One of the temptations is to just think “oh my business probably can’t really benefit from using Twitter, so I won’t bother”. You’ve seen it on the news and heard all about it, but yet you think it’s not for you – this could prove very costly.

On a personal level I am not a big fan of Twitter, but from a business point of view I am a huge fan. Say for example you run an ecommerce retail shop. You could create 2 separate accounts, one for yourself as an entrepreneur to connect with lots of other entrepreneurs, and the second account purely for your ecommerce business.

What Could You Then Do With These Twitter Accounts?

The first one you could use purely to build up business2business relationships, connect with other entrepreneurs, suppliers, marketers, consultants etc. From following them and communicating with them you could learn heaps of stuff and you never know what opportunities you may open.

The second account could be for your customers and website visitors to follow. You could then communicate directly with them on an individual personal level, just sending them a message to check they were happy with their order could do wonders for their loyalty! But even more powerful perhaps, would be when you have special offers or new products. Tweeting about them will instantly open you up to lots of highly targetted potential customers who are following you. Now your brain is starting to imagine the possibilities!

Need Help With Twitter?

If you’ve never used twitter, or are using it but not very successfully then there is lots of information available. You can either buy a book from Amazon, they have quite a few available for under a tenner (at time of writing) and you can also read reviews as to whether they are any good. Or you can search the web for advice and build up your knowledge that way from articles on blogs and other information sites.

Social media is now a big part of the web, and thankfully ecommerce websites can take advantage of it. Social networking is a much more popular activity then social bookmarking services but all are still worth utilising.

Benefits
Not only will they give you bursts of traffic but they can also help build inbound links, some of which will help your SEO campaign. Although time is required to maximise the potential of these services it is completely free.

Limitations
The nature of social media means bursts of traffic will be very short lived, so one day you could get 1,000 visitors from a great article which has became popular on stumbleupon, the next day you could get 5 visitors. Visitors from social media sites traditionally don’t convert as well as more targetted visitors from search engines – so chuck your 1.5% conversion rate target out the window for social media traffic.

Weighing Up The Pros and Cons
All-in-all I am a big fan of social media and think it is worthwhile using it to increase traffic and inbound links to your ecommerce website, despite the limitations. It is also a rapidly growing sector of the web so it is good to get involved now as who knows how much it will grow.

Integrating Into Your Website
You can start by joining services such as digg, stumbleupon and reddit to begin building links. Remember to use the services properly though, submit quality content and become an active member of the community, spam will get you nowhere over the long-term (apart from give you a terrible reputation).

You can also add buttons to your website so visitors can bookmark your pages on sites like delicious, and submit pages to social media sites. Services like addthis are a good one to use because the button can take up very little space but has lots of functions.

You could also start to use twitter, although I would use this more as an individual to build up business contacts rather then promote your ecommerce website to potential customers.

Conclusion
If you want to start increasing traffic via social media then get together a full plan of how you are going to harness it effectively, but also in an ethical way (IE not spamming, being a genuine member of the services). And also how you want the social media buttons on your website to work and have an effect. As with an aspect of your business approach it properly and professionally with a decent plan and you can have a good crack at it.

PPCWebSpy is a tool to see what keywords Google Adwords advertisers are targetting and how much they are spending on those keywords. It’s a great way to see what your competition is doing compared to you.

Even if you currently aren’t using Google Adwords it may be useful to see what other advertisers are up to. See how much money they are putting into their campaigns so you know for future reference when you can start using Adwords. You may also be able to locate phrases that aren’t being targetted much so you could take advantage of them to get low cost clicks!

To use the tool all you need to have is the Firefox web browser installed. It is better than Windows IE anyway so if you haven’t already I recommend you download it regardless of whether you want to use the PPC tool or not.

