How to Build Traffic to Your New e-Commerce Store

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We all know that getting the first throng of traffic to our site is always the hardest. And this challenge is further amplified when you have no idea how you should measure your traffic building strategies, and whether you are getting more noise than real prospects.

If you don’t know what you want, that’s exactly what you are going to get.

In other words, you must be specific. When it comes to traffic building for your website, there are really many things that you can and should try. While applying this scatter-shot approach, it’s equally important to measure how effective each of these methods are so that you can allocate your resources accordingly.

Before we go into the specifics, we must know where we now stand. Simply look at these 3 things first on your Landing Pages:
1) Unique visitors
2) Bounce rate – how sticky are your pages?
3) Average time spent on site by each visitors – Quality information? Are you selling your products or just describing your product using the descriptions provided by your manufacturer?

Notice I mentioned Landing Pages, not your Home Page. Measuring those metrics on your Home Page isn’t very useful if you are a store selling many products, since the Home Page will not have any specific mission, other than to impress your visitors.

Your Home Page