Friday, September 11, 2009

How to Promote Your Own eCommerce Website

. Friday, September 11, 2009
By Steven Snell

In recent years the amount of money that is made through online purchases has continued to increase. More and more people turn to the internet when they shop as opposed to going to stores. This has created an opportunity to make money through the sale of products from your own website.

If you have your own online store, you probably know that one of the biggest challenges is to get people to visit the site. In many cases, converting those visitors to sales is much easier than just getting the visitors in the first place.

For this reason we will now take a look at a number of different things you can start doing today to increase traffic at your e-commerce site.

1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

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.

As an advertiser, PPC ads are a great option because you can highly target the traffic that you are getting by using the right keywords, negative keywords, and by setting geographical limitations. With high quality visitors that are looking for what you have to offer, conversion rates can often be quite high with PPC.

One reason PPC is so popular is that it can work on any budget. If you only have a small amount to spend each month, you can set your maximum and ads will not be displayed after that point. If you have a bigger budget, you can set up more campaigns and keywords.

2. Banners

Banners are one of the most popular kinds of online ads. If you are using banners to market your sites you may not have as much control over who sees your ads as you would with PPC, but you may get exposure to a larger audience.

There is no set method for pricing banner ads or for buying these ad slots. The price will vary depending on the traffic level of the site, the size of the ad, location of the ad, number of ads on the page, and possibly the duration of time that you will be advertising.

3. Start an Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs can be a great way to boost sales by leveraging the efforts of others. With an affiliate program other website owners can send traffic to your site, and if that person makes a purchase the affiliate will be paid a commission on the sale. There are a lot of options for setting up an affiliate program and it is not as complex as it sounds.

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

Adding a blog to a website is a popular method for marketing just about any type of website. Blogs are great because they help to keep your site up-to-date, and over time you will build up the amount of content on the site and have a chance to attract more search engine visitors.

In addition to adding a blog to your own website, you can also write articles for other blogs to promote your site. Many blogs are open to receiving guest posts, and as a guest author you will generally be able to include a brief bio of yourself with a link to your own site. This link can help for bringing click-through traffic and for improving your search engine rankings.

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.

About the Author:

Seo Optimization Now

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