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How to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store
by Enrique De Argaez
The great number of e-commerce websites that exist
today is enough to overwhelm the consumer and make the Internet marketing business
a true challenge for any online business owner. Fortunately, however, there are many
different ways to drive targeted traffic to any website. Get more customers to your
website using the following three techniques to drive traffic to your online store.
1. Understand the True Sales Potential of Your Website
Determining what your website can and cannot do is the first step. Setting the right
expectations for an online store can help you to invest your time and effort into marketing
to the right target customers. The point is to avoid wasting time on people who will
never become customers. You must concentrate your campaigns in advertising to people
with a genuine interest in the products and services that you sell.
People buy what they want, and not necessarily what you insist in selling to them. Most
new entreprenuers forget this basic concept, and insist on selling what the prospect
does not fancy nor desire.
Remember that your website should also be a lead generation tool. So, you want to focus on
targeted leads that are a perfect match for the products and services you provide. Make
sure you build an opt-in option on your website's landing page. This is where you make
an offer in order to collect the contact information from visitors. You might offer free,
valuable information such as access to a newsletter or a complimentary lesson or session.
This is important to your strategy for building your visitor list and starting a customer
relationship that leads to more sales in the future.
2. Build an Attractive Store With Your Objective in Mind
The next step of a web traffic generation campaign is to build or to alter the website so
it fits the new strategy for generating sales leads and attracting target customers. An
attractive website is easy to understand, and is interesting and engaging. It does not
mean that you should spend money on expensive graphic design or Flash animation, in fact
experts strongly advise not to waste money on elements that will not directly help you
to increase your website sales conversions. Invest instead on communicating to visitors
what your business offers and why they should be interested.
3. Drive Additional Traffic Through Advertising, SEO and Promotion
The third step of the campaign is to make it easy for potential customers to find your
online store through search-engine optimization (SEO), article marketing, pay-per-click
advertising and other advanced promotional tools.
Investing in online advertising is crucial to promoting your website, but there are
also many low-cost strategies. Effective SEO tactics include creating external links,
regular website updates and keyword saturation. Other little known channels for driving
website traffic include promoting sites through blogs, articles and press releases.
You don't have to be a technological wizard or a marketing genius to improve your
search engine ranking and generate traffic to your website.
These are several online ways to drive targeted traffic
to your online store and to get more visitors each day. However, there are also many
offline ways to drive customer traffic to your website store. Use traditional direct mail,
newspaper ads, radio and TV advertising, and other promotion tools to increase your sales.
The criteria is ROI, return on investment. In other words, your advertising budget should
generate a profit. Use an apropiate "advertising mix" of methods for maximum results in
store traffic and increased online sales.
About the Author:
Enrique de Argaez is the webmaster of twelve
International websites and the author of four newsletters. He
is fluent in English and Spanish, at present he is active in Internet
Marketing and Internet Market Research. Visit his new market research
website at http://www.allaboutmarketresearch.com
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