Fortunately there are some very straight-forward steps you can take to drastically increase the number of people visiting your website. They are:
1. Optimise your shop
First and foremost you need to ensure that your website looks great, is easy to use and most of all is easy to find in the search engines. The last point is where many online businesses struggle, but it needn’t be difficult. Ensuring that you put well written and most of all relevant content on all of the pages on your site and give them appropriate titles can make a huge difference. Even if you are not an SEO expert and can’t afford to hire one, you should still be able to make your site search engine friendly.
2. Interact
It has been said many times and I will say it again – use social networks. Set up profiles on the major ones first (Facebook, Twitter) and keep those updated. If you have pictures of your product then you should also join Pinterest as a matter of urgency and start posting those images. Place links to your social profiles on your website to let your customers know about them. Carry on posting and new customers will gradually follow.
3. Advertise
if you have funds to buy advertising then you should use this opportunity, but be wise. A local newspaper probably won’t be the best channel for you to blow your trumpet. For an online store it makes much more sense to advertise on the web as you will be targeting people who are more likely to shop this way. Advertising next to search results in Google and Bing is something you should definitely consider doing.
As the number of online shoppers increases more entrepreneurs want to capitalise on this demand. This can make the online environment look very competitive. However it is arguably still a lot less saturated than our high-streets and does allow smaller start-ups to compete with bigger brands.
The above ideas may not be ground-breaking but it is sometimes easy to forget that easy steps can lead to success.
Happy trading.
Image: Stuart Miles