Selling online is very easy. You just subscribe to a good eCommerce website builder and you are ready, right. Even though the technical process of creating your own online store has become easier, that doesn’t mean that you will necessarily have success with selling your products. The fact that it is very easy to create an online store leads many people to thinking that this is going to be a profitable venture.
But that’s not always the case. If you aren’t experienced with internet marketing, and have no plan on how to bring visitors to your website, than the venture is not going to be as profitable as you wish. Actually, Internet marketing is a topic so broad that it would take days and hundreds of articles to cover every aspect of it.
In this post we are going to talk about some of the basics. If you are interested in opening an online store, then you have most probably decided what you are going to sell. Now you should learn about how you should sell your products.
Introduction to Internet Marketing
As I said, Internet marketing is a very broad topic. It includes many things. From SEO optimization, to creating landing pages, email newsletters and many many more. There are many different techniques and styles known to the marketers. If you search for content on IM, you will find out that different people have their own styles. This is why the information in most of the articles found on the internet is going go differ. But that doesn’t mean that the information is going to be untrue or misleading. It only means that people have different styles.
SEO Could Be The Way to Go
SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it’s just what it sounds like. You can optimize your website so that search engines can discover it more easily. Applying the proper techniques is going to get you higher in the results, which, of course, will lead to more visitors and customers.
Before you dive into the world of SEO, keep in mind that this is a field that is constantly changing. Since Google has the biggest market share when it comes to search engines, the rules are almost solely defined by the company. In most cases you are going to optimize your website for Google, because you can expect most of your audience to come from there.
SEO consists of many things. Put in a few simple words, that means optimizing the text of your page for a keyword, optimizing your titles and meta tags, as well as using headers and other formatting to emphasize certain pieces of text.
However, when it comes to practice it’s not that easy. In the past people would put many keywords in their pages, tricking the search engines, and coming up in results for queries that they are not related to. Nowadays the ranking of a page/website is decided over 1000s of criteria. Keywords are not that important nowadays, but when a search engine sees that you are optimizing those, they give you a preference.
It’s easy to see that you are going to optimize your pages for the product that you are selling. You will also have to optimize the category pages, so that they show up in the search engines as well.
Email Marketing
This is the strategy that is used by most online stores today. Instead of making people come to your website and see the discounts and other promotions, you can let them subscribe to your newsletter and they will automatically receive promotion information. That sounds great, right?
At first you are going to think that people will just want to subscribe and receive that information for free. But almost every website gives its visitors the opportunity of subscribing to a newsletter. This is why you should come up with something better. Instead of just saying “Subscribe to receive information about promotions”, you should give your visitors an extra motivation to do so. For instance, that could be a discount coupon, ebook, report, or anything else that can be related to your online store. One of the leading email providers today is Mailchimp.
That’s going to leave a good impression and it is going to lead to more people subscribing to your newsletter. Also, don’t expect 100% of your subscribers to read your emails. In the real world, only 20-30% of your subscribers are going to open your emails, but a large part of them are going to click any link available in the mail.
Social Media
That’s the place where people spend most of their day. You can easily think that many of the people nowadays stay on Facebook, for instance, almost 24/7. Then why not create a fan page for your online store. Knowing that most website builders offer great integration with social media, this is a must if you want to get more and returning customers.
Not only is social media a place where you can create a profile for your business, but you can also put up ads there. Since people are already staying on these type of websites all the day, you will have a very wide audience. Facebook is slowly becoming the largest advertising platform on the planet. And with the tools that allow you to target a very specific niche (group of people) you can target the people that are very likely to be interested in what you are selling.
Conclusion
Internet marketing is very broad. What I just told you are 3 different techniques that you can use to optimize your online store. However, they are not the only 3 by far. You can find out many many more. Also, there would be no problem if you wanted to combine all of these 3. The results are just going to get better.
But if you are a starter with internet marketing, then we suggest that you went with SEO. With time and experience you will easily learn how to master the other two, as well as more, techniques.
