If you have just launched your site – congratulations! It seems like no big deal, but that is just not true. I know how many hours and dollars you have put into it.
Some of you probably think that I have no idea what I am talking about. Thanks to ecommerce platforms like Volusion people can build an online store in a few hours. That’s true but these people have spend months before that to gain the knowledge needed.
They have at least basic understanding of what web hosting, domain and shopping cart is. If your business requires a custom website to be built you will need to know what exactly you want, work with wen masters and manage them.
Do you understand now why I said congratulations to you in the beginning of this article to those of you whose ecommerce sites are already on-line? With that said it is time to celebrate. The site is online already and we can begin counting the money, right? Actuallly wrong on so many levels.
The truth is that now it’s time for you to master traffic generation. To do that you need to know things like search engine optimization, ppc, banner ads and content creation. Hard – yes, but that is a good thing, because only a few people will have the willpower to do it. And it takes time, a lot of time to master this subjest. To give you a general idea – twelve months will do it.
During this year you will not be able to make much money just because the traffic to your site won’t be anything to write home about.
Of course, you can set up a Google adwords campaign in minutes to drive traffic to the store but chances are you’ll lose a ton of money.
If forking out money before you have made money isn’t an option you can always try driving organic traffic from the search engines. Keep in mind though that this is time consuming, too.
What just happened – it looks like whatever you do you can’t get fast results and the big guys in your niche will keep getting all the traffic and sales.
However, it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a way for you the small guy with no resources to fight his way to success and profits and this article will show you one way to do that even though there is more than one.
I will digress for a second Just a few months ago I got a call from a guy who had just launched his site for bowling gear. You know what I am talking about – bowling balls, bowling bags, bowling shoes and accessories. For the most curios among you – the website can be seen at LongLiveBowling.com.
In short – he had a site that was getting almost no traffic and the sales were abysmal. He could not afford a pay per click campaign nor to pay someone to optimize the site for him. He also didn’t have time to learn all that himself.
And yes, he needed sales like yesterday. So it was time for me to roll my sleeves up and get down to work. Being the nice guy that I am I got down to work immediately because every day mattered at this moment. Want to know what I did? Ok, I guess you’ll have to read this article to the end to find out.
All you need to do is start making videos and put them on YouTube. It looks pretty simple on the surface but in reality it is not. It’s not because you have to create videos on topics that your target market is interested in and to do that you have to do some research.
After doing our homework we unearthed that bowlers needed help choosing the best bowling ball for them. For that reason we did a bunch of videos explaining how the lane conditions affect the ball choice.
We didn’t stop there. After a day of brainstorming we had a list of one hundred bowling-relates topics that people were interested in and we started making videos immediately. These were no fancy videos – just talking head type videos but they were fulll of useful information and people just loved them.
Next step was to upload them to YouTube.com. In this article I’m not going to talk about the importance of title tags, meta tags and video description to video rankings in the search engines but you definitely want to know more about that and Google will be your best friend.
Why did we chose video marketing and YouTube in particular? Because Google tends to push videos on You Tube to the front page for specific term easily.
But I digress. After we uploaded the videos it took us about two weeks for the majority of them to reach page 1 in Google for the targeted terms. After all the bowling related videos were up on YouTube.com it took about 14 days give or take for them to reach page 1 in Google for their respective terms. The rest is history – the website got a ton of web traffic.
It definitely helped that my client is a former US National Team Coach and he knew his stuff. As a result website visitors who watched the video felt like they knew that man and that they could trust him. What happened was they were willing to spend money with him and not on his competitors websites that carry the same bowling gear. Bowling Team coach and I took advantage of that. He mentioned it in any video, he was also instantly likeable and he knew his stuff. People were instantly attracted to him. They felt he was genuine and passionate about bowling and they were willing to spend money on his site. Yes they were buying on his site the same bowling products they could purchase somewhere else. The minute I figured out that the owner of LongLiveBowling.com was a former US Bowling Team coach I took full advantage of that fact. I made sure he mentioned it in all videos. He obviously knew what he was talking about, was likeable and people responded well to that. So well that his sales when through the roof.
All I am saying it as that you can do something similar. You don’t need expensive equipment – a smart phone will do ,at least in the beginning. There are products that you do not have to be an authority on the subject matter or have extensive knowledge – for example hammocks. However, if you decide to talk about bowling shoes and have no idea what you are talking about people will sense it and won’t buy form you. You might argue with me that you have no knowledge on the products you chose to sell. It might be true, but you can always find someone in your area and who knows just enough and offer to compensate her for their time and effort. You do not have to pay him with cash – just give him some product, or give him percentage of each sale, you got.
So, this is all you need to do if you are just starting out and can’t spend money for marketing – take advantage of it.
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