Online Shop Traffic

[TLMartin]

Hi

My online shop has a number of items I sell at various stall events. The stall events go alright, although the online sales are a bit slow...
My prices mostly beat amazon and ebay prices, and I have products that a number of people want....
I'm able to make sales on Facebook ok

The trouble I see is that I appreciate most people going to buy an item just go straight to Amazon or eBay.... trouble is the charges eBay and Amazon make are too high to make any kind of profit

Just curious what ways people might suggest to drive more traffic to the site. I know my products appear in google, I;ve had a few random orders from google..... I'm just looking at more ways to get people there.... what are the best ways to advertise an online shop

Obviously budgets are low at the moment as its new as an online shop....

I'd be grateful for any suggestions thanks

 

[RyanTrustSpot]

If you have good prices and already appear on Google it might help you to start collecting customer reviews and display them on your website. There are a lot of sites out there that do this.. TrustPilot, ResellerRatings, ShopperApproved etc.. Our company TrustSpot = trustspot (dot) io actually is 100% free and helps you to increase site conversion rates and more importantly as well to drive traffic to your site.

When you create an account on TrustSpot you automatically get a company profile page, which thanks to our partnership with Google .. is SEO driven to show high on search results fast. You can advertise your products on your profile page, so when customers search for those products, there is a good chance your profile page will show on the results. Customers can than click in > read about your company > see your awesome reviews and select to view your page.

I checked your website, and I see you use FreeIndex, which I'm not too familiar with, but you can easily import those reviews into TrustSpot to jumpstart your collection.

I was going to suggest Google product ads, but if your budget is low that might not be an option. Have you considered doing any content marketing, such as blogging?

 

[TLMartin]

I'll have a look at the other testimonial places. A few clients of my IT services side used free index which is where I came across it and to be fair it's generated quite a few leads IT side

I'll have a look at yours as I like that I can import existing testimonials there, that's one thing that's made me cautious of signing up to all


As for the blogs I've started doing a blog, just curious what's the best way to get people finding and reading your blog? Is there a good way to get it out there.... Blogs aren't a strong point of mine

Thanks

Tris

 

[fisicx]

If you don't like blogging don't have a blog. It's not going to make any difference so it's probably not worth the effort.

Do you have visitors who don't convert or it is visitors you need?

 

[Annoying Donkey]

Do you maintain a list of customers? Then can you make some sort of incentive to refer a friend? The starting point is to wow your customers so they want to refer people...

Understand who your customer is and what they're really buying can make a huge difference.

Getting an article - ideally a regular series - that connects with your audience, on a site that already has your customers visiting, will bring targeted traffic.

Making your product descriptions connect with the underlying emotional need will help build on that connection. Do this right and referrals will come...

Having a connected blog may help depending on what the content is. Again, you need to make that emotional connection so people want to come to you rather than Amazon etc. So yuo blog about the underlying need rather than about your products.

Fastest way would be to find people with lists of your ideal prospects and get them to make an endorsed offer. This could be for a profit share or an exchange - you endorse what their selling in exchange for their endorsement.

There maybe other things you could offer in return for such an arrangement. How about some form of ebook that would be useful to their customers, which, of course, would have your banding and contact details. B&Q give away "how to" PDFs which have a list of their products need to complete the task. The "how to" is useful in itself. Perhaps you could do something similar and put a series together as a giveaway ebook...

Maybe offer them a product for review... Doesn't work overly well for commodity type products.

 

[TLMartin]

If you don't like blogging don't have a blog. It's not going to make any difference so it's probably not worth the effort.

Do you have visitors who don't convert or it is visitors you need?

I didn't say I don't like blogging, I said it is a new area to me, that I'm just starting, it's not my strong point.... However again with a blog, how do you get people to want to read your blog when there is so many more out there.... any tips there would always be useful... to me just google searches seem over saturated with blogs that there must be a more focused environment

I need more visitors to the online shop.... that's what I'm curious about how to obtain more... i.e. get them to try me before they try amazon or ebay and assume they are the best prices...

