I'm in progress of setting up my first online store. Can you give me an advice how to promote it after it's done? My store will stock products from Thailand that (hopefully) is not available widely in Western countries. My initial idea is to use service on: 1. PPC on Google ad 2. PPC on Yahoo product search 3. PPC Facebook ads 4. buy ads banner and posting on forums related to the product I wanted to promote I plan to only use very specific keywords on PPC ads so the cost wouldn't be so high. This is the first time I do this and I want to be very careful just to not throw a money away blindly. Anyone have suggestion as what to do or any other advertisement method that will works with online store website? Thank you in advance. edit: Here's my website: www dot khuntin dot com (the forum doesn't allow me to make a live link yet). Any comments on the site are welcome
You won't burn all the money you have because these PPC advertising services allow you to set a maximum budget.
I've start a low CPC campaign on Google AdWords now and will see how effective it is. Any one have other suggestions?
Try directory submit, that will give you good SERPs results and that will give you more traffic and that will give you more customers. IF you are interested pm me.
Some people (in gaming niche) have tried Facebook and said it was horrible. Not sure if it works for you, but just wanted to say that it might be safer to try Google/Yahoo first. As for adwords - be sure to get some info on how to use it (like... read "Adwords for Dummies" or other similar book). Saves you tons of money to get the basics right.
You can start now by making sure that the ecomm site you build has been SEO'd well. You don't want to build your site and THEN try to change it so that it ranks organically. Changing your Information Architecture later so that it is SEO friendly can be VERY costly... typically means rewriting your entire site. The best time to do SEO work is now while you're building it. You'll likely have to use PPC initially to drive almost all traffic to your site. But once your site starts to rank organically for some of your 'money' keyword phrases, you can back off on the spend for those keywords and spend the PPC budget on others. Even when you rank #1 organically for a particular term, you may still want to spend PPC budget on that same keyword phrase... But now you probably don't have to bid as much because it's not as important that you're in PPC position 1 or 2 now... You can settle for PPC position 4 or 5. Be sure to include a good web analytics package in your plans so that you can easily determine where your traffic is coming from, which is converting best, etc. You'll find that CMP traffic through banner ads on random websites can vary drastically in conversion rates depending on which ad service you use and which sites are in their networks.
Include the word "buy" in all of your terms you pay for PPC. For example, "buy product name". It will greatly reduce the amount of traffic it brings to your site, but it will greatly imporove the quality of traffic you get and your conversion ratio.
Before you start advertising, first get your site and your ads critiqued. Ask them if they were looking for such a product, service, would they go with you. Don't use the same ol' typical ads. Try to think outside the box for some ideas on creating really cool, interesting ads. When you think you are strong enough to start advertising, place your ads in other webmasters' sites. To see if they are even worth advertising in, use compete.com to see, roughly, how many monthly hits they get.
Thanks, I'll try looking at the SEO on my site then. What do you think about directory submitting, paid and free product listing like shopzilla.com? Should I try that also?
Interesting. Where can I find critics, or I just have to post website in many places and ask for opinions? Also any one know about any websites that I can post promotions and discount voucher? I've made a voucher thread in one forums and it seems to attract alot of people.
If you have products that people actually want to buy then PPC is the perfect solution to get you started. But invest in SEO for your long term success. After you get decent rankings then you can drop you PPC campaigns.
I just got my first order from posting a voucher, this is looking good. Still no sales from AdWords and Facebook ads though, my CTR is something around 0.11%, is this normal?
why don't you try issuing an online press release? it worked wonders for me a while ago to get traffic to my site, in fact it was even captured by an offline magazine and the traffic skyrocketed (only for a week tough!) but I made some good money in that week! and also I have noticed now that the press release is gaining momentum in the search engines and I am getting some traffic from the press release itself remember traffic to your website= profit!!
Choose your website carefully when advertising your banners. You can get some AMAZING results from banner advertising, especially when trying to promote a service. Checkout where your competitors may be advertising, this is sometimes a good indicator as to where is working.
I would suggest you look into how to do A/B testing of ad text and multivariant testing of landing pages before you get your PPC campaign up and running. Basically, you'll almost always want to be in search of the BEST ad and the BEST landing page to improve conversions. At least w/ Google it's quite easy to rotate ad text. So you keep a "champion" (BEST) ad and one or more "challenger" ads. The goal is to find the ad with the best click-thru-rate and conversion. You can do similar things with your landing pages by having a champion landing page that you show most of the time, but also show 'test' versions or "challenger" landing pages to some percentage of your customers to see if you get a higher conversion rate. If after the test period one of the "challenger" ads or landing pages converts better, make that challenger your new champion. Rinse and repeat ad infinitim.
yoes_san, you can find others to critique your ads anywhere. Ask family, friends, coworkers, board posters, your mailman.... Way back when I started, I even asked the associate at Barnes and Noble's coffee shop. Consider pausing your ads until you know more certain they, along with your site, are strong enough. You could try shopzilla. Only you can know if it works for you. What may work for one webmaster, may not work for another, so.... I would not focus too much on seo. Yes, optimize your site, but don't spend a lot of time on it. Search engines are highly overrated. Your valuable time should be put towards more productive methods, like, advertising. That rate you gave...so it is clear, are you talking around a half of a percent???
My ctr is 0.10% - one tenth of the percent. Guess I'll have to do something about this. May be I use too specific keywords or it's that not many people interest in products I offer. I've tried having few people review my site, most of them say it easy to use and look clean enough. I'll try to get more feedback then. Also I only got 10k impression per day on my campaign, is that normal? I'd study more about how to using AdWords and think of the best keywords to use. Should I try using "broad" keywords?
See what Canonical says here (and do what he says): One good tip worth remembering is (selectsplat actually mentioned this already) using word "buy" in your campaigns. Gets you less traffic, but more conversions. Also, don't forget to get somebody to check out your landing page. Small tweaks can have big effect.