Free Online Store Promotion in 5 Tips
Market your eCommerce business inexpensively
Nothing in life is ever as free as we’d like, especially when it comes to website promotion. Having said that, you don’t always have to spend money promoting your brand but of course, everything has its price. In order to increase your online store’s traffic there are a few techniques to help you with promoting your product or service inexpensively, you just have to be willing to work on them.
In today’s article we’re going to dig into 5 tips on how to market your eCommerce business for free, namely through quality content, SEO, social networking, reciprocal linking, and data analytics. All these methods will cost you is some of your time.
1. Write, write, write
Creating quality content is the key because if you don’t have quality content on your website, none of the techniques below are going to work very well for you either. How to create the right content that will resonate with your audience? You need to pinpoint your target group first so that you speak directly to the people you want to attract to your store. Do a survey, collect information, segment your market, use some analytics tool to help you with this. You can even draw an ideal customer sketch that will display someone who is most likely to suffer from problems your products solve.
Based on what you know about the target audience, it’s easier to write an article or a blog post that actually connects with their needs and interests. It doesn’t matter whether you sell a small range of knitted socks or complicated marketing software — you need to understand your customer if you want to maximize your sales. The more information about your audience you collect, the more valuable content you can offer them.
2. Drive traffic to your online store using SEO
We all know that SEO can help you improve your online store rankings in a web search engine organic results (namely Google, Bing, Yahoo!) and drive more traffic to your site, thus convert visitors to customers. You can of course pay for a high placement among paid search results through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. But with SEO it’s not only free but also quite easy to learn and apply the basics to your website. How does it work though? For most entrepreneurs, it’s a mysterious black box. New to SEO? Learn more about how it works and how to use it in this cool article on The Balance or read this detailed Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
3. Drive even more traffic to your online store using social media
Don’t forget to include social media follow buttons on your web store! Why? Let’s make a short list of the most popular social media channels: Facebook, Pinterest, Sina Weibo, Instagram, Google+, Twitter. You’re most likely not only familiar with all of these but also using at least one of them on a daily basis, aren’t you?
Social media isn’t just a great place to connect with your friends and family; it’s also a great place for your online store promotion as everybody uses it these days. So, participating in social media can be a great way to get free website promotion as it can give you high visibility at low cost. You can use it for your customer care as well, to get valuable feedback.
In order to successfully market your eCommerce business while using social media to do so, you’ll need a plan though. Take a look at the usefulness of social media for small and medium businesses, read more on the issue here.
4. Quality vs quantity links
Having other people put a link to your site on their website is a great way to get free website promotion. But be aware that getting inbound links to your website is not a numbers game; which is why you want to focus your linking efforts on relevant quality sites only. Reciprocal linking is generally done to either provide readers with quick access to related sites, and / or to show a partnership between two parties. So naturally, when it comes to a reciprocal linking it’s the quality of the links that really matters.
To find link exchangers do searches in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Make a list of sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors. Once you find good quality complementary websites, you can place a link to them on your pages and email them a short, friendly note.
5. Analyze your data
There are various ways of maximizing the revenue of your online store, such as reviewing your pricing strategy or diversifying your sales channels. Have you considered how valuable your data is in growing your business and boosting sales? A successful internet marketing campaign may depend upon building a high quality online store to engage and persuade customers, setting up analytics programs to enable entrepreneurs to measure results, and improving a site’s conversion rate.
So, monitor your data, it will help you with pinpointing your target customer group, create customer profiles and patterns, know product preferences and trends, being aware of payment and logistic trends as well as of traffic sources. Look at your data by channel, campaign and other splitters to help optimize your marketing efforts and focus on what works best. You can use some cool tools to collect your data, such as Google Analytics, Kissmetrics and MonkeyData just to name a few.
Creating quality content, working with SEO, posting on social media, using reciprocal linking, and analyzing your data — these are not the only ways to get free website promotion of course. But these are the best, and if you concentrate on doing them consistently over a period of time, they’ll yield the return in increased site traffic that you’re looking for. You see, consistency is the key. So schedule your activities carefully, so that apart from saving money you’ll save some time as well.