Existing customers tend to be the on the stall, and most of them wait to see me at the next event.... so don't do much online and they do bring friends to the stall event.....

I want to try and get more from a wider area online.... so literally want to drive more traffic to my site


Weblink Plus, you've got some great thoughts there which I'd love to know more about
You say about an article on a an already established visited site.... whats the bets way to approach these? I tried for my IT Services side to deal with a local paper on World BackupDay... didn;t even get an acknowledgement email... mind you even when I also asked about advertising in them I didn't get an acknowledgement email... lol

I have an affiliate scheme set up on the site, and am about to speak to a few local charities to ask them to put me out there to their members and they get a percentage of sales from their recommendations.... but how to do this on a more wider field... or similar I'd also be interested in more information, if you have suggestions

Thanks for your help

 

[PaulBappoo]

I just took a look at the site, seems you have lots of stuff there, very nice. I think the design could do with a bit of work, you need to inspire confidence in people if they are going to trust you enough to buy and design can do that. Also, the small text paragraphs on the home page dont really need to be there at all. Check out some of the big boys, like Etsy - no paragraphs of small text anywhere, unless you go hunting for it.

But.... all that aside, the thing with getting traffic is that it wont buy on visit 1 (rarely anyway) so you need to get people to register with you. A marketing friend I know refers to this as a "lead magnet" - i.e. some sort of givaway, usually electronic and therefore low cost, that encourages people to put in their email address. Once you have the address, you can market to the person to your hearts content until you beat them into submission lol.

OK, so I am not advocating spamming, but I am advocating having a conversation with your potential customers. The journey from stranger to customer is a long one, it starts with people seeing something of yours out in internetland - no-on is gonna just think to type in your address and land on your page. So you need some cool stuff out there that attracts people. Bring them in, get their email addresses and market to them. That is the magic sauce.

Best of luck

Paul

 

[PinkSquareHosts]

As far as blogging goes, just to pick up on that point, it is well worth doing from an SEO perspective. as it adds more indexed pages from your website, which means more opportunities for it to show up in Google or Bing, and drive traffic back to your website from organic searches. You can promote your blog posts via social media "hey read all about blah blah blah...(add link). I currently manage a website for a regular client, since adding approximately 5 - 10 blog posts a month, that site ranks on the first page for a lot more relevant keywords than it did a year ago!

 

[webgeek]

Blogging is one approach from a content perspective. The other is to expand your product pages so that they stand head and shoulders above the rest. Photos, videos, product specifications, reviews, use cases, hints tips and tricks for use, buyers guides and/or just about anything a reader would find interesting which Google would find relevant.

Optimise the on-page, expand with blog posts which you mention/syndicate via social networks and you've got a winner.

 

[justinaldridge]

This is a tough one. You have quite a varied product range. It's much easier to create a marketing campaign when you are focused on a specific niche but your products seem quite diversified, from t-shirts to video games. We have a client in the video games market and it's a very tough marketplace online...and he is focused on just that.

SEO would be a very long game for you as you would need to do so much work to make the website really strong in terms of content and backlinks. You need to consider other approaches.

In these sorts of situations we tend to focus on activities such as competitions which enables you to get a huge reach with a very small outlay as you can use other platforms to reach a ton of people. I always recommend gleam.io to run the competition on, it's cheap and because it's set up to enable people to enter in different ways it means you can also significantly boost your social media followers and newsletter subscribers. You need to embed the gleam widget on a page on your site.

Just make sure you have a prize that people will really want. It doesn't have to be anything expensive...it could just be a voucher to use on your site or an M&S voucher.

The next bit is to then submit the competition to all of the competition websites...and there are quite a few. You will be surprised at the volume of traffic that you will get and what it will do for your followers and subscribers...oh and you also get some backlinks too which helps the site for SEO.

