Marketing Your Ecommerce Website

To be quite honest, marketing your ecommerce website deserves much more detail than this single article. There are entire books devoted to some of the smaller aspects of marketing a website. So for this section, I am going to go over some of the common methods that you will find to bring people to your website. Some of them may intrigue you and I would encourage you to read more on those individual topics that you think might be good avenues to take for your ecommerce website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably one of the more popular and most discussed marketing methods. You may be telling yourself that this sounds way too complicated or technical. Really, it is not.

To explain what it is, I first have to explain a little bit about how search engines operate. We will use Google as our example because it is the most popular search engine in the United States. When you go to Google, type in a “keywords” to search on, it pulls up several results, sometimes millions. Now, Google does not have little workers that manually go through each website on the internet and determine keywords that are related to it. This would take countless hours and would be unproductive. Instead, they have what people call the “Google algorithm”. As Google finds new websites through its software, it determines what it is related to. It uses a wide variety of things to do this, the title of the page, the content, and who is linking to the website, what keywords people are using in their links when they do link to it, the domain name, etc. There is a huge list of factors that play a role in SEO. The act of marketing from your end, is to make your website easy for the Google software to determine what your website is about. Therefore, ranking you better than many other websites that Google is unable to tell what their website is about. The end goal is to have your website listed in the top few results when they are searching for your products or services.

Direct Advertising

This is one of the most popular marketing methods. It is simply like a billboard except on the internet. You place advertisements for your products or services on other peoples websites that might have traffic who would be interested in what you offer. For example, if you sell motorcycles, you might place a banner on a forum that has people who are interested in motorcycles on it.

Pay Per Click

This is one of the quickest methods to getting traffic to your website. The problem is that if you do not know what you are doing, you may never see a return on your investment. I highly recommend you read a lot about PPC before you ever get involved.

The actual process however is placing your website within search results at places like Google when people are searching on keywords. For example, you could pay $2.00 per visitor for when someone searches on “Motorcycle” at Google. This would actually not be a good keyword to buy because it is too broad. But again, this is a simple overview and you should read more into PPC if you decide to take this route.

Smaller Free Methods

Generally, these methods are not quite as good. At the same time they are worth mentioning because you will read about them elsewhere. These take time and effort, but if you have time to spend to build your website up, you might as well do these to gain some extra traffic. Many of these are related to SEO, so you there are side benefits as well.