Increasing Traffic To Your Ecommerce Website

Reach The Customers!

This article focuses on traffic. In percentage terms the amount you can increase your traffic using the content below will vary. But young businesses should be able to increase their traffic a notable percentage.

First off; you must be going for targetted visitors who can convert into customers, not just any old visitors. Give me 50 targetted visitors over 5000 random ones any day! A while back I wrote an article with 7 ways not to promote, worth a read to check you aren’t doing any of those methods.

I’m now going to split this post into 2 parts, Long-Term and Short-Term.

Generating Traffic In The Long-Term
SEO – search engine optimisation, it is all about the SEO! Get your website ranking highly in Google for popular terms in your niche and you will receive thousands of visitors every month. You can either pay a company to do SEO for you, or do-it-yourself.

Paying someone is going to cost a fair bit of money, I can’t give exact figures because I do all my SEO myself but I know it isn’t cheap (well it can be if you hire someone crap!). If you have the time I recommend you learn yourself. It will take a while to learn, take action and see results, we aren’t talking weeks here – we are talking many months and possibly years.

It is a massive subject so their is no point me trying to cover it in this post. Instead here are some websites I’ve used to learn SEO which have served me well.

Search Engine Guide – A huge archive of articles, the whole blog is about search engines but pay close attention to the specific SEO category. Covers everything from the absolute most basics upwards.

Problogger – This blog focuses on bloggers, so you can ignore most articles, but the SEO category has lots of good articles with information that can be used regardless of whether you run a blog, ecommerce site or just a content site. Go through the archives and have a good read as their is lots of content so don’t just skip through it as you may miss important stuff.

Those are the main 2 that I’ve used so I highly recommend them. Everything else I’ve learned has just came from being active online looking through forums, searching etc. There are a fair few SEO specific blogs, perform some searches for terms like ‘SEO blog’, ‘SEO tips’ etc and you will find lots of resources.

One thing I will say is make sure the SEO advice you read is relatively up-to-date, anything over a few years old may now not be sound advice. The search engines are changing the ways they rank websites all the time, so if an article tells you to do tonnes of link exchanges, quickly leave the website! Generally from an SEO point of view I say the fresher the better.

Generating Traffic In The Short-Term
If your website isn’t ranking highly in the search engines you need to use other methods in the short-term to get potential customers to your website.

• Shopping Directories – Submit your website to all of the major shopping directories like ShopSafe. All the good directories have strict requirements so it means you won’t be listed amongst a load of crap like you are in general directories.
• Review Sites – Get your website listed in all the consumer shopping review sites like Ciao.co.uk. You will probably need to submit your website to be in their database, so search their FAQ’s and if you can’t find how to get listed then drop them an email.
• Pay-Per-Click – All the search engines now have sponsored results, Google call theirs ‘Adwords’. You only pay for the clicks you receive. You will need a decent budget to be able to really utilise PPC effectively though. A good way to get instant traffic.
• Paid Banners & Text Links – Pay for banners and text links on targetted popular websites. Must be done carefully. Ask the website owners for stats on previous ad campaigns they have done for people to see what the CTR (click-through rate) is like. I once spent £50 on a banner and text link ad on a blog in my niche. The whole time the ads were running I received about 5 visitors! Not a good ROI! So make sure you know roughly how effective the ad placements are.
• Offer Products In Return For Reviews – Contact bloggers and website owners in your niche. Drop them a quick email asking if they would like to review your service. You don’t charge them for the product so the reviewer gets a free product and you get some exposure within your niche. Can be very effective because the cost of the product to you could soon be clawed back from the direct sales made from the review.
• Sponsor Niche Forums – Contact forums in your sector to see if they will let you sponsor them. If you can get a good price and the forum has lots of loyal users you could get a fair few visitors and a good ROI. Because of how loyal forum members can be they will have a higher trust in you before they even visit you simply because their forum is willing to let you sponsor them.
• Create Coupon Codes – Create special coupon codes for reductions and free delivery and then try and get word out about your ‘limited time coupons’. Contact blog owners etc to let them know. You can also submit to websites which list retailers coupon codes, search in Google for them as there is a lot of those types of websites so you should be able to get at least a few listings.
• Submit Press Releases – I’ve covered this methods of advertising before, check out this article: Press Releases For Marketing. If you can get featured in the press it can drive a lot of free traffic.
• Social Media – Utilise facebook and myspace groups which focus on topics in your niche to drive traffic. Although don’t spam them, join in the groups properly! You can also tell relevant friends and family who like the sort of products you sell.
• Start An Affiliate Program – Sign-up affiliates to promote you and pay them a cut everytime they make a sale! You could either create an in-house affiliate program or use an affiliate service like Affiliatefuture, using a service like that would make it easier to hire affiliates.
• Offline Methods – Leaflets being one of the most popular for those on a tight budget. You could even design a simple leaflet on your computer at home (you will need the natural flair for design of course) and then print-off a few hundred just to get you going. For small and young online businesses I really don’t recommend offline advertising in the early days. You need to build up an online presence first and then move into offline ads.

Conclusion – A Good Mix
Long-term SEO should be your main traffic generation focus. The amount of highly-targetted visitors you can receive from being high in the search engines for absolutely no money makes putting a lot of effort into SEO very worthwhile.

Having said that it is also important you have a good mix of traffic streams, just encase one of them suddenly drys up. Instead of 95% of traffic from search engines and 5% from returning customers. It would be good to have 60% of traffic from search engines, 10% from returning customers, 10% from banner ads, 10% from directory and review sites, 5% from PPC and 5% from forums you sponsor. That would make your traffic levels a lot more solid and also shows a greater web presence.

Traffic Generation Is A Huge Subject
What I’ve talked about in this post is only the very basics and designed to introduce you to the different methods. There are whole websites about traffic generation, it is a huge subject. So use what I’ve mentioned above as your starting points. And when you go searching for more information on them you will also learn about other methods I’ve not mentioned. Just being active reaps its rewards.

Test, Test, Test
And one last thing, remember to Test, Test, Test! Not all methods will work for you, some will provide a poor ROI and some will provide an incredible ROI, so keep trying and changing things and eventually your traffic, sales, revenue and profits will all keep on a nice upward line.