Hi, We've recently opened an online shop for musicians, www.smeaudiosolutions.co.uk We have some good products on there but I'm struggling with promoting the shop, what other options than PPC campaign can you think of to drive new visitors to my website? I'm working on it really hard, to get some links from dj forums etc, but they all get deleted as advertising, same with blog comments... I feel really hopeless because it costed me a lot of time to get this shop to work and now I get no visitors. Any advices appreciated, please don't just post "use social bookmarking" etc, I know the basics of online marketing, the problem is that we only ship within the UK, so we're only interested in traffic from the United Kingdom, and I don't know how to promote it regionally.
You will want to focus mostly on getting links from websites that also target the UK market. In particular you want links from .co.uk websites and other websites hosted & registered within the UK. Most social bookmarking websites are based in North America. There are probably many uk forums and uk blogs that you could target. If you are having problems with posts and comments deleted as spam, you should rethink your strategy. Any such posts or comments should provide useful information or insight. If you just post something about your site, you are not adding value to the conversation. Look at it from the eyes of the forum or blog owner. Think about what kind of comments/posts they would delete and which ones they would let slide. A few other strategies to consider include article distribution, press release distribution, link exchanges, directory submission, etc.
I had a similar problem having posts removed not so long ago... if you consider that someone with a genuine interested in providing you with valuable information wants to view your website; they will look further into your profile and normally find a URL to your site in your personal details that you added earlier.
try an ebay store if they have them targeting the UK market for 15 bucks a month it is a lot cheaper then PPC and probably worth a shot.