take advantage of the traditional forms of advertising such as catalogs, local advertisements (print, radio, TV), and targeted mailings. As with any of the online advertising mentioned above, it is important to think about who your potential customers are and how to reach them in a cost-effective way.
Developing Your Overall Marketing Strategy
As you can see, there are a variety of marketing options available to you as an online merchant. How do you make sense of it all and come up with a plan that fits your needs and budget?
It is important to use a variety of techniques and not put all of your eggs in one basket. Our recommendation is to build a website to house all of your products so that you can sell as much inventory as possible. After that, you should promote your site everywhere you can. You can sell on eBay, Amazon, and internet malls to have your products out where there is lots of shopping traffic already. Be sure to promote your website wherever possible (in each mall, in your eBay username, etc) to promote your own site and catch some of the traffic for yourself, in addition to the direct sales you get from the services themselves.
You will also need to focus on having your site in search engines to ensure your site can be found. If someone is looking for your site or your products, they will probably use a search engine at some point, so you need to be there!
You can also supplement this activity with CPC marketing and your other efforts. The key is to have your site promoted from as many different areas as possible, because each effort you take helps all of the other activities you already have in place. As your name and brand and customer feedback become more prevalent, you will get more and more traffic from each of your marketing efforts.
There is no cookie-cutter strategy that you should use, and developing your own personal plan is part of the fun of building your own business. You can decide how and where you want your customers to see you, and each place your name and products appear works to build your very own brand. Over time, you can develop an immense internet presence and appear everywhere that anyone would look on the internet to find the products you are selling.
In short, start small and be smart, but continue testing and adding to your strategy to build a business that will be successful and continue to grow. As you find successful strategies, they will each work with one another to give you explosive success in your sales and revenue.
While this may sound like a daunting task, help is always available. If you decide to use the Inventory Source service to help your business, many of these opportunities and tasks can be automated and simplified, allowing you to sell more and sell smart. |
|
|
