How to get more traffic to your online store
29 June 2007Whether you have an eBay store, an eBay ProStores store or any other kind of online store, one of your biggest tasks will be to get the traffic to your store. More traffic means more prospective buyers. And more prospective buyers means more profit for you.
So how do you get more traffic to your store? Frankly, I don’t have the time to go into detail on all of them nor to list every single way to increase your traffic, but here are a few of the simple ones you can use.
First the offline ways.
The simplest way is to create some nifty flyers to hand out, post and otherwise distribute around town. Stuff them into your packages as you ship out your items. It doesn’t have to be much. Maybe a few nice color pictures of your best selling items, a quick description and the most important part, your store’s address. If the rest of the page is blank, put on your URL.
Two other good offline ways to promote you site and get more traffic is with business cards and postcards. Both can be cheaply gotten from sites like VistaPrint. Again, the key is to have your URL on whichever you decide on. I’ve found that the postcards are great for stuffing into packages when you ship. Business cards are great for handing out when you run into people who take an interest in having you sell things on eBay.
Online, there are many different ways to get more traffic. The most important revolve around getting more traffic from search engines. Many of the search engines use some fairly robust algorithms to determine where a site lands in the search results. Many weigh links pretty heavily. It stands to reason, then, that the more links you have to your site, the better. Get your site added to link Directories like pfdirectory. You can also get links by participating in related forums.
Another way to get more traffic from search engines is by doing something called SEO on your website. SEO is an acronym for (S)earch (E)ngine (O)ptimization. It consists of making sure that all of your pages have an abundance of the key words for that page. If it’s a page displaying blue widgets, you want the term “blue widget” to appear as often as possible. It also helps to have the term in your URL. If you’re URL for the blue widget page looks like http://www.mysite.com/store/?cat=5&Product=23, it’s not helping your cause. If you can get it to display more like http://www.mysite.com/store/bluewidgets/?product=red&bluewidget, you’re well on your way to better search ranking and better search traffic.
Whatever you do, don’t stop promoting. Most of the stuff we’ve discussed here is free to you so there’s no reason to not do it as often as possible. You can read and learn a lot more about SEO at sites like forums.digitalpoint.com.
Best of luck.
[tags]website,seo,traffic,search engines,ebay stores,prostores[/tags]
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July 3rd, 2007 at 4:16 am
I would like to expand on this post if I may.
If you have an eBay store, the chances are that no matter how much SEO you do, most of your traffic will come from the eBay search. It is therefore best to optimise your eBay titles making sure that you pack your important keywords into your 55 characters!
That said SEO for eBay is an important way of driving traffic to your listings. I have written a post on this for my blog:
http://www.trevorginn.com/seo-for-ebay-auctionbytes-article/
If you have an website, then search engine optimisation is a important and cost effective way of driving traffic. I have written a brief guide on the subject
http://www.trevorginn.com/guide-seo/