Building up your traffic
Main prerequisites for success
There is something called conversion rate in the e-business world and generally speaking, the higher the visit rate, the higher the income. The fact that income grows proportionally with the visit rate is only valid if you manage to bring customers to your web by using direct and non misleading methods.
Suitable and unsuitable forms of advertising
An example of misleading advertisment could be a wrongly chosen form, such as banner campaign with an attractive woman. On one hand, the campaign will have a high click-rate (click rate towards impressions), but many customers will only click on this banner because of that pretty woman. Once the customer finds out that you offer cameras and not "pretty women", he will quickly leave your shop and your conversion rate from this particular campaign will be insignificant.
Suitable and unsuitable places for advertisements
It is important to understand, that you can achieve higher conversion rate by placing your adverts on websites somehow related to the commodities that you offer yourself. A good example of such an ad is advertising on social networking websites with holiday pictures if you sell cameras or camping equipment. A similar campaign that runs on a web devoted to politics will probably be less effective. Always try to advertise on websites where the visitors feel related to what you do and offer. And do not consider the advert price and number of impressions to be the main success factor.
Statistics are the essential predisposition for success
Do not underestimate statistics, such as Google Analytics. Learn to understand it. Monitor statistics regularly and, preferably with your morning coffee, browse through and think about what you have just learned. You'll find out soon enough, that statistics can give you a lot of important information and facts that can help you to manage your online store better. It will quickly give you a much better idea on how to estimate the advertising effectivity. You learn more about your customers and also to differentiate between good and bad offers from advertising agents, who often care about your money rather than your commercial success.
You will find out soon enough that you can manage the growth of your business with considerably less investment, in comparison to the beginning. Our customers and providers of the most successful e-commerce enterprises say "statistics come first".
Sources of visitors
High website traffic is an important factor, which has a fundamental impact on your incomes. Focus on building your traffic up and also on monitoring related expenses. Try to use the cheapest possible ways for building up your visits and don't forget to analyse each advertising source from different points of view using statistic tools. Analyze your objectives carefully and suggest suitable marketing forms that correspond with your goals and planned budget.
Now have a look at the basic sources of daily visit rates below:
- Repetitive visits
- Fulltext search engines (SEO)
- PPC advertising
- Link building
- Third-party shopping marketplaces (product comparison)
- Banner campaigns
- On-line community
- Affiliate systems
- Microsites
- Competitions
- Sponsoring
- PR activities
Repetitive visits
Repetitive visits are visits formed by visitors that had come to your store before and came back again. This is esential for any prosperous online business. It is extremely difficult and expensive to earn every single new customer. That's why it would be an increadible shame to lose a customer that you have already gained. Do everything you can to make your customers stay with you and provide them with good enough reasons to come back.
Fulltext search engines (SEO)
Fulltext search engines such as Google.com use so-called fulltext algorithms. If your shopping cart solution provider manages SEO well (FastCentrik is perfectly optimized for SEO, see Features), you are familiar with SEO rules and you also follow these rules strictly, you are on the right path to success.
Success in our terms is to be displayed on the first page of each of the search engines for keywords and expressions that are relevant to products you offer. Visits from search engines are very important and bring about 30-50% of daily visits for established shops.
The best thing about SEO is that it aims for a special group of targeted customers and represents a cheap yet powerful e-marketing tool. The downside of SEO related primarily to new shops as the results only show up after a considerable delay of 1 to 5 months; this relates to page ranks, an evaluation given to your web by the respective search engine.
PPC advertising
The abreviation PPC stands for Pay per Click. It's a form of advertising, where you pay for every click that leads to your online shop. PPC advertising system is provided by e.g. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. It is a textual add displayed on the right side of the site next to regular (organic) search results. PPC marketing requires regular attention and time if the aim is to advertise as cheaply and effectively as possible. Sometimes it is more convenient and economic to engage a specialist who can deliver turn-key PPC management for an agreed flat rate.
Linkbuilding
Linkbuilding is about creating as many links as possible that lead to your shop from different websites, e-catalogs, discussion forums, blogs, etc. Generally speaking, the more links you build, the better. Links offer two major benefits. Firstly, people click on it which means more visitors and secondly it is important for SEO, as mentioned above.
Search engines do make a difference between the quality of links. Sometimes it is more efficent to have 10 good quality links as oposed to 300 poor quality ones. Because of the complexity of this matter, we do not have enough space to go into a detailed explanation here. In every case, try to build as many links as possible, e.g. through free registration into internet catalogs, link exchange with friendly webs, etc.
