5 Ways to Promote Your E-Commerce Website
Posted by | Posted in Internet Marketing | Posted on 31-08-2009
Selling products online is not only for big businesses. Small businesses and individuals also have the opportunity to make money in the world of e-commerce, which has continued to grow in recent years.
Despite the fact that e-commerce presents so many opportunities for businesses and website owners, getting people to visit the site and to know what you offer is offer a major challenge. Obviously, without any visitors you won’t be able to make any sales.
In this article we’ll examine five different methods that you can use to promote any e-commerce website, regardless of what you are selling.
1. Pay Per Click
Pay-per-click marketing is a great way to get visitors to your site that can be extremely cost-effective if done properly. All of the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) have PPC programs where advertisers can bid on ad placements that will be shown when certain searches are performed.
PPC is a good choice because as the advertiser you can be highly selective about the types of people you want to market to. You will choose cetain keywords and phrases, and when someone searches for them your ad will show up. You can also make other requirements like geographic locations and maximum budget.
Also, PPC is an option regardless of your budget. You can set a limit of $25 per month, or you can even spend thousands of dollars in a day if you want to. PPC campaigns can work with any budget and so there are few people that cannot benefit.
2. Banners
Another type of popular online advertising is banner ads. Banners are generally not as highly targeted as PPC ads, but if you carefully place your ads on the right sites you can reach a rather targeted audience.
The price of banners will vary greatly depending upon factors like the amount of traffic and impressions (how many times the ad appears), the size of the ad, the placement on the page, the number of ads on the site, etc.
3. Affiliate Programs
One way to get more people to your site without making much of an investment in advertising is to be willing to share the revenue with others who help you to make sales. With an affiliate program, other website owners can sign up and start sending visitors to your site. If one of those visitors makes a purchase at your site it will be tracked and recorded automatically and the affiliate will get a specified portion of the sale.
A good affiliate program will produce monetary results for you and for those who are promoting your products. The percentage of revenue that is paid out to affiliates will vary greatly, but generally electronic products that can be downloaded will have the highest commissions (sometimes as much as 50% – 75% of the sale will go to the affiliate).
4. Start a Blog
If you are struggling to get people to visit your e-commerce site, consider adding a blog to the site. Blogs are great for marketing and traffic generation because they keep fresh content on the site, they gradually add to the number of pages on the site, and they can help to produce search engine traffic as well as repeat traffic.
Another great option is to also write guest blog posts for other blogs. When you write a quest post you will be able to include an author bio with a link to your own site. This can help to get more exposure for your site and help with link building.
5. Email List
People who are interested in buying your products are also likely to have an interest in being notified about sales, specials, new products, and things like that. If you have an email list you can quickly reach a targeted audience with your message.
Steven Snell is a web designer from New Jersey. He runs CartFrenzy, a gallery site that showcases the best ecommerce websites.
