Hi Guys, I have been working with websites for years and years now but they are usually adsense/affiliate type websites. Now I have branched out and created a full on e-commerce website that serves to the entire world. It's in the video game niche. Currently it has about ~35 products in there. The basics are in place such as an email capture for a 15% off coupon, I have done a tiny little bit of link building, I have a youtube channel (24k subs) related to my e-commerce site, as well as an established facebook page (1.1k subs), and also a semi related website that get's about 500-1500 uniques a day that now has a banner on all pages promoting the new e-commerce site. My question is this. What would you do with a brand new e-commerce site to make your first sale? I have a tight budget so keep that in mind but I would love to hear your ideas or what has worked for you in the past too. Thanks in advance, Tim.
Hi Tim! We are currently building our ecommerce site as well and are a little bit at wits with it as well. Link building for us has been great, but where we found our true success is with improving our SEO on our website. Before we launched our ecommerce on our website, our SEO was middle-tier average. After we launched our ecommerce, I went through all of our pages on our website to improve our SEO. Finally, we started seeing more visits to our ecommerce page and eventually more sales. It's not perfect yet - we would still like to see more sales, but it's definitely growing. The thing about SEO is that it's not an instant solution. It's takes time, which can be frustrating! But in the long run, it's a free and easy way to gain more sales. Hope this helps!
SEO is a fool's game these days, IMO. Here's why: Google and Bing have a strong incentive to constantly change their search algorithms and disrupt website's rankings. The incentive are their PPC and other SEM advertising revenues. If they can keep websites frustrated with cycling organic rankings, enough of those businesses will opt for the more costly stability of SEM. Any company that rests its revenues on the precarious results of SEO will regret it down the line.
Hi Timby, As you mentioned in your comment you are seeing steady progress in your business already so you just need to do what are doing. If you want rapid growth in your business then you can opt for paid advertising like PPC, Facebook marketing etc. SEO is also a good option for you though it is a long-term process but, definitely, you can increase your sales through this by spending a little amount of your budget.
I have successfully launched a few successful ecommerce stores. Here are my steps. First, I generally start a referral program. I recommend trying OSI Affiliate Software or Getabassador. Then try to find super affiliate to sell for you. Next, I recommend getting autoresponder software. The two software I recommend is Drip or Active Campaign. Then I recommend using Ahrefs and looking at what keywords your competitor is using. Semrush is also a good choice when you are looking for keywords. Make sure the keywords are not too competitive . Both Ahrefs and Semrush can let you know.