Hi cjpeeps,
Thanks for your message. There is a lot of; jewelry, gifts, and books that can be sold through Shopster so these are all solid niches. With regard to marketing your store, having an existing website is just one method. There are many more though (many which apply outside of Shopster). Check out this article that was recently updated on the Shopster forums:
(Sorry for the formatting)
Online - People
1. Tell your friends.
Word spreads quickly. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way to promote and
advertise your store. It’s as easy as it sounds. Tell your friends (online and
otherwise) – they’re the most difficult customer for your competition to take
away from you.
Remember, everyone likes to feel like
they’re getting special treatment; this goes double for your contacts. Create a
coupon just for them and send it out. Encourage them to take advantage of the
discount and get them to help you spread the word with their contacts.
2. Brand Your Store
Branding your store will bring you an advantage when it comes to marketing.
Determine how you want to represent your store and seek some unique selling
proposition that includes a brand name. Plan and research your brand name by
running it past friends and researching it on your favorite search engine. By
creating a unique selling proposition that includes a unique brand name you are
setting up your store for success within the Search Engine Marketing Wars.
Although it is good to have a unique
URL it is better to have a Unique Brand Name that you can advertise offline and
that you know will be found by the casual internet user who may think or feel
that trying to remember a URL is too difficult.
Most high-traffic, well-known sites
have their own domain names. You don’t see too many instances of “http://monster.example.com”
or “cnn.example.com”. Monster, CNN, and any other website that commands a large
number of unique visitors tends to have it's own domain.
With Shopster, we provide you with a
sub-domain (.secure2u.com) free of charge. Having your own (.com) domain is
cheap (only about $10/ year) and can go a long way to help brand your store and
make it more credible. To purchase your own domain,
click here.
Simply type in your desired domain name and click the "Check WhoIS" button on
the top right corner.
3. Ask visitors to bookmark your
site.
A quick, low cost strategy is to simply ask your visitors to bookmark your site,
or save it in a “Favorites” list. Visitors who’ve bookmarked your site can find
it faster, and are more likely to visit again. The best way to get these
visitors to return is to make regular updates to your site.
4. Take advantage of others’
forums and blogs.
There are innumerable forums, discussion lists, blogs, and news groups online.
These are comprised of people with specialized interests. As such, you’ll be
able to find quite a few that are dedicated to what you’re selling. Register and
post about your RShop. Be sure to read the posting guidelines – you don’t want
to violate the community standards. As well, be careful not to spam. Some of
these sites have sections dedicated to ads and other commercial posts. If you’re
unsure, contact a moderator or administrator for that site and ask permission
first.
5. Set up affiliate relationships.
Set up links with sites that have visitors who would be interested in what your
store has to sell. Links to your store from other sites will increase the
traffic headed your way.
6. Start a blog.
A blog is attractive for two reasons. First, they’re “in”. It seems that nearly
everyone has a blog right now. Celebrities, columnists, and virtual unknowns all
generate traffic solely for the updates provided on their weblogs.
That’s where the second reason comes
in: People tend to visit sites that are updated with content on a regular and
frequent basis.
Blogs give you the opportunity to
provide your visitors with new, perhaps more personal or pointed, content. Let
your visitors know what’s going on with your store. Or, if you’re interesting (or
even if not), let them know what you’re doing. Visit
Blogger.com or
wordpress.com for free
blog accounts.
7. Create free Web spaces wherever
possible.
Squidoo,
MySpace,
Wikipedia and
Facebook are excellent
free opportunities to increase your reach. You’ve got to build buzz around your
brand and some name recognition. These social networks are where the buzz is.
Use these sites and tools which are freely available to you and you’ll be able
to tap into their enormous online communities (MySpace has over 100 Million
accounts!). You can do this by building pages focused on your store vertical in
these social networks. Here’s what a recent retailer had to say: “I set up a
niche appealing MySpace page and within 3 days had over 698 visitors to the page
and over 108 from those went to the site. Create an appealing MySpace page and
direct traffic to your site (Hey it’s FREE). Request to be friends with high
profile persons who allow you to post HTML ads to their space.”
In addition to tapping into the
visitor pool of existing social communities, you’ll find that your pages on
these sites tend to do well in search engine rankings. Make sure you use
keywords in your copy that are relevant to your target customer. You’ll find
you’ll get new customers coming to your site through the social networks and
over the long run, through traditional search. Check out some examples:
Shopster on Squidoo,
Squidoo example;
MySpace example
8. Press – Get yourself in the
news.
Write up a press release once every
month or two for your business. Focus your release on something with a story
feel. Rather than strictly informative, it can be a story about how your
business got going. Or, write about one of your customers and how they use your
products. Or, it can simply cover trends in your vertical.
Post your press releases for free on
www.i-newswire.com or
www.prleap.com. Make sure
you link to your storefront in the release as these will count as inbound links
for search engine page rank and will drive traffic to your site.
9. Research your competitors.
Visit their sites and see what
they’re doing. Knowledge is power. The more you know about your competitors,
the better. Write a list of things you like about their site and what they’re
lacking. You need to find out what you can offer that they don’t. They’re
likely carrying the same products as you, so you need to offer something
different. Give visitors a reason to shop from you. Remember that the lowest
price isn’t always the greatest selling point.
Online – Business
10. Submit your store’s URL to
search engines.
