Guyzz, I run my online dress store, which I started a month back. I have:
done its SEO properly (brings 30-40 traffic, will take time to be more effective)
submitted it on traffup (bringing 70-80 visitors)
Have its twitter and facebook account (bringing 30 odd visitors)
Social Bookmarking (40 visitors)
Article Bookmarking (bringing 15 visitors per day)
But i want to get thousands of visitors on my website. Is there something I am missing in promoting my online dress store? Or is there any special way to promote fashion websites, free of cost? Any help would be appreciated.
I don’t want to go for paid forms of marketing, as i have just started my website. I don’t have much money to promote it now. I have already spent a lot of money on it.
Since you just started the shop a month, be patient and keep on working are the only two things you need to do now. And besides those methods you mentioned above, you also should try forum posting, video submitting and blog commenting, they will be beneficial.
If you’re selling products you should be testing paid advertising to understand the opportunity to drive traffic faster.
Generally the first step is a pay per click campaign on Google, Yahoo and/ or Bing as the costs to start are minimal, the learning curve is fairly quick and the traffic is highly targeted and purchase focused.
I’d suggest signing up for a campaign and seeing what happens to your conversion rates on a spend of a few hundred dollars. If it’s showing signs of life, you can tweak your site, landing pages and campaigns and expand out to broader terms… if not we can help with some pointers as the same issues that impact paid traffic will apply to organic, likely at higher rates.
My suggestion is keep patience. SEO and SEM are not like the other thing you get huge visitors instantly. Take care of your local citations. There should be some ways your site will be better known in the web and in front of SE. Do a keyword research keeping geo basic keys. Get yourself known with those keys and also some keys attached with “online …”. Mediums are many like directories and others of the SEO. Time to time give ad campaign to classifieds with the keys. These are things you can do without investing much to SEO Firm.
Yes, just keep plugging away with the SEO work you’re doing, plus if you don’t already have a blog attached to your store, create one & try to update it as often as possible - a couple of times a week would be great!
With my sites, the ones that maintain the highest rankings are those being updated quite regularly.
Also, have you tried building some Web 2.0 sites - Squidoo, Hubpages, Knols etc. - around the keywords you’re targeting & linking them to your main site? Then not only point links from your articles to them, but your main site as well.
Another thing you could look at also, is cross promoting some of your products on some of the larger shopping comparison sites on the net like Nextag, PriceGrabber, Bizrate/Shopzilla etc. You do have to pay, but in most cases it’s only for each visitor they actually send (CPC advertising).
If you’re not considering Paid traffic then fix your current traffic channels for better outcome.
SEO (Work to do):
Fix your title and descriptions and make it more keyword richer. Provide more content in product descriptions.
Build more links.
Start blogging.
Social Media:
Engage with your ideal customers in Facebook/twitter.
Follow your customers there.
Use Social Media for providing support to get more buzz.
I am planning to start a blog of my website, to share latest news with our existing customers. I am also thinking of writing a lot of articles, with pix and a link to my website. I hope that works in bringing free traffic plus better optimizing my website.
And I will also find some fashion blogs to submit guest posts on them…
I do understand your wish to start earning money rather than spending, but I really doubt that your online store will be profitable without paid advertising, especially when it’s fashion.
From my own experience banner ads placed on the right sites get much more ROI rather than PPC on google. You will definitely come to this conclusion as soon as you work a bit longer in this field.
Affiliate marketing would be a great way to supplement your traffic. Affiliate networks like commissionjunction.com and shareasale.com are just a few of the larger networks I’m aware of. You can get people to send free traffic to your site by offering them a percentage of the sale or some other amount of revenue. They send traffic to your site and you only pay when you get sales.
I do have to agree that getting your toes wet with AdWords is good advice, even though you are hesitant to spend money right now. You can search for AdWords coupon codes online and you can find $50 or $100 worth of free AdWords for new advertisers; also your website hosting company probably has some AdWords coupons they could give you. I realize that’s not a lot of money, but if you experiment and find that it brings you same sales, you may just want to keep up with it.
While you need to be patient with SEO, you can also consider hiring an SEO specialist. There are many SEO companies that focus specifically on what you are requesting and can implement a custom plan based on your business goals and budget.
I’ve seen rubbish sites do well because they are great at marketing and great sites which have cost thousands to set up fail becuase of poor marketing.
What you have done is not enough and the SEO is an ongoing process not a one-off thing. I suggest you use Adwords for a month and see how it goes, lots of tips on the net.
Also 1 month is too soon, my sites been up for over a year and doing really well now but it wasn’t until my 2nd month after launching that i started to see sales
Definitely use PPC to start with and see what you can get for your money - Google Adwords, Yahoo and MS AdCenter. Review after a month and see what conversions you are getting with your sales.
Start link exchanges with other online dress shops! If they dont buy at your competitors’ shops, they can buy at yours. Draft a compelling letter to indicate the benefits of working together!
