• Posted by Melanie
• 31 May 2009
• Ecommerce Marketing

Getting all the sales you need from your ecommerce business?

I think that most everyone would answer NO! We get calls all the time from shop owners who are just not making it. They reach out to us for help... Well kind of. Most think there is some magic wand we can wave to make them rank. This is a common myth among shop owners.... EASY MONEY! Yep, that's what we hear...

Shop owner: My online store has been live for 6 months and I have made 3 sales!

PRO-Webs: What have you done to promote your store? Build links? Build usable content? Updates?

Shop owner: I really don't have time to do those things, why do I have to promote my store? Won't people just find it and give me money??

Easy Content

Ok, so that is a bit dramatized... But we get calls very similar to that all the time! So today for you shop owners who lack the time to properly promote your business AND the funds to hire PRO-Webs to do it for you, we are going to give you 5 easy ways to add additional content to your website and pick up additional longtail and niche searches.

How does adding some content help?

This is a very simple mathematical equation that everyone should clearly understand. Your conversions are generally referenced as a percentage of total visits... and average if you will. Soooooo, increasing the visits (qualified leads) will inevitably increase your sales.

How to Boost Searches with Content

These ideas to help you promote your store with content are NOT completely without effort. I would certainly rather see you sit down and write great content for your visitors... But, since you don't have time....

1. Buying Content: Buying content is really a simple matter of buying PLR articles related to your niche OR hiring a copywriter to write for you. Most importantly this content must be unique, so the smart shop owner will not just publish purchased articles, but rather change it up a bit for uniqueness.
2. Add a Glossary or FAQ section: Glossaries, dictionaries, FAQs and tutorials are excellent niche content, inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. Probably the most common for shop owners is a Q&A or FAQ section. Many times this can be accomplished with a simple plugin for your ecommerce software. Our FAQ sections contains questions, answers and tutorials... We used WordPress to build it. Fact is this is very inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. So when customers ask questions.... answer them and post it.
3. Product Reviews: Product reviews are very easy to manage. Most ecommerce software has this ability build in or a modification is available to add it. Biggest issue with this is getting folks to add a review. Some shop owners use a system to ask for them to post it, some make it open for guests to post (ill advised) and then wade through the spam to find good reviews... But our suggestion is far simpler! Just create a nice email master asking customers how their experience in your store went, did the receive their items and by the way can you reply to this email with a review of the product as you see it. Ahhhhh easy, many more will provide a review for you if they can stay within the comfort of their own email screen.
4. Forums: While web forums are not the gleaming star they used to be, if your products are very technical or related to a hobby for example... then a forum might just get shoppers writing content for you! Again, this is not easy task to get going, but a well structured and supported forum can supply an incredible amount of user generated content with little or no effort long term to maintain. Again, this would not be a very costly project to develop, but you would have to add content manually for a while and invite your shoppers at every opportunity to get it going.

A web site that grows it content in a sustained pattern over time gets better search engine ranking. You can also use content creation regularity to train the Search Engine Robots to visit your store more often simply by updating your web site content every week. The trick is in the perserverance, so don't run out and buy 10 articles and publish them all at once, you have far more to gain from publishing them once a week for 10 weeks.

• Posted by Melanie
• 24 April 2009
• Ecommerce Marketing

Ecommerce Marketing

Your average citizen probably does not realize the impact certain decisions in the business world has affected them. The primary concern for most is making sure they have enough money to pay the bills.

Gas prices rise, but they don’t logically consider of the higher grocery prices they would soon be paying. They just knew things were tighter now than they have ever been.

Unions demanded more money in contract negotiations, but they didn’t automatically understand how that might affect the sticker price of their next car or airline ticket they just hoped the car would last a little longer or a really great deal would come along.

However, when you work on a new business start up in a brave new world called ecommerce you begin to take notice of these pebbles tossed in the pond as you swim in. Suddenly it is much easier to see the ripples those small pebbles have created and you brace for the aftermath of the wake because there will certainly be a wake.

If you’re going to be in business ecommerce is a wonderful place to start because the overhead is often much less than a traditional brick and mortar small business and you likely have fewer employees and related concerns than a traditional store counterpart.

You will soon discover, however, that your marketing plan needs a ‘flex’ mode. This means very simply, the things you sell online may require certain shifts in marketing depending on regional or national economic indicators.... and the economy as well.

For instance, let’s say …

1. You sell decorative outdoor garden items.
2. Your current marketing plan has you developing content based copy on developing pleasing about gardening and the niche hobby topics
3. The economy is tough and gardens are not a homeowner's priority

In this scenario there will likely be customers who would be looking for garden items for their home which they have found through your online content. However, what if you ‘flexed’ your marketing ideals and re-pitched the products as a way of improving the value of a home an individual may want to sell? This could have a profound impact on your ability to boost sales and increase your market reach.

You are selling the exact same product, but you recast the product to conform to a real need – selling houses. This need is expressed behind closed doors and at the local coffee shop. It ultimately is translated to the general business climate. There may come a time when you revise your approach once more, but that’s one of the best things about ecommerce, you can recast your sales approach when you need to. You will find that for the web based businesses this recast or re planning is a necessary marketing venue.

Some of the very dismal things that may be happening in the business world around you may present marketing opportunities you just haven’t explored yet.

When the economy deals a blow to your marketing objectives take some time to research if there may be new opportunities in a shifted marketing strategy. Many time adversity can allow ecommerce to flourish in new soil. Think outside of the box.... The only bad marketing idea is the one you didn't plan or try.

Look for any and every advantage for marketing your product in light of changing circumstances and a softer economic tide. Change doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. The greatest successes in business have very often been spawned of need and change.