Online shops promotion

[Sunlust]

Hi,

We've recently opened an online shop for musicians, www.smeaudiosolutions.co.uk
We have some good products on there but I'm struggling with promoting the shop, what other options than PPC campaign can you think of to drive new visitors to my website?
I'm working on it really hard, to get some links from dj forums etc, but they all get deleted as advertising, same with blog comments...
I feel really hopeless because it costed me a lot of time to get this shop to work and now I get no visitors.
Any advices appreciated.

 

[Connexions]

Only had time for a quick look but....

make sure you get your sitemap uploaded to google webmaster tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

submit your products to google base:http://www.google.com/base

will be a start.

 

[rich06]

Hi sunlust, I'm a web designer and SEM manager so hopefully I can give you some advice that may help.

First of all, nice job on focusing on a featured product for the homepage. The only change I might make is instead of having a list of best selling items on the homepage, have a few eye-catching lozenges which identify categories instead. If you were to have a bestselling product then place it in the top right hand corner. At the moment you are repeating products which will confuse the audience.

Don't feel down about not getting any hits to your site. If your SEO is relatively new then don't forget it takes a couple of months to get to the top of the Search Engines and it is hard work. Deep linking may help in the short term and there are a few commmunity product review sites out there which may help. However, if your PPC is not working then I suggest really optimising it further. Look at negative keywords, negative sites, landing pages, search terms and competition.

If you need any more help don't hesitate to PM.

 

[Sunlust]

Only had time for a quick look but....

make sure you get your sitemap uploaded to google webmaster tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

submit your products to google base:http://www.google.com/base

will be a start.

My sitemap is uploaded to google.

I will submit my products to google base, thanks for this tip, I forgot about it ;-)

Hi sunlust, I'm a web designer and SEM manager so hopefully I can give you some advice that may help.

First of all, nice job on focusing on a featured product for the homepage. The only change I might make is instead of having a list of best selling items on the homepage, have a few eye-catching lozenges which identify categories instead. If you were to have a bestselling product then place it in the top right hand corner. At the moment you are repeating products which will confuse the audience.

Don't feel down about not getting any hits to your site. If your SEO is relatively new then don't forget it takes a couple of months to get to the top of the Search Engines and it is hard work. Deep linking may help in the short term and there are a few commmunity product review sites out there which may help. However, if your PPC is not working then I suggest really optimising it further. Look at negative keywords, negative sites, landing pages, search terms and competition.

If you need any more help don't hesitate to PM.

"few commmunity product review sites out there which may help"
Hmm, not sure what you mean with that, but I'll have a google for it.

I don't use PPC, we don't really have a marketing budget...that's the problem.

Thanks a lot for the tips, I hope for more.

 

[wood1e2]

Look at your titles, they are a little to generic, remove your company name. You probably know what you would search for if you were a customer, so place keywords phrases in your titles of your pages. upto about 64(ish) charactors.

If you have a shop you may find 'Sussex Music shop' a benefit, ok so not many people may search using that term, but it is likely to be less competitive and you may additional footfall from it.

You could write some articles/PR publish them online, get some pr in local newspaper

Can you change your URL's? Remove actinic/nanoKEY.html and just have category/nanoKey.html ? Obviously have the name of the category as to whatever category a nanoKey is..Keyboard/synth etc...

Make the main image smaller to bring up the products you are looking to sell..

ooppss now moving into area of web design not what you asked for...apologise going for that coffee now before I go completely off niche!!

Keep asking if you need any more pointers

 

[Kwackers]

Write Articles and list them in such places as Ezine.

Write Blog Comments with useful content

Post on forums with a Sig Link

Buy Links

Promote, Promote, Promote!

 

[Bruce_Andrews]

Unless the "coming soon" products are going to be there in the next week or so, either remove the heading/link/page, or add some sort of text about "available to special order" or something like that.
Anything that would make a prospect either look again, or better still, contact you with an enquiry.

 

[Sunlust]

Unless the "coming soon" products are going to be there in the next week or so, either remove the heading/link/page, or add some sort of text about "available to special order" or something like that.
Anything that would make a prospect either look again, or better still, contact you with an enquiry.

Thanks for the advice Bruce, you're right, I'll get a date of when they'll become available and put it on.

 

[matt.chatterley]

Thanks for the advice Bruce, you're right, I'll get a date of when they'll become available and put it on.

What about adding an "Email me when this product is available" link? Perhaps come up with some shorter wording, but still, gives you:

1. Indication of popularity before you put something up

2. Strong call to action for the customer

3. An opportunity to collect email addresses for opt-in marketing (tick here if you would like us to keep you updated when we add other new products)

 

[FireFleur]

Be careful not to drop your brand if you remove it from the title tags.

