Hey there DP community I am writing this (amongst a few other guides over the next weeks) because I think its time that I give back to the community and share my experiences. A bit about me: I've been in the E-commerce industry for 6 years now and I just recently received my degree in E-Commerce Project Management. I've overseen hundreds of new website projects and I learn something new everyday just like you Obviously there is more traffic sources then just the ones discussed in here but I just wanted to offer a quick break down. Any additional input is appreciated You're probably still new to E-commerce marketing and you're wondering how to start getting some actual traffic to your website. Obviously, this is just a general guide and you customize each website campaign as needed. Before you get started you should consider the audience that you're trying to target, as well as what kind of offer conversion that you're looking for. This may seem like a minor step, but often effective planning will make or break a good website. Analyzing your audience will also effect the content and design of your website which can safe you work time (it is proven that males convert much higher with less content, while females prefer detail filled websites). General Traffic Sources: Organic traffic This kind of traffic source usually stems from search engines and effective keyword marketing. Traffic is send to your website/offer by ranking for specific keywords/terms that are commonly searched. A higher ranking website will reap more traffic from this since its the first seen result. Although this a very effective way to drive traffic to your website/offer, it also takes a lot more time and patience depending on the project. Often there is a lot of confusion behind this method so let me explain with an example: Lets say that we are building a complete blog around the "Diet" keyword. Since the keyword "Diet" already has a huge amount of competition (139,000,000 results in google) there will be a low chance of your page being displayed within the first few result pages. Your main option now would be to find other related niches within the "diet" keyword that can be combined to yield a high amount of traffic. The main idea here is to target other low competition keywords that will allow you to reach page 1 in the results. The keyword "diet" may have 20,000 monthly searches while "sleeping diet" may only have 2,000 but is much easier to rank. There is many different tools that will give you keyword recommendations however I still find it best to do your manual research. Social Media Social Media traffic is a great way to push your offer because it will hopefully be all targeted traffic. Marketing will really depend on the niche that your advertising but social media offers the benefit of user connectivity. Considering the amount of cellphones that are connected to these accounts, often users read/see advertising notifications much faster. E-mail traffic usually has a 26% chance of being read within 24 hours while most mobile traffic has a 76% chance to be read within 1 hour. Account quantity usually plays a role just as much as content quality when going the social media route. High quality content will mean much lower deletion/ban rates on websites that are monitored as heavily as facebook, twitter etc. This can be a curse and a blessing at the same time because users will have less exposure to spam. This will be a great opportunity to work on a "trusted" website with your visitors since they expect that most fake offers will be deleted by whoever monitors the website traffic. There is many free options that will get you extra traffic however most of those will be non converting leads (google "facebook follow trains" for more info). Your most secure way is to find audiences that are interested in your general topic and then advertise to them. Social media accounts usually steadily grow over time and can lead to some good passive income as long as your list stay up to date. E-mail marketing E-mail marketing is a great option to grow your website traffic while establishing a trust relationship with your visitors. Most e-mail marketing will be done through opt-in list (collected email subscribers that agreed to receive your emails) or solo ads. There is many vendors that sell their email list however it is always most effective to build your own. This does not only guarantee that your list is targeted, but it also guarantees that you stick to Icann regulations. Mailing services like aweber (who is currently running a $1 trial) can be an effective tool to reach your audience that you are targeting with with your own personal squeeze page. This will give you the ability to successfully manage your list (as well as keep it clean) all while sending your subscribers continuous articles and information. Mobile Marketing This is a new marketing trend that is growing very rapidly. It offers great conversion and it is a marketing technique that most users are not aware yet. There is a daily rise of users who own and use smart phones to do their daily web surfing. If you decide to use this traffic,. make sure that you are using a mobile optimized offer/website to ensure that your viewers can actually reach the content that you're advertising. There is different resolutions/scripts and addons to consider that may not be available on mobile devices and could therefor harm your conversion rate. Mobile traffic is a great resource to consider since there is less competition at this point. I hope this guide has helped at least a few people. Just like mentioned before, any additional (helpful) input is appreciated !
I gave you one like man. I'm visiting DP a lot lately and still seeing some idiotic posts and this is a bit refreshing. It's not science but it's not crap.
You give a good explanation of what different kinds of marketing can do in different purposes. This helps people who want to find as many ways to market people as possible.
This suggestions and tips are true and somehow effective, however almost every IMer I knew, already did those things. But either way, this could help newbies.