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.

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.

You most easily accomplish this by starting with an honest marketing and business model first. You must answer some tough questions like:

1. What types of services or products will you be selling with your online store? (Now and in the future as you grow)
2. What is your targeted area/region or customer base age, gender...? (Demographics)
3. What other companies will you form relationships with? (Distribution, etc.)
4. What kind of budget does your store development project have? (A real budget... Never over extend)
5. What is your plan for marketing and information distribution? (PPC, local marketing etc..)
6. Is your brand or company name well known or rich enough to include in your domain effectively? (Probably not)
7. What is the potential traffic for your store's products/services? (What are others in the same niche doing?)
8. How much or deep is the competition? (Who's on top and what do you have to do to beat them?)
9. Are you serious about making a successful commerce store... or have you big dreams and little execution?

There are a really host of things to consider in your domain name selection... some you can control and some you really cannot. Obviously, domain availability is one that is generally out of your control. If the name you "must have" is already registered, you might attempt to purchase it for a substantially higher investment. I strongly suggest you have a qualified SEO check it out first as there a many tricks and issues which can spoil the deal... and get a domain broker to handle the purchase for you... Would you sell your house using a car salesman?. Then, realize for certain, this is going to cost a great deal more than 10 bucks... So set your budget and stick to it.  Secondly, there are certain rules and restrictions regarding domain name registration.

• Domain names over 26 characters are supported in most web browsers, but many email, programs, and form fields will not be able to handle them. For reasons beyond my comprehension, however, in most extensions you can register up to 63 characters long.

• Domain names cannot begin or end with a hyphen.

• Names can only include English letters, numbers, and hyphens. For most TLD extensions the name must be 3 letters or longer.

Generally speaking, if you plan to target your home country (or another) you will benefit from registering a country level/coded domain and hosting physically residing in that country as well. If you are seeking a global market, then I suggest .com for a business or .net if you have to. If you are an organization or group, then .org would be perfect. In the United States, there is the .us, which I am personally against registering your business with this as it's main url.. Because it is not widely known, you lose some marketing juice and it is NOT a standard TLD and does not have all the same abilities for its use as a result.  If you own the .com and redirect one or the other, then that would be fine and helps to seal your "brand" development from squatters. I am also very much against the .cc, I know some one with a .cc website... A rather large market, that literally loses hundreds of lost customers to the .com business (which is in the same field) simply because the .com extension is so familiar they know its a "C" and boom they're gone.

Now for some nuts and bolts.... Keyword(s) in your domain name can help you some, if they are relevant and do not inhibit a shopper's ability to remember your domain name. Some will have to consider whether to chose the keyword path, a brand/company domain name or a snappy easily marketed domain name. Most times you cannot accomplish all of these metrics. That's where your planning and research comes in to play. I will say this in no uncertain terms, using your business name your business name is probably going to fail you for a very, very long time (unless it's Pepsi, Coke or Google =-)). There is no valid reason you cannot chose a potentially more successful domain to market now and register, but market your business' domain later (Buy both). There are some things you might think about when you start plodding though the hundreds of possible names for your web store.

1. It should be natural language and make sense.
2. I avoid using numbers for words and letters for abbreviated words. "like hot4U". The reason is, people will not always remember these things, and it will not take long for some squatter to register the "mistake" domains and sweep your precious traffic away. (Not Bf4.com for example)
3. Avoid hyphens. This one is a very highly argued topic. So here's the scoop. If your keywords have high enough search volume... You DO NOT need to separate them with anything to get the value of the keyword picked out or the word(s). If you need to check and see if the search engines know your keyword, just Google it, and look at your keyword in the highlighted words of the search results in the URLs/domains. If you do use a hyphen, keep it to one, people will mess up and not find you. (Trust me)
4. Try to pick something snappy and very easy to remember, word of mouth is FREE and effective marketing.
5. Shorter is better and if you cannot spell it.... HMM DUH.
6. Avoid using the automated tool suggested domains from tools like..."my..." or "the..." they are just unnecessarily irrelevant additions and are probably a good way to register your domain too similar to someone else's, and when a visitor forgets that irrelevant addition... They other guy will get the visitor.

Here are a couple of quick domain and search related tools you might find helpful. Google trends is a nice way to not only to check up on the search volume of your keywords, but a trended history as well. A good stable history or recent stable upward volume trends can let you know you are on the right track. When you are trying to choose a domain name, DomainsBot will sort your words in many different ways and let you know what is available with some alternate suggestions.

Good luck with your store!