Anybody who has had a or has a retail website and is either successfull with it or would like to be successfull with it I would like to discuss some strategies. I am trying to build up Supplements.net but seem to run out of ideas. Maybe we all can help each other with this thread.
What have you tried already? I am planning to open up an ecommerce store later this year and I help local companies build at least some sort of web presence (never full blown retail though -- usually just a blog or online newsletter to drive customers back to the physical store). I would be interested to see what others think and what questions they have.
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things im working on now are. google adwords - Currently a low budget but I know some that have 2500 + budgets. It seems risky to me but if you could get your conversions up it would be definitly worth it as long as you had a variety of products. affiliates - only 3 so far. Trying to figure out how to have a great affiliate program in place. The 3 so far have converted sales which is great! discussion forums - another avenue that has drawn some traffic. myspace - just setup a page and had 1 order so far from it. Not too bad for a new site. I'd love to start a nice ebay program but so I have tried it a little with no results.
Just a quick thought, I'll develop it later if you are interested. Take your successful (converting) keywords from Google Adwords and optimize a page for them. PPC is great to drive traffic and find out what words convert. There's no real need to keep paying for words you can optimize for SEO (free traffic is good). I recommend you check out www.robsellen.com He specifically talks about Yahoo stores, but you can use his SEO suff immediately on any platform.
yea that sounds like a good idea. I actually have somewhat started that. We hired a company to create back links for us based on keywords that are very expensive for adwords and that alot of people visit. 2 months I will know if it was effective or not.