HELP: New online web shop business. (How can I get genuine visitors/hits?)

[jcsuperstar]

Hi,

I’m currently in the process of setting up a new online web business/shop selling t-shirts. I have a supplier, and they will ship directly to the customer, I have someone setting up the OS commerce site for me, and am sorting out the other basic stuff, like phone numbers etc, etc.

Now the question I have is a simple, but yet I know it’s not…

How do I get genuine hits/people to visit my site?


Now I believe the most affective way is to use ad-sense (Google?) But my knowledge on this is very poor…is Google the best? What about the other search engine ad-sense services, like yahoo, ask, msn, etc.?

Can anyone please help/advice me on the best way to go about this, as I’m totally new at trying to get people to visit a site, any help would truly be greatly appreciated.

I realise the main key is getting lots of genuine visitors to my site, as I’m presuming common sense would dictate the more genuine visitors, the more people that are likely to buy my t-shirts.


Many thanks in advance. :redface:

[darren atkinson]

Hi

The answer to your question is get together a marketing strategy. I don't mean to sound harsh but attracting visitors to your business (website) should have been a key consideration when deciding to establish a new business.

Anyway I'm not a marketing expert so I'll give you what advice I can in my knowledge base.

With PPC (Ad-Sense) you can quickly end up spending lots of money so you have to be very careful at first with your bid amounts, and monitor it almost constantly so you can tweak your spending rates.

Google will generate the most hits from its Ad-Sense compared to the Yahoo / MSN overture system, purely for the reason that Google has a miles bigger market share of Internet searches. Do not disregard overture though as it doesn't matter to you where your customers come from.

Long term I would expect it to be very difficult to make a profitable business relying soley on PPC for low value items such as t-shirts.

You do need to think about SEO as a long term alternative. However this can be very costly if done properly and will take quite a while to gain good results for.

Alongside all this you should think of ways of getting your web address out there such as press releases, magazine adverts, etc.. but again I'm no marketing specialist.

I'm certain there is at least one guy on here who manages PPC campaigns as a full time job, and there are a few SEO people on here too ;-)

By the way, make sure your OsCommerce guy sets up search engine friendly urls, and meta tags / page titles modifications to the basic installation.

If you need any more info feel free to pm me or email me through my computer site below.

Regards,

Darren

[earner]

I setup and manage PPC campaigns for a living and I wouldn't recommend you go down that route yet.

Darren hit it right on the head first time: get a marketing strategy.

You should have done that before you got a website commissioned really. If you don't know who you are marketing to, or how then it can be difficult to work out how you want the website to work, or what your business model will be.

I've turned down clients for PPC marketing and advised them not to throw good money away as their website wasn't right to be able to turn their PPC visitors into paying customers. Even though they'd just gone through a whole £5000 website re-design, it just wasn't set up at all for any kind of marketing. It was one of those "doesn't it look lovely" sites (in the eyes of the designer).

A friend of mine had an affiliate link to a T shirt website on his website and he was making hundreds every month from the T shirt sales he was generating. So there's money to be made in it.

Once you've got your website up and running, come back to the Forum and ask the question again and people may be able to be more helpful once they can see your site. But you can put your wallet away as there are many good ways to generate site visitors.

Have you thought about how many you need per day?
How you are going to get them coming back?
How you are going to persuade them to buy when they are there?
Your upsell opportunities?

Anyway, it's late and I am not thinking in whole sentences at the moment, so above was more of a "brain dump" than a coherent reply.

Good luck with the T shirts!

[ltw]

intersting. my website is u[p and running and I have a marketing strategy for 'offline' as this was why the business was set up and the website was just to back up my business but I'm now starting to think of the online potential. Any advice woudl be greatly apreciated as to how i could drive more traffic to it.