Ten tips for getting people to visit your commerce site

Over the last few years the hype about ecommerce has risen to fever pitch. But you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to realise that creating an online site for selling on the Web is not enough on its own. To attract visitors and convert them to customers you have to market the site. Here are some pointers on how you can persuade these prospects to visit and buy your products.

Start with your existing marketing. You should put your Web site address on your existing brochures, advertising and business cards. Wherever you promote your company name, you should also promote your Web address.
Register with the major search engines by hand. Either research the most effective way to do the registration yourself, or employ a professional. Just using the free, automatic registrations without any thought or investigation will leave you in the middle of the crowd. Search engines can provide considerable traffic, so it’s worth investing some time in learning about them. One of our customers generates 80% of their traffic through search engines.
Use newsgroups and forums. There are lots of places where people hold discussions online. Some of these forums will be talking about your speciality. For instance, if you sell yachting gear, there are plenty of specialist boating forums. Provided that you participate responsibly, you can get the chance to talk about your company, products and offerings. This has the added benefits that it can be enjoyable and is likely to provide lots of useful tips for you, too.
Use targeting. There are lots of opportunities to advertise online – banner advertisements, email mailing lists (where people have opted-in to the email list), directories and so on. Before parting with your cash, you should use the same judgement that you would use when deciding whether to advertise in conventional media. Who will be looking at this medium and are they my target market? Getting your message in front of large numbers isn’t the issue, they must be interested in your products.
Ask the question, what’s working ? It’s a sad fact that when it comes to marketing, the anoraks are in the driving seat. That’s right, although being creative is crucial, measuring the results and putting the next round of money where you got the most results last time is the way to success. So measure everything you do, and try to find out where all of your leads and customers come from. Use questions on your Web site to ask buyers how they heard about your site.
Find sites that are complementary to yours and offer mutual links. If you can, find specialist sites that cater for your particular niche and get them to either link or put you in their search results. In return, put a link back to them. This can offer added value to your visitors as well as boosting your traffic – it’s a win-win situation.
Use the great interest in the Internet for PR purposes. One of our customers has recently got national coverage because they have an interesting story – selling bras for larger ladies online. If you can get the press interested, it’s worth a fortune in marketing.
Try and get a Web address that makes sense. It’s worth spending some time thinking about your Web site address (URL). Ideally it will be easy to remember, stand out from the crowd and communicate your message. This will take some time and probably a lot of investigation, as many good URLs have already been taken.
Use multiple URLs. If you can think of different but interesting Web addresses, they can all point to your one site. Having more than one Web site address gives you lots of extra options. You can register multiple times with search engines, you can emphasise different aspects of your products, and so on.
Provide some additional value at your site. Can you come up with offers at your site which will attract visitors? My company provides free advice on search engine registration, a “Commerce consultant” which assesses the suitability of your site for e-commerce, and other goodies. Hopefully some of you will visit as a result - www.actinic.co.uk - and try to do something similar at your site.