Getting Customers

Getting Customers

In my last post I talked about auction sites, today let’s assume you have a ecoomerce site but no one is visiting.

While it is certainly possible to sell your merchandise exclusively through auction sites you should still have a website. A presence on the web beyond eBay will help you promote your business and develop a more enduring relationship with your customers. If you don’t already have one and are daunted by the technical aspect of making your own site there are software templates that be purchased at any office supply store or online for around $20. You might consider hiring someone to design a site for you. Web designers can make your site attractive and highly personalized. Professionally made sites look more professional as a rule but the cost will be much higher than doing it your self.

Having a website does not guarantee traffic. There are millions of websites out there and you will need to find ways to maximize the chance of a customer finding yours. Once they’ve found your site much of that traffic will be unproductive. There are many ways to help generate traffic and make sure that that traffic generates sales, some are free and some are not.
A few free things you can try are contributing to discussion groups, trading links with similar businesses, and collecting testimonials. There are discussion groups out there for nearly every topic under the sun. Contributing to these groups will help establish you as an expert in your field and simply get your link out there. Trading links with websites similar to yours increases the chance of your site turning up on search engines and provides a valuable service to your customers.

Testimonials from previous customers may not improve your chance of being found on the web but it does help drive sales.
Never underestimate the power of a well-written press release. The press release will generate links to your site and inform your customer base. Spend some time researching the sites to submit your press release to and write a few informative paragraphs about new products or trends.

One method to improve traffic that you will have to pay for is hiring a search engine optimizer who can vastly improve the chance that the major search engines will rank your site higher. If you have the time and inclination you can learn to do this yourself by purchasing instruction books and PDFs.

Another way to improve traffic is to enroll in a pay-per-click search engine. The engines will charge you a fee per click they generate for you. Usually you will bid against other customers for position on the site. The higher your bid the better position you will get. You should expect to pay fees ranging from a few cents to around a dollar per click.

Direct mail campaigns can be a powerful tool but unless you’re willing to send what amounts to spam be prepared to pay serious money for permission only email lists. Beyond avoiding annoying people permission based lists will help you be sure to reach actual prospective customers. Permission based lists are available from reputable list dealers online.

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