If you want internet shoppers to find your RShop, go to where they are. List and
advertise on search engines and shopping sites. This is where the legions of
online shoppers go to find stores and products. As far as cost and benefit go,
this is one of the best ways to market your new store.
Where to go:
Google - Add your URL to Google. Google controls about 40% of all internet
searches.
Yahoo! Search
- Suggest your site for inclusion in Yahoo! Search for Free.
Addme Free Search
Engine Submission - Your site will be submitted to the following search
engines: focusLook, Subjex, Alexa, Scrub the Web, FAST Search, AllTheWeb, Google,
LookSeek, Jayde, InfoTiger, NerdWorld, Aeiwi, Walhello, LifeTips, ExactSeek, and
EntireWeb.
11. List your products on shopping comparison and online auction sites.
Shopping comparison sites compare products and prices across a large number of
online stores. Auction sites are targeted towards customers looking for
particular items. Some of these sites charge a listing fee or commission on
sales. Checkout Froogle,
BizRate,
Shopping.com,
PriceGrabber,
eBay, and
Yahoo! Shopping
Auctions.
12. Pay per click advertising
You can pay for ads with
Google AdWords
and
Yahoo Search Marketing. When you conduct a search using either of these
search engines, take notice of the advertisements that come up to the right of
the results. They are geared towards the search query you entered. You can pay
to have your RShop link come up as an advertisement whenever someone enters
search words you pay for.
Interested in giving pay-per-click a
try? Sign up here and receive a $25 Credit Free with
Yahoo Search Marketing and another $25 in Free Clicks with
Enhance Interactive!
13. Exchange banners and links
with complementary sites.
Contact others whose sites are related to yours, and exchange banners and other
ads. Remember that there is a difference between competition and complementary
sites. Competitive sites aim to take your visitors and your business.
Complementary sites sell products that complement the ones you sell – they do
not sell the same products you do. These help you reach a new audience. For
example, if you run a DVD store, think about contacting sites that sell DVD
players. Customers buying DVD players are going to need DVDs at some point.
14. Submit your store to industry-specific directories.
Links from directories help your ranking. Higher ranked sites get more traffic.
List your site in dmoz, which
is a free Open Directory Project.
15. Run sales, create coupons, and
let people know they’re special and getting a deal.
Everybody wants a deal, so why not
give them one? Here are some ideas for running sales and using coupons
effectively:
Run sales on popular items in
your inventory that are fairly inexpensive. Cut your profit margin on them.
Then when the customer is purchasing the popular item, up sell them on
related items and accessories and make your profit there. You’ll also profit
from having a happy first-time customer and hopefully getting a repeat
customer out of them by running great deals on highly sought-after items.
Offer a coupon to repeat
customers and advertise that first time customers receive a discount on
their next purchase.
Create unique coupon codes for
each campaign to help track your results
16. Search Engine Optimize your
content and store.
Test your storefront to make sure
that its search engine friendly
here. You can do a
variety of things to help search engines pick up on your site. There’s no magic
formula; it basically takes some work and some time.
Here are the most important ways to
spend your time improving your natural search results:
Pick keywords that your target
customer is searching for and that you can actually compete on (Wordtracker.com
is excellent software to do this with).
Build content around those
keywords (product description, company description, help articles, blogging
etc).
Click here for a handy tool to check your keyword density.
Get inbound links to your store
which can be accomplished with a link exchange program or affiliate program.
This is critical if you want to achieve good natural results in Google
searches.
Build page titles for each page
around the keywords you want to be found under. Remember to give each page a
unique page title.
Add meta tags of your keywords
and site description, customize them for each page on your site where
possible.
Put the keyword in the page URL.
Submitnet specializes in Search
Engine Optimization (SEO). Click on the following link to try Submitnet free for
3 months:
Submitnet
Online – Email
17. Get visitors to subscribe to a
mailing list.
Visitors who sign up to receive emails from you are already interested in what
you have to offer. It’s up to you to entice them to come back and become
customers.
Visit
constantcontact.com or
verticalresponse.com
for more information on managing a mailing list.
18. Send promotions, coupons,
updates, and offers to your customers.
Existing customers are a valuable market for you. Solicit your customers to
return by rewarding them with coupons and offers. Keep them interested with
updates.
19. Comply with CAN-SPAM.
The ramifications of not complying with a Federal Act notwithstanding, there is
an air of professionalism and respect that comes with seeking permission and
being mindful of the expectations of the email recipients.
CAN-SPAM Act- Federal Trade Commission
How
to Comply with CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
Offline - Traditional
20. Point offline contacts to your
online store.
Your personal printed media are sometimes overlooked. Make sure you put your URL
on anything you print and distribute. Business cards, stationary, and print ads
all have room for your online address.
Make use of print ads – brochures, magazine/journal ads, etc. – to let your
customer base know about your existence online. If you have an actual store (a
building out of which you conduct business) with customers, you’ve already got a
jump on many retailers. You’ve got customers. Let them know about your online
store. Sign up for a
Vista Print account and receive 250 business cards FREE!
21. Shopster Community Forums-
Marketing/Promotion Center
Last but not least, there is an
entire section in our Community Forum called Marketing/Promotion Center where
members can discuss and share their marketing strategies. There are also a
variety of excellent marketing articles posted in the forums to assist you.
Remember, this is not an exhaustive
list. The more creative you get, the more successful you’ll be. But in marketing
the old axiom “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” definitely applies. Make
sure your approach includes more than one technique and adjust your efforts
based on your results.