By the way, I've done this many times and it's very effective. Here are some competition sites that you can submit to to get started with.

http://www.competitions-time.co.uk/competitions/addcomp
http://www.competitionstoday.co.uk/addacompetition.php
http://www.crazycompers.co.uk/add-competitions/
http://www.loquax.co.uk/promoters/addcompetitions.htm
http://www.competitorscompanion.com/addcomp.php
http://www.theprizefinder.com/upload-competitions
http://www.ukcompetitions.com/add-comps.html
http://www.myukcompetitions.co.uk/submit-competition/
http://www.ukcompetitions.com/add-comps.html
http://www.allukcompetitions.com/add-competition.html
http://www.theprizefinder.com/submit/competition
http://www.competitionhunter.com/
https://twitter.com/competitionhunt
http://www.competitionsandgiveaways.co.uk/get-featured
http://www.competitionslist.com/info/submit
http://contestrage.com/uk/advertise.html
http://prizebug.co.uk/submit-a-competition/
http://www.ukwins.co.uk/submit/
http://www.offeroasis.co.uk/addfreelisting.php
http://www.competitionclub.co.uk
http://www.competitions-uk.com
http://www.like2win.co
http://compershaven.co.uk
http://www.simplyprizes.com
http://superlucky.me
http://www.compersgrapevine.co.uk
http://www.coffeebreakwinner.co.uk
http://www.competitionstracker.co.uk
http://www.competitions4free.co.uk
http://ukcompetitions.info

Best of luck.

 

[Deleted member 65339]

Maybe take a look at classified ads on ebay?

 

[Countrymun]

Hi,
We do quite well with facebook ads. The key is to choose an audience unless your product is something that most people would buy.
We don't spend a lot and you can run an ad for just a day or a week so you can quickly see if it is bringing in customers. Our products are not the cheapest so we get a lot of clicks where people don't buy but FB definitely gets us a lot of clickthroughs.
The only problem is that it isn't easy to get to grips with - but there is a good article on the forum about it.
That said, we started a google ad about two years ago. It is a tiny budget but we get at least 10 clickthroughs a week so we have been thinking about increasing our google ads.
Depending on your product you might want to think about magazines - some niche magazines and even niche web forums offer ad space pretty cheap.
Is there anything about your business/product that would make a good press release? That doesn't cost you anything except the time involved in writing the release and then finding the right publications for it.
Hope this helps
Susan

 

[James Hawkman]

As a starter, I will recommend you to start advertising your products on social media and boost them a bit ti the right target audience. Other than that, push your products to some classified ads sites, that will for sure gain you more traffic.

 

[Annoying Donkey]

You say about an article on a an already established visited site.... whats the bets way to approach these?

Blog owners get loads of requests every day, so you need to stand out. Think about how to pitch it as a benefit. I always try to get a conversation going first, by commenting or asking questions via their contact address. It's rare you'll get a response to a single email. You'll normally have to persist. Once you've got a conversation going, then you can hint at a guest posting.

Otherwise look for blogs that ask for guest postings. Just be careful and selective. Some blogs are likely to do more harm than good

One way might be an interview or an article about the blog owner on your blog. They'll almost always highlight this to their own circle. Obviously, you need to make sure it's interesting to your audience.

I tried for my IT Services side to deal with a local paper on World BackupDay... didn;t even get an acknowledgement email... mind you even when I also asked about advertising in them I didn't get an acknowledgement email... lol

Best to pick up the phone and talk to the editor. Buy him/her lunch. Have something already published on your blog so they can see samples of your writing. Find out their editorial policies. Then once they know who you are, you might get more response. And your press release needs to be newsworthy. Nobody really cares what's going on in your business unless there is something in it for them. You might be able to relate your press release to newsworthy events. e.g. "The Queen ate my hamster" on the Queens 90th might get attention... Probably not much use unless you're selling edible hamsters...