Whether you’ve just opened a small business ecommerce store or if you’re looking to build your customer base, there are many affordable or even free options that can help you build your clientele. Instead of sitting waiting for customers to find you, these small business marketing tips let you turn idle moments into traffic building opportunities.
You can implement many of these techniques piecemeal. You can start today, and then work a little more every day to drive traffic to your site.
1. Search Engine RegistrationIt’s critical that people can find you when they search for the products or services that you provide. When you first open your store, register your site with search engines. Start with the big ones like Google, Bing and Yahoo -- it's free. Enter the URL for the home page of your store, and click the "Submit URL" button.
In most cases, you’ll submit just your home page and the search engine’s crawler will find the other pages from that one. The downside is that it takes some time before your site will be listed on the search engines, so it’s best to get your registration done sooner rather than later.
Ensure that every page of your small business ecommerce site has both a description and keywords placed in Meta tags in the head of the page. Many search engines use these to index your site and to display search results, so they can affect how easily potential buyers can find your site and how it shows up in the results list.
2. Product Reviews and InformationDistinguish your small business ecommerce store from others on the Web by including product reviews and detailed product descriptions. First, search out and link to reviews and information about the product elsewhere on the Web. Introduce these links with a short paragraph or two summarizing some of the reviewers’ opinions or the information you’re linking to.
In time, as your business grows, your own purchasers are a great source for reviews. Encourage your customers to review the products they bought by offering a coupon or code for a discount on a future purchase. You get reviews that help boost your site’s appeal, and your customers get a thank you that encourages them to buy from you again.
The more information you provide about the products you sell, the more trust your customers will have in you and your business. Over time, this content will also be indexed by search engines and can help improve your site’s ranking.
3. Leverage Traffic from Other SitesHarness the popularity of other websites by exchanging links with other business. Look for websites for businesses that are complementary to yours but that don’t directly compete with you. For example, if you sell wedding cake decorations, look for any website offering products and services related to weddings and commitment ceremonies. Offer to link your website to their business in exchange for their website linking back to yours.
Reverse links not only help improve your site’s ranking with many search engines, they also encourage traffic to your site from these other websites and vice versa. Contact the site owners either via email or by phone to ask for the exchange. Make sure to provide them with your URL and some suggested link text or an image so that you make it easy for them to link to your site.
If you decide to put a little more effort into this process, create a page with banners and images that other website owners can choose from as a means to link to your site. This way they can choose a size that fits their site’s design.
4. Blog, Guest Blog and Write ArticlesA blog linked to your small business ecommerce site is a great way to drive traffic when it contains posts and information that add value to your business. If you sell wedding cake decorations, write a post for each new design you get in (or for slow sellers or popular designs).
Post photos of cakes topped with your designs, tell how customers use your products; show customers how to paint their toppers with their own clothing colors; explain how to place the decorations on the cake; suggest what they might do with the toppers after the wedding. Bottom line -- anything to do with cakes, celebrations and decorations is a potential blog post.
Offer to guest blog for other sites related to your business, and accept guest posts from those site owners, too. When your guest blog post includes a link back to your site, it will drive traffic from that blog back to your site.
Another way to showcase your product knowledge and expertise is to submit relevant articles to article syndication sites. These sites get a lot of traffic and rank high in search engine results. Again, when you include a link back to your site in your article, you’ll drive traffic they’ve found back to your site.
5. Post Answers and Opinions on Other SitesOne great way to subtly advertise your small business ecommerce site is to increase your visibility on the Web in places where your potential customers gather.
Seek out sites where your customers hang out and look for readers with questions or comments that are within your area of expertise. In the wedding decoration scenario, you could visit sites that discuss wedding planning and answer questions and comment on topics that relate to your area of knowledge.
It’s vital when you do this that you show yourself as being informative, knowledgeable and helpful rather than being there just to do the hard sell on your products. Add a link to your site below your signature when you post an answer or comment so interested readers can find you.
Bottom LineYou can start these techniques immediately and implement them over time. All of them can and should be part of your ongoing marketing efforts. It will take time and work (but not a lot of cash) to develop a base of links around the Web that all point back to your site. While each link may only drive small amounts of traffic -- when you add all the small amounts of traffic together they can build over time to become a steady stream.
Additional ResourcesTop 10 Free Small Business SEO ToolsSmall Business SEO: How to Use Google AnalyticsBuild Your Business: How to Establish Your ExpertiseThree Reasons to Keep Your Small Business BlogHow to Set Up a Blog for Your BusinessHow Small Businesses Can Attract New CustomersHelen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.com
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