Keeping your website fresh

When you're marketing through your own website it's important to keep it fresh to keep repeat business coming back. The more buyers you have coming back, the less new traffic you need to cover your sales targets.

So how do you keep your site new and fresh?
The most obvious way is to have special offers each month, give people a reason to come back. Have some designed to induce new customers to purchase, but also think about having some for customers that have already purchased, just a way to reward them for their loyalty.

Develop an email list so you can send it out to subscribers and to make sure you get subscribers, make sure you offer some incentive for them to join the newsletter to start with.

If your website isn't in a constant state of flow, it runs the risk of looking very old, very fast. Repeat customers want to see something different when they come back. If they don't see it, then the chances are they won't be back very often!

I believe this applies when you have constant traffic already coming into your website. A lot of people (moving from small brick & mortar store) to online E-commerce model, seem to believe that having a website would solve all their problem and traffic comes flooding in and sale going through the roof. I was one of them a couple of years ago until I wised up.

For those people starting your own website, the first thing to keep in mind -

Remember that creating a website is Step 01 of a long drawn success process. It is the most basic step and as much as I would love to say, you would start selling immediately, the probability of it happening is slim to none. A website merely ensures you have a web presence.

The logical progression to this is the next steps of marketing. Now that you are world wide web, let people know that you are on it. This is the painful process and consumes every bit of time, energy and effort you might be willing to offer.

Ideally SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is a combination of creating exceptional keyword rich useful and related content, link building, forum posting, 301 redirects and so on. SEO is a medium to long term strategy to ensure your site is successful and it ranks in search engines. It has always been said that investing in good quality content would be appreciated by Google and other search engines thus bringing in more visitors to your site over time.

While you invest in SEO and Social Media (this will take quite a bit of time to yield returns) and it will keep burning your pockets, it is important to set aside funds for Google Adwords or other Paid Search program with them (PPC - Pay Per click). Essentially this means, you pay google/bing/yahoo when someone clicks on your advertisement. Popularly this is called "Google Adwords" (google being the largest of your traffic source).

If you do not have the money to invest in these (which could be well over $1000-$10000) per month, then my suggestion is to start a simple website with a check out cart and invest in Long Term SEO. In the meantime, use online marketplaces like ebay, amazon and if you have large volume products which can be sold at huge discounts then daily deal sites like groupon or livingsocial etc. This will ensure you have some revenues coming in, to support the significant burn rate through advertising. Good luck and feel free to reach out if you have questions. Thoughts welcome!

Yes, it does go without saying that you need traffic, that's a given and another topic altogether really.

That said, your points on some people's mis-conception about online marketing and SEO are very valid. If you're going to run an independent website, then you have to really focus hard on driving traffic to it and SEO can play a key role in that. Good SEO isn't cheap unfortunately and the vast majority here wouldn't be in a position to take advantage of that.

You really need to take advantage of mass marketing opportunities where ever you can. An eBay presence is seriously recommended, but many just stop there. No reason to stop there, there are a stack of online selling platforms out there to take advantage of. Some charge, some don't, but it can never hurt to get your name and your products out through as many avenues as possible.

In my opinion it's never too soon to work on keeping your website fresh in an effort to encourage sales. If you have one single visitor in a month to your site, then it's even more important to try and convert that visit into a sale. If you can't convert into a sale, then you need to at least give them a reason to come back and to preferably get their details for a mailing list.

Building a mailing list is KEY in pushing your own site forward and that process should start from the very first visitor or you're missing opportunities, and if you miss too many of those in this business, you're dead!

Mass market and promote your site where ever possible to build up mailing lists, Social Media, Forums, where ever you can. If you have a bucket load of cash, then good luck to you, but it doesn't mean you can't do it if you don't!

Is there a listing of these daily deal sites or whatnot? We are trying to find every avenue we can to successfully grow and thrive. (Trail and Error, but hopefully limited Errors) lol

~you state, "You really need to take advantage of mass marketing opportunities where ever you can."

What places are you referring to?

Thanks much,

Greg

Any and all, social media other free listing auction style websites. A lot of people tend to brush off smaller sites like bonanza.com because they aren't a major player and don't have the traffic flow, but what is there to lose if the listing fee is free?

It's all about getting a footprint out there, the more footprints you leave, the greater the chance someone sees them!