Drive customers to your site
As with bricks and mortar stores, it doesn't matter how good your store looks, or your products are, if there isn't a regular and steady stream of traffic coming your way, your store, and your interest in it, will die. We are talking thousands of visitors a month here. Lets say that you aim to convert 3% of your visitors to paying customers. According to VISA, the average Australian is spending around $130 per online transaction. This is back of an envelope stuff, but you can roughly calculate how many visitors you should be aiming for to generate the turnover you want.
A $50,000 annual turnover is going to require 32 transactions a month which is equal to 1068 unique visitors per month through your store.This is not a huge amount of traffic IF you get the right level of exposure for your website.
You have many options of exposing your website to potential customers.
In order of cost effectiveness these are:-
- Positive Word of Mouth
- 'Organic' Search Engine Positions ie. Google
- Email Marketing
- 'Paid' Search Engine Positions ie. Google Adwords
- Direct Mail
- Press Advertising
- TV & Radio
Building traffic takes time, but there are short cuts. The main online methods available to you right now are:-
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Every online business should be working to establishing the strongest position possible on the Search Engines. Google provides over 70% of the search results, so this is the one to target. Either learn about Search Engine Optimisation yourself and spend at least 10 hours a week building links to quality websites, or engage a specialist company to do it for you. PlanetDomain's TheTrafficAccelerator service is the leading Search Engine Optimisation service in Australia. It costs $990 for 6 months service, and will optimize your website and aim to put you onto the 1st page of results for targeted search terms relevant to your business.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) This encompasses online advertising such as Google Adwords and Overture. PPC is a great way of generating instant results by targeting people actively searching for your keywords. The challenge is to create ads that consistently turn a profit. Adwords can be hard to get to grips with and many people are frustrated because of their lack of patience with the system, but it can produce great results. For short-term traffic injections, Adwords is a great tool, but for long-tern cost-effectiveness SEO is the way to go.
Email Marketing This is a cost-effective method of communicating with your existing customer base and generating new sales amongst this group. Your website should be actively encouraging visitors to sign up to a monthly newsletter. Over time, your mailing list will be a valuable source of new and repeat sales. Don't expect to generate new targets from email marketing, because sending emails to people that haven't opted in to your mailing list is called Spamming and is illegal. There are many off the shelf solutions that enable you to manage a mailing list and easily send out HTML emails from your website, and some online store software such as X-Cart has these facilities built in.
All the above are powerful methods of marketing that are essential if you are to generate the traffic you need to keep your business ticking over. If you are not going to invest the time or money building traffic to your website, save yourself a lot of hassle and don't go into business online. If all of the buzz words associated with online marketing make your eyes glaze over, that's okay, but recognize that you will need to engage specialist companies to handle these areas.
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