Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Ecommerce Website

Let’s discuss some techniques that how we can promote our e-commerce website online without spending much money.

1. Blogger Outreach:

Blogger outreach is about building relationships. You can find social influencers or bloggers in your niche who has good social following. You can connect with them and get your product reviewed from them to leverage the benefits of their social following. You can offer your product to them for free in turn.

Blogger outreach can be used for Guest Posting, Product reviews, Increasing awareness and many other things. Lets discuss few of them and some tools which you can use for Blogger Outreach.

a. Guest Posting: Many people thinks that Guest Posting doesn’t work anymore as Google doesn’t value it much. But that’s not true. Guest Posting is still a strong tool to get traffic and increase awareness about your product.

You can find websites relevant to your business that has guest authors and asks them to write about your product and services to increase your brand visibility online.

b. Get Your Product reviewed: It always helps if someone having large following can review your product and write about it. There are many social influencers who review products and share their views with their readers. You can offer your product to them for free to them in turn.

Few tools that can help you in finding such influencers. We call them influencer search engines.

Followerwonk: This is the best service to find influencers for your niche. You can type the key search term related to your business and find the twitter profiles having good following. Then you can approach them or connect with them.

Check the screenshot below for reference.

follower-wonk

 

NinjaOutreach: Probably one of the best prospecting and outreach tool available, you can search for influencers either via social prospecting, content prospecting (the content they write), or live search (search engines). Just type in a keyword like ‘food blogger’ and you should be able to see tons of results from their database. The outreach part makes it easier to connect with influencers.

To sum it up, this tool can help you find Influencers, build a list, reach out, and save time.

Blogdash: Blogdash is the best tool to help you finding targetted bloggers/influencers who can write about your product or services. Its very important to find the appropriate blogger who can write for you and blogdash makes it easy for you to find that blogger in your industry.

You can create a campaign, find bloggers, pitch them and track the progress.

2.  Leverage The Benefits Of Instagram

instagram-marketing

 

Instagram is the most promising marketing source for ecommerce business owners. Its all about sharing photos and business owners can use it in creative ways to drive traffic and convert the visitors to sales.

You can share your product images to Instagram by using appropriate hashtags to get the attention of users and that can be a huge plus to your store. Its not like you just take a picture of your product and post it to Instagram and wait for likes, it doesn’t work like that. The photos should be created well to grab the  attention. For example, check this photo how they creatively they showcased their services by these photos. We took this from Instagram account of We Work. We work provides shared office space across the world so its obvious that they will post photos of their office space but check the way they took the photos which say it all about their offerings. They have also included their slogan in that. It bounds the visitor or followers to share the photo and that do the rest.

shop-by-instagram

Use appropriate hashtags to increase the reach of your photos. You can prepare a set of hashtags for each photo by typing it in the post area and see how many other posts are there with the same hashtag, it will give you an idea about the popularity of that hashtag as well.

Add your website URL in the bio section of the Instagram profile so people can find your website from there.

Run contests to get user generated photos and create engagement. After all its all about creating engagement. Let users posts photos using your brand name as hashtags and set a prize for them for best photo. You can do something like that.

Hire a professional photographer and get some nice clicks of your products to post on social media platforms that can drive more traffic.

You can embed your Instagram photos on your website as well in the form of a slideshow or grid of pictures.

You can add a shop by Instagram widget on your store which can allow customers to buy by clicking on Instagram pictures. See the example below how Andy and Evan Inc. did on their website. Its a kids apparel brand. http://www.andyandevan.com/

shop-by-instagram-widget

Try to take advantage of the following of influencers – This term came again which we discussed in Blogger Outreach section that influencers can drive good traffic and helps in giving a boost to your sales. There are several Instagram users are there who has huge following. You can find some such influencers in your niche and connect with them to review your product or share your product images on their profile. It can be a good strategy to drive traffic and promote your products. If your product is really good, you can easily find promoters.

Lets take a look at some numbers.

instagram-statistics

3. Search Engine Optimization:

We kept it at number 3 in our post but it is the first step that every ecommerce website owner should follow while launching a website. Your site should be seo ready and optimized before launch. It should be well optimized for onpage and offpage as well.

ecommerce-seo-marketing
Just follow some online tutorials and do the onpage seo optimization of the site. You can do it yourself as well. Insert meta tags to all the pages of site, make sure all your site pages and product pages have title and meta description tags written well.

Its important because if a page got indexed in search engine, the first thing a visitor will see is the title and description content so it should be done properly.

Check the site load time speed as it will not be good for customers. Customer may leave the site early if they find it difficult to browse site pages due to poor load time. You can check site speed on these tools:

Google pagespeed tool
Gtmetrix

Next submit the site to major search engines, there are several online services by which you can do this.

All these are basic SEO steps that will give your site the initial start that’s needed to launch the site. It will not drive massive traffic to your site but will make it SEO ready. SEO is a slow process and over the time, you will see results.

If you have a good budget, you can hire a seo company who can take it further for you. Don’t hire a cheap SEO firm who claim to get your site ranked among top 10 or to drive traffic instantly, as it will ruin your online presence and may get penalized from google.

4. Press Release

Press Release is always a powerful marketing tool for new and existing websites. If you are launching a new product or ecommerce store, you have to communicate the information to target audience or potential customers.  Press release is the most important marketing tool for that. You can write about your products and services in Press release and mention the important features as well.

5. Forums

Forums are the best place where you can connect with potential customers. Find some relevant forums and create an account there. Spend some time there and follow the questions of the members out there. Answer the queries of different members and build a connect with them. Once things are going well and in the right direction, you can add your signature to profile and add a link back to you website.

6. Social Media

Social media is a well know medium to promote your business online. Create profiles for your business on Twitter, Facebook, G+ and other major social media platforms. Once you finish creating profiles, go ahead and start posting content relevant to your products and services. You can set some marketing budget and start paid campaigns to promote your posts and page as well. This will bring followers to your profile and increase the reach of your product.

social-media

7. Reviews From Customers

Ask your customers to write reviews about your products on your website. It always helps new customers to learn about your products and build trust among them for your website. Reviews also help in your overall search engine rankings as Google prefers websites with good reviews.

Most of the buyers read the opinion and experience of other buyers from your website so it’s a good practice to have reviews from customers.

8. Build a Mailing List

There will be many visitors to your website who will just come to the site but don’t purchase any product. You can collect their email address by using a popup newsletter form or a form at some other place like in your blog. Once you have your email list ready, you can start using it.

You can use the email list for following purposes:   Email List Tools
a. Introducing New Products

b. Promotional Offers

c. Discounts

d. Sending Regular Blog Updates

There are many other ways to drive traffic and increase sales to your ecommerce website, and we will keep adding more such techniques to this post.

 

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