Attracting Customers to your Web Shop
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You could have the best web shop in the world, but if no one knows about it then it is the equivalent of building a department store in the middle of a desert! It is a simple rule but one that is important to remember, the more people that know about your web shop, the more orders you are likely to receive.
Marketing includes all the ways of letting people know about your shop, and it can be as cheap or as expensive as you can afford. A lot of the .com companies that went bust in the last stock market collapse spent huge amounts of money on explosive one-off advertising. A more sustainable approach is to think about small but regular marketing, spreading your budget over months rather than days will ultimately reap bigger rewards.
Networking with Friends and Family
The most cost-effective way to get started is word of mouth. Tell your friends or better still, get some simple business cards and leaflets printed and hand these out to your friends and family. Ask them to hand your literature out to their friends and so on. For the more adventurous, there are networking and business clubs that you can join and spread the word about your web shop!
Good Service
Imagine how you would like your own shopping experience to be when buying from a web shop. If you can offer the same level of service that you would expect to your own customers then they will appreciate it and might order from your shop again.
Web shops can have a momentum of their own. It takes time and effort to get your first few orders, but by providing a good and friendly service happy customers will spread the word about your shop to their own family and friends.
Note
: Disappointed customers do the same, so beware!
Search Engines
Nearly everyone uses search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to find what they are looking for on the Internet. We have helped several web shops reach page one of these search engines but it takes time and perseverance to achieve the best results.
A popular way to get noticed straight away on search engine results is to advertise as one of their sponsored listings. These are the web sites that appear down the right hand side of Google after you have searched for something. This is called Cost Per Click advertising, usually abbreviated to CPC.
Some of our shop keepers sign up to affiliate schemes which work by encouraging others (known as affiliates) to advertise your products in return for a percentage commission on every successful sale they generate. Affiliate schemes can be very effective over time but also very expensive, with most schemes charging a high monthly fee for their service.
Search Engine Optimisation
Wouldn't it be great if someone searched on the Internet for 'fluffy tigers' for example and your Fluffy Tiger web shop appeared first in the search results?
Search Engine Optimisation (usually abbreviated as SEO) is a generic term used to describe the techniques used to get a web site to the top of a search engine's search results.
Note:
There are
many thousands of self-proclaimed experts out there waiting to talk to you about SEO and guaranteeing great results for your Internet shop. Always ask for proof of their success and consider any claims of guaranteed results with caution!
Luckily there are some SEO techniques that you can do yourself in your own time.
Swapping Links
In our experience one of the most enduring SEO techniques for long term success on search engines is swapping links. By adding a link to similar-themed web sites as your own and asking them to put a link on their web site back to your web shop is a great way to promote your shop to a wider audience, including search engines.
There are services called Link Farms that can help you swap more links and faster but expect to pay for the better ones and there are no guarantees that every link request you receive through a link farm will be suitable to add to your shop.
If you want to swap links yourself, do a search on a search engine for a suitable phrase, e.g. 'fluffy tiger', compose a short polite email requesting a link swap and contact each web site that appears on the search results pages.
By sending out a dozen link swap requests a few times a week, over a period of months you will have accumulated a good number of links to and from your web shop.
There are endless real world advertising opportunities such as placing an ad in your local newspaper or industry publication, sponsoring a local event or team and running competitions with one of your products as a prize. Please contact us if you would like to discuss any aspects of marketing your web shop.