Time and time again we see people at Evoluted who believe that having a website will lead to success and riches. It’s a common misconception, the media is full of stories of young businessmen who setup a web venture and then bang, they were millionaires! Sadly whilst this happens for some it just isn’t going to happen for the majority.

Setting up an e-commerce site is akin to opening a small shop in quiet part of town with low foot fall. To get people to visit your shop you need to shout about it, let them know where you are. It’s no good expecting customers to know where your shop is, what it sells and what great value it is!

There are a number of ways to bring traffic to your site and develop a sucessful online business:

Target a Niche Market.
This makes everything considerably easier as you are narrowing your focus, there are less potential customers but they are easier to reach. It maybe that your offline business is already in a niche market, such as Trafalgar Marine Services (one of our clients) in this case you’re onto a winner. In other cases, if you can specialise then do so, rather than opening an e-commerce site selling electronic equipment, pick a particular subset such as cameras, or even narrower such as high end pro cameras. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The holy grail is search engine optimisation; if done well it will drive traffic to your site for free! How much success you’ll have with SEO depends on your competition and your market. The key is to includes lots of text full of relevant keywords and ensure you update your website regularly. Ask your web developer how well optimised your e-commerce site is, can anything more be done? 

Pay Per Click (PPC) 
Pay per click marketing is a massive business which really makes sense for many e-commerce sites, we use PPC with our clients to supplement existing natural search engine results. The market leader here is Google but you may well find better value per click with Yahoo! and MSN. 

Email Marketing
Get your latest offers and news out to clients and potential customers, don’t let them forget how great your shop is! Email marketing is a comparatively cheap form of marketing, the key is to ensure you are using a good quality set of email addresses that you have permission to send to. You should be capturing email addresses from customers when they make purchases either online or offline. 

Social Networking / Viral Marketing
Encouraging your users to share your latest and best offers is an approach that will work if your offers are really great, bringing exposure to customers that you wouldn’t normally reach. Add share buttons to the product detail pages on your shop to encourage customers to post your offers and products to sites such as Facebook. 

That’s it for now but if you’d like any advice or tips then please get in touch!