The brand is useful to have if you are doing any form of offline advertising.

It is best to think that you have just opened up a shop on a tiny dead end side street close to where you live.

Once you realise that is the shop, you have to use the same techniques you would use if in that type of physical position.

So, you should advertise locally, those customers will get the products really quickly and of course simpler to handle returns, so your warehouse location is important, and you can advertise the brand around the local area, it is just so happens you have a shop in your customer's computer system.

I think the sweet time for opening an online shop has gone, and nowadays it is a hard slog to get the brand out there, and to get the search engine traffic.

Typically it will cost 20pence to get a person to your site initially, and say a business card is 10pence, that will normally get you a site visit as well. Conversion is in the low percentiles for virtually every site, think 1 - 10%, and then you will start at the bottom so 1%.

So, say on average 15 pounds to get a sale to begin with.

Because I can develop solutions, and have been in ecommerce pretty much since it began, I head to the web, but I do look into bricks and mortar for people as well. For some it now actually makes more sense, and at some point I may open up a B&M, when the market is low, it may already mean less effort than online.

 

[allsquare]

I thought you were already an expert in this area;
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?p=257575 :|

http://www.smewebsolutions.co. uk/search-engine-optimisation

 

[YooHee]

bookmarking is one of the solutions you can do to your site....

also when forum posting don't do spamming.;..

 

[AndyBlack]

There is loads u can do to gain traffic. With regards to your comments on blog posting and forum posting. Don't blatently go on these forums and start posting about your site. Its spam and people don't't like it. Just log on and join in discussions. Start your own discussions. Give advice. Then simply add your descriptive links to your signature... Like I have below. Same applies to blogs. Why not download the free version of fast blog finder. Search for theme related blogs and post lengthy helpful products. Then add your website link to your name. If your post is good, they will leave your anchor as is and approve. Do this a few times per day and you're laughing. Also, write a good article and submit it to ezinearticles.

I'm no.1 in google uk now for 'article creator' and no.2 for 'unique articles'. Yes, not too competitive but for a new site with little content it isn't bad. Do things daily, but gradually and you won't go far wrong.

Good luck!

Andy

 

[computaguy]

My own advice (for what it is worth).

Remember that for some sites the majority of hits come from people who see the URL somewhere else. Written on a vehicle or mentioned at a local music school; advertised at a music venue or specialist music lighting center.

Once some hits come from these sources you will find word of mouth in the music industry is a great source of advertising!

 

[WhizzPeople]

I guess nobody has noticed one of the most important aspect of SEO ... your website URL. On the homepage, url on find out more it shows - http://www.smeaudiosolutions.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?PRODREF=113&NOLOGIN=1 but when I clicked it - it's redirecting me to http://smeaudiosolutions.co.uk/actinic/DigiScratch-2-software.html#a113

It's not helping you at all - and reducing your number of indexed pages. Search engine bots hate "redirect" and try to remove this redirect part.

I'll try to focus more in next posts.

Cheers!

 

[quikshop]

I guess nobody has noticed one of the most important aspect of SEO ... your website URL. On the homepage, url on find out more it shows - http://www.smeaudiosolutions.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?PRODREF=113&NOLOGIN=1 but when I clicked it - it's redirecting me to http://smeaudiosolutions.co.uk/actinic/DigiScratch-2-software.html#a113

From what I remember that's a necessity with Actinic in order to keep account holders logged in - they have to go through the cgi script. If that's changed I'd be interested to know.

Actinic's default seo results are generally very good and require few tweeking. Looking at the OP's post on the Actinic forum it looks like he's posted here for an easier time... or another forum link

 

[Icoste]

Hi,

I have had a look around your website and I would be keen to list your products with us on Icoste.com

We are offering new merchants upto 3 months free listings, please see the post here: www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=95288

Best Regards,

Mike Meade
Icoste.com

 

[edman]

Hi,

We've recently opened an online shop for musicians,
We have some good products on there but I'm struggling with promoting the shop, what other options than PPC campaign can you think of to drive new visitors to my website?
I'm working on it really hard, to get some links from dj forums etc, but they all get deleted as advertising, same with blog comments...
I feel really hopeless because it costed me a lot of time to get this shop to work and now I get no visitors.
Any advices appreciated.

You can do a bit of article marketing, this is free traffic for you

you can start here superfastqualityarticles. com for some pointers

You can also work on making demo videos for some of your products een if its just having some features list and reading of a powerpoint presentation with some photos and then submit to yotube and other video sites