No matter what business you are in, the way to go about marketing your business online is the same.
Your business is all set up. Everything looks wonderful and you are envisioning great success. Everyday you check to see if you’ve sold something but everyday you check your disappointment soars a little higher. Nobody is buying!
This is where marketing your business comes into play. A major mistake people make when setting up their business online is not learning how to properly market it the same goes for taking your offline business online. If people can’t find your store then they most certainly can not buy what you are selling.
1. Find out if you are getting visitor’s and if you are, find out where they are coming from.
The first thing you need to do when marketing your online store is to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytic is a traffic analyzer.
First head over to Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a new account. It will walk you through the sign-up process and putting your website on.
For Business’s With A Website – If you have your own website then you will need to get the tracking code and install it on every page on your website. Copy and Paste the code into html on the bottom of every page you have done.
For Craft Stores Online Using Etsy – If you are using Etsy then you need to get your publishers ID. It will be the profile id 01234567. After you log into your Etsy account and click on web analytics. You will put your profile id in there.
For Selling On eBay – eBay keeps track of how many visitor’s you have going to your listings already.
Why are we doing this?
This will allow us to see just how many people are looking at our products. There is no sense getting upset that you are not selling anything and feeling like your business is a failure if you are only getting a handful of people a day looking.
If you opened a bricks and mortar store and only twenty people came in a day, you would be sunk. The same goes for online.
It will also tell you where your visitor’s are coming from. Are they coming from Google? If so what are they typing in to find your store? How long are they staying and looking at your products? These are all very important questions you should be able to answer. Having the answers to these questions will help you when you are building your store up from being a hobby to being a real business.
2. Getting Visitor’s (Customers)
You have basically 2 options when it comes to getting visitor’s to your store. You can either pay someone to do it for you or you can learn how to do it yourself.
If you would rather pay someone then be prepared to spend a lot of money. Basically what they will do is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your store for you and for each keyword (what people type into Google, Yahoo, etc to find your store) be prepared to spend upwards of $1000.
Now I have always been a big fan of learning how to do something for myself and even if I wasn’t at those prices I would have been.
The other option is to learn how to SEO your store yourself. This is not going to be a quick, over the next five days you will be an SEO expert type thing. It will take patience and learning but within a few months you are going to have a darn good idea of what you are doing.
There are two methods to use when you are learning to get traffic to your business.
The first is a paid method called PPC. What that is is those little ads you see on the side of Google. Every time someone clicks on one of those ads the owner of that ad pays money to Google. The advantage of using PPC to get visitors is that it is quick. Your ad is displayed on the first page of Google and no work is required from you to get it there. The disadvantage of course, is that you will always have to pay to get your visitor’s.
The next method is called Article Marketing. Basically what that is is you write articles that link back to your business. This is somewhat like a popularity contest in Google’s eyes. The more links you have pointing to your store the more popular Google thinks your business is and in turn the higher your business will list on Google. The advantage of Article Marketing to improve your stores SEO is that it is free to write and submit articles. The disadvantage is that it will take some time and work to get your store listed on the first page of Google.
One of the major advantages of having your business online is that you are able to market it for relatively little or no money. That is simply not possible to do if you have a brick and mortar store.
You have many options if you would like to learn how to market your own store.
There are a zillion books available to buy and so on. The problem with buying a book (in my opinion) is that you will have to buy a lot of them to get the whole picture of what you need to do to get a lot of visitor’s to your business. By the way, it’s my opinion because that is what I did. I never found one that included everything I needed to know. They all seemed to be missing important pieces. I’m not saying that there are no good, all encompassing books available just that *I* never found one.
What I would recommend is if you want to learn how to market your own business is to join Wealthy Affiliate University.
There are three reasons for this.
1. All of the information you need to learn is in one place. If you decide to go out and buy a book (and then another one) on how to market your store you will see why I consider this priceless.
2. It is a lot cheaper ( *I* like that) to join Wealthy Affiliate to learn how to market your store then it would be to by books on the subject because everything you need is in front of you without having to buy anything else.
3. They have a forum with people at every stage of learning how to market. This means that if you get stuck on what you should be doing, you post it in the forum and someone will have an answer for you. This was invaluable to me because I learned a lot of great ways to market and got lots of questions answered for me when I was confused. The more you ask the quicker you will learn how to market your online business.
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