Hey all, quick introduction of myself: I work as a webmaster for a successful eCommerce website and luckily I'm given enough freedom to work on new traffic generation strategies for our website. I figured there may be a lot of you in the same boat and would like to share some of the things I do. 1. Create A Youtube Video and Advertising Youtube is one of the most highly used search engines on the web today. You heard me right, there are more people using Youtube than Google on some days. These people looking for videos are highly relevant traffic if you know what they're looking for. For your eCommerce site, many of your products and services can be converted into an information video (think How-to). Recording a video takes less than an hour, I suggest telling a little bit about your product and how to use it. Including a call to action within your video to click on the link included in your description will help send traffic to your website. But this is where it gets heavy, you can advertise on your videos for mere pennies compared to Adwords. Youtube uses different pricing which allows you to place a clickable ad within your video to drive highly relevant traffic to your product pages. 2. Article Marketing and Outsourcing We've all heard the debate about wither or not article marketing really works. Well, I can say from experience it's a great benefit to our company. The thing that many business do wrong with article marketing is not creating worthwhile content. Just like the videos, you can easily create an instructional guide, overview or summary of your individual products and submit them to article directories such as eZineArticles. Be sure to include a link in your byline to send traffic to your website. And of course, here's where you can really step up your game. Visit websites like eLance and Freelancer to outsource your articles. You can buy articles for $1 - $5 a piece. The backlink, additional call to action and exposure will send additional traffic to your website. 3. Facebook Fan Pages and Advertising Facebook is an amazing platform to engage customers and prospects. Facebook is used by hundreds of millions of people each day, it's one website people spend the most time on. If you've noticed, fan pages are a great way to build a community around your brand and business. On the fan page, people can share their experience with your company and gain additional information you may not have room for on your website. The power comes in with advertising. Facebook allows you to drill down your advertising to the most minute detail, you can target people based on specific interests filled out in profiles. Advertising at this level of relevance sends hot buyers to your website - Facebook ads are dirt cheap as well too! 4. Install A Blog and Command Your Niche It's one thing to offer a product within your business niche, it's another to continually offer killer content to your visitors. Blogging helps add additional links throughout the search engines for minimal setup costs. Where you may not be able to touch on subjects on your individual product pages, you can create great content centered around each product, how-to's, interviews and more. Blogging allows you to build credibility and authority within your market. Blogging also gives you to opportunity for visitors to subscribe and join your sales funnel. 5. Email Drops and Newsletters If you aren't utilizing your customer contacts, you're missing out on a great opportunity to increase sales. Although you may not personally care for eCommerce newsletters, many do. Using your newsletter in tandem with telling about your blog, videos, articles and more will give a great experience to your customers. Email drops are great when you have a new promotion. You can easily send out emails using services like Aweber to contact large amounts of your customer list. Whenever you update pricing or add an additional product, take this opportunity to contact your previous customers to gain a nice spike in sales. I hope you found this post helpful. At the moment we try to implement each of these tactics at least once a week. By far the best advice I can give you is go with video. One of our instructional videos has over 100,000 views on Youtube now and is placed second for the keyword. Over and out.
Thank you for taking the time to do this write-up. A multi-prong attack to driving traffic is almost always better than a one dimensional one. What is often forgotten, however, is to optimize the website for conversion. It may not sound like much, but moving the needle from a 1% conversion rate to a 1.3% rate is a 30% increase in sales without additional overhead.
Absolutely CarlDia. Rigorous split testing and testing new methods are key when it comes to eCommerce. As you said, just the .3% increase in sales can lead to hundreds of thousands (millions) for many companies. From there, just tweak tweak tweak.
Great tips and advice Murlu. Implementing these methods will most certainly build traffic. Thanks for sharing!
We already do most of these things for our site, but we just recently got into video and it really does seem to be helping. We included links in the video description on YouTube and have already seen sales on some of those products.
Glad everyone enjoyed the article; just checking back in now - hope you all have tested out a few of these for your own online campaigns