Linkbuilding is of course time demanding, but it should not turn you off and you should pursue this activity relentlessly. The good news is that linkbuilding could be outsourced as well as PPC or SEO. But be careful when choosing the right agency as some of them use software robots for linkbuilding. As a result of that your internet shop can get penalized by search engines and you won't succeed in reaching good positions in search results.
Third-party shopping marketplaces
Third-party shopping marketplaces are special portals which receive data from internet shops and provide a fast search option throughout all the products of the registered online stores.
One of the advantages of the third-party shopping marketplaces is the fact that you can start promoting your online store straight after its startup. This is to be compared with SEO, which brings results only after an extended period of time (months, sometimes years of patient work). It is sufficient enough to register with online marketplaces and arrange programs that will regularly provide new product data from the shop (referred to as data feeds) to be exported to the particular marketplace. Thanks to the FastCentrik system you can send your product data to all important marketplaces, such as Google Products, please see Features. The search website can generate as much as 50% of all income for some shops and its significance is still growing.
The business model of the third-party shopping marketplaces is usually based on the above-mentioned principle of PPC. An agreed price is paid for every click that brings a customer to your website. The customer's decision as to which shop he or she chooses can be influenced by you. When a buyer searches for a particular product, the website gives him a choice of several competitive offers. The customer then decides according to several aspects; for some the main criterium is the price while for others it could be the product description, delivery conditions, stock availability or customer evaluations.
Banner advertising
Banners used to be the main advertising form for online store promotions. As time passes on and together with the increasing prices of online advertising and its decreasing effectivity (low click/through rate) of banner campaigns (banner blindness, ad removals etc.) different forms of e-marketing became more effective. It is also important to understand that the role of a banner campaign does not have to be only direct inflow of customers, but also image building. For that reason the banner should always display an easy-to-remember address of your shop. Banner advert providers usually charge in three ways:
- Exchangable advertising - you provide a space on your website and, in return, you are provided space somewhere else
- PPC
- Payment per impression
On-line communities
Websites where different online communities meet could also be used to increse your visit rate. Discussion forums could be used in particular. However, this way of promotion is quite demanding. Be careful as using discussion forums could sometimes reach the ethical boundaries. In principal, there are hundreds of discussion forums on different topics, including topics related to your commodities. If you are going to monitor and participate on these forums as an active disputant, you can build awareness and bring more customers to your shop (some forums also allow placing links). Always try to be relevant and to the point and never slander your competition. Other visitors would soon reveal your identity which would lead to you losing the required respect.
Affiliate systems
Affiliate or commission systems run on the principle of aquiring customers followed by a commission payment from their turnover. Commission partners place textual or banner ads on their website, their customers click on them and are then taken to the advertised website. The advertised site has to be able to recognize the acquirer (commissional partner) and the commission right for each partner. If the shop system cannot do that, you can use an external commission system.
Microsites (miniwebs)
Microsite is a small website whose aim is to promote product, service or important information in a way that does not lead the attention away from the main information - the actual message of the microsite. Microsite is often a part of and is used for promotions during planned marketing campaigns. Microsites are expressly used for their easy optimizing for search engines (SEO).
The usage differences between a web presentation and a microsite:
- Microsites usually has between 1-8 www pages
- Page navigation is extremely easy
- Emphasis is usually on attractively elaborated graphic design and flash effects
- Microsites are focused on narrow target group of visitors
- Microsites provide simple, uncomplicated message
- The website is created in such way, that the visitor's attention is not led off from the main topic
Competitions
There are numerous webs on the internet with different visit rates. You can approach them, agree with the provider to organize a competition with prizes you will supply. The questions might be designed in a way that the competitors need to visit your store if they want to find the answer. Thanks to this you will increase your traffic and also gain outside non-competitive visitors. The biggest effect will be reached, of course, if your competition runs on websites with related products.
Sponsoring
There are also other types of webs with high visit rates that could be used for increasing your own traffic. The ideal example are websites created by authors who run these webs for non-commercial reasons and cover all expenses themselves. If you can offer them a modest sponsoring and you are open for negotiations, you can achieve in return a space for your advert, article about your company, etc.
PR activities
PR - Public Relation activities (paid PR articles, press releases sent to journalists, press conferences etc.) won't bring the required results as fast as the direct marketing forms mentioned previously. Nevertheless, PR is a good way to promote your brand. You shouldn't, especially in the later period, underestimate PR. Because it is quite a difficult area, in which those with better contacts with journalists and the journalistic community are more successful, it is probably wise to outsource PR to a professional and reliable agency.
