 Got traffic but takes work
My website is around 15 months old. I prowl SEO forums and basically do everything I read there to generate traffic, sometimes leaving it alone for a few weeks, sometimes working on it every day for weeks on end.
You need a cart that makes it easy to submit to different search engines and shopping sites. Google/froogle, yahoo, shopmania, thisnext, thefind, live, and a lot of others. Register and claim your "brand" on Kaboodle.
You need to submit XML sitemaps (for free) to Google and Live. Yahoo charges for that now.
You need to run CHEAP PPC campaigns: Google and Yahoo are freaking expensive, 30 cents and up for my niche. I use 7Search and LookSmart and pay 3 cents and up for the same ads.
You need to post in dozens of forums, using your website in your signature. Do that in forums that get spidered (not this one LOL). The spiders will read your signature and it will count as a backlink.
Find websites that have cheap ads. $10-30 a month. In your niche, of course! If you sell power tools, prowl the power tool forums and blogs, look at their ads. Go to Alexa and see if they have good traffic. Buy ads on those sites.
Search Yahoo Answers for questions about your niche. Answer them and point to your website. "Hey, I found a great one of those at NotAtAllCrooked.com! They shipped it to me really fast and their customer service is the best!". Like that. Also answer questions without referring to your site, and refer to your site as well as 2 or 3 others to cover your tracks. If your answer is picked as best it will be permanently visible and spidered by Google constantly. If not, it will get spidered until it's buried, so no loss.
There are lots of other things to do, the only trick is to do them all, constantly. It's dreary, boring, deadly dull work, and very disheartening because you don't see results. but keep at it and it will finally pay off.
I know my various approaches are working because now I get orders even when I do no promotion at all, so people are finding me somehow. When I run ad campaigns I get more orders. My site is higher in organic listings and I show up in searches for my products. In fact, because of my PP issue I had to turn off the cart and stopped all my ads. I got emails from people complaining that they couldn't buy! So, I turned it on with check/money order as the only payment method, sure that would stop the emails. To my amazement I've gotten 4 orders with people sending me MO's through the mail!
Of course, your site has to not suck too! Test it in FF and IE. Get SSL so people feel safe checking out, and put some kind of protection shield on every page so it's in their face. If you have a decent cart it is already optimized for SEO, so you don't have to do a lot on the coding side.
I'm leaving out the obvious traffic/spider tricks like Facebook, blogging, MySpace and Twitter. Those sites make my brain dribble out through my ears and give me a headache in my eye and I avoid them like the clap. But if you can stand them at all they are very good resources.
Last edited by TapTapper; 05-25-2009 at 02:40 PM.
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