Small Business Website Advice
E-Commerce: 5 Traffic Generating Strategies
Written by Bobby Jan for Gaebler Ventures
Generating traffic can be both the most important and the most difficult thing to do for internet businesses. This article will show you five strategies for generating more traffic.
Are you wondering why your website is not getting the traffic it deserves or why your traffic is not bringing in much revenue?
If your efforts are not showing up on the bottom line, then you should take a hard look at your marketing strategy. The success of many websites is a marketing success. Here are five strategies you should follow:
1. Make your web content work for you.
One of the biggest reasons why sites do not get a lot of traffic is because your potential customers cannot find your website.
So how do you make your website rank higher? Game the search engines. Figure out what makes the engine search engines like and make your website likable. When you are developing content for your website, be careful when it comes to choosing keywords. Imagine that you are somebody who would be interested in the product or service that you are selling and ask yourself, "How do I search for this product/service on a search engine?"
Always use keywords your customer base uses to search for a website and sprinkle them throughout your website. Using the right words will help the search spiders in properly indexing your website. Also, if you can, trade links with websites with high traffic.
2. Keep your website fresh
A website with the same old content and design will quickly go stale. Keep your website fresh by putting up new content from time to time, changing the designs, or adding interactive features. Give your customers a reason for coming back to check out the website. Nice interactive features to have include forums, podcasting, blogs, feedbacks, etc.
3. Invest in advertising.
Don't be cheap. Go ahead of put some money into pay per click (PPC) and other paid search campaigns--it really does work. When you are starting off, it is very unlikely that the search engine will give you a high ranking so you need to pay for your right to be up there. You do not need to spend a lot of money. Bid on keywords that are most relevant to your website. There are many advertisement platforms you could use, including Google's Adsense. You could also contact websites directly to see if there are any advertisement spaces available. Explore your options.
4. Provide useful articles.
Don't just let your website be about selling a product or service, add some flavor to it by providing useful articles. This way, visitors will come back more often to your website and link your articles to their websites. (The Google search engine will rank you higher if you have more incoming links.) Good articles will give your product/service more publicity as well as build goodwill with your customers.
5. Start networking.
There are many social networks out there--Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.--that can help you reach out to potential customers. Besides some of the mainstream social networks, you can also stack your customers by participating in forums, commenting on blogs, etc. Establish relationships with opinion leaders. The more of a splash you make in the social networking world, the more traffic you will generate for your website.
Cheng Ming (Bobby) Jan is an Economics major at the University of Chicago who has a strong interest in entrepreneurship and investing.
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