How To Get PPCWebSpy

• Visit the PPCWebSpy website and watch the video so you appreciate exactly what tool does.
• Scroll to the bottom, and enter your name, email address and create a password.
• You then go to a page showing you a video trying to get you to upgrade to the ‘Platinum version’, which costs $97 (£66 at time of writing). In the beginning I wouldn’t bother upgrading, you want to use the tool for a while first to get used to it and see for yourself it is reliable, useful etc.

  However I would recommend you watch the video anyway, just for future reference so you know the difference between the free software and the paid version. As your business grows it may make sense to upgrade to the platinum version.

  Scroll to the bottom and click ‘No thanks’ (unless you want to upgrade right away of course).

• Then you go to another page, which then trys to sell you the ‘Gold version’ for $47, once again skip it and scroll to the bottom and click ‘No thanks’.
• Then it gives you the instructions for how to download the tool, and away you go!

I think it is a really good tool to have. Even if it is only to see what your competitors are up to. And if you are using Google Adwords then this could help you identify good-value keywords and keep you away from the costly ones.

Get In The Newspapers!

Press releases are great for a quick burst of highly targetted traffic, but they can also have other more long-term benefits.

Here are two different ways to use the press release marketing method:

1. To get recognised and published in the online and offline media sending you a burst of traffic – to achieve this make sure your story is newsworthy, it has to be something big your business is doing E.G launching a new product which has benefits like no other product.
         You will have to write a great press release to get good press coverage, reporters get sent lots of press releases every day so you need to write a good one from the title all the way down to the last sentence.
2. To build up quality inbounds to your website helping your long-term SEO targets – sending out press releases online to lots of websites and press release services can gain you some valuable and highly targetted inbounds at very little cost.
         Some press release services offer paid services, for your money your press release can even be published by Google News gaining you a quality inbound and thousands of potential readers. This method can be done more often than Method 1 above so your story doesn’t have to be as ground breaking. It won’t send you as many visitors as Method 1 but long-term it will help your SEO efforts which in turn will send you lots of visitors every week.

When I completed the recent Dropship Help upgrades I sent out a press release to pressbox (read the release) it only took about 10 minutes to write and submit and I now have an extra inbound to the website. If you type ‘dropshiphelp.co.uk’ into Google the pressbox page comes up as the 8th out of 366 pages. This is an example of using a press release just to get an inbound link for your website.

If you don’t know how to write press releases or where to publish them then search around the web and fill yourself with the relevant knowledge so you can get in the media and build valuable inbound links to your ecommerce website!

Marketing No No's!

Getting highly targetted visitors to your ecommerce website isn’t easy (unless you’ve got thousands of pounds to spend), this results in people doing everything they can to get any visitors – but some marketing practices are best avoided!

Here are 7 ways NOT to promote your ecommerce shop: 

1. Spam – you should never ever spam, whether it is via email, forums, blogs or whatever. It makes you look like an idiot, your website look unprofessional and it results in very few visitors anyway!
2. Too Many Link Exchanges – a few targetted link exchanges with established quality websites are recommended, however don’t go doing hundreds of link exchanges with any old crappy websites, it will harm your website, not benefit it.
3. Use FFA’s – FFA stands for ‘free-for-all’, sites where you can just submit your link and it is instantly live amongst hundreds of other irrelevant links. This will harm your website, result in no visitors and waste your time.
4. Use Autosurfers – members of autosurf websites very rarely view the actual sites they are supposed to in order to earn credits, and if they do the chances of them being interested in your website is incredibly small.
5. Join Banner Exchanges – these make your website look ugly and unprofessional and result in very little traffic, your banners on other websites will also get very few clicks due to webmasters sticking them deep out of visitors view.
6. Practice Blackhat SEO – eventually google will get you and your website will disappear from search results resulting in no traffic from the major traffic source. Never practice blackhat SEO!
7. Stop Marketing - never stop promoting and improving your existing marketing methods.

So there you have 7 sure fire ways to waste your time and damage your business. If you are doing any of the above then stop now and start using your time more wisely.