Online Marketing for Ecommerce Sites

Marketing is of huge importance in the online industry. This is a totally different ballgame than the typical businesses down the road from your house. Where in typical brick and mortar businesses there has been a standard of “build it and they will come”. This is not the case for the online industry. If you wanted to compare your internet business to an offline business it would be like building a store in the most remote location and the only way to get business is to drive a bus to and from your store.

Your ecommerce website is going to be unknown originally and the only way most people will know of it without any marketing will be if they just happen to stumble across it. The bus you are driving is the marketing method. To get it going, you are going to find people who are interested in your store and drive them to your website. If the people you were driving were interested in your store to begin with, it increases the chances that they will buy something once they get there. This is the overall concept of online business marketing. You absolutely have to jump headfirst into the marketing game to be successful.

It is all about testing

Now with the above analogy, hopefully you understand that you are going to have to market your business. The idea now though is to take a step back and be rational about your thinking. Not all of your marketing ventures are going to be successful. In fact, a good portion of them will not be. This means that whatever you are doing, you should analyze how much traffic you are receiving and evaluate your return on investment (ROI). If the ROI is not high enough, get out or modify the marketing plan.

The many places to advertise

There are numerous things that you can do online to drive traffic to your website. This topic alone deserves numerous articles and there are hundreds of lengthy books on this topic. I do not have anything to recommend to you, but rather, just get out there and start reading. Below, I have a few of the most commonly used methods to bringing traffic to a website.

Direct Advertising

Direct advertising is the term that is given to the method of going out to related websites and paying to place banners or links back to your website from one that already has a significant amount of traffic. The idea is that the advertising website has traffic that might be interested in your products. They will click your advertisement and hopefully purchase an item.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization has really become popular over the last five years. Google receives several million searches per day. A good portion of those people are likely looking to buy products that you have for sale. The problem is that your website is listed on the 15th page for “good smelling candles” and no one ever goes that far down the list to find your website. You have to invest time and often money into what is called search engine optimization (SEO) to get ranked higher.

Pay Per Click

Google’s system called “Adwords” has really helped many businesses that want to see immediate results from their efforts. Businesses who are in highly competitive markets may find this worthwhile. These are simply the advertisements listed on the far right when you do a search at Google, usually under “Sponsored Ads”. The businesses that advertise there are paying for each click on their advertisement that they receive. Too competitive of markets can make it a poor choice though.

Since the clicks are based on bidding, it is not uncommon to have to pay four to eight dollars for a single targeted visitor. Do as much research on this topic before you invest into it. Many people have lost their shirts off their back when not bidding properly or keeping an eye on their pay per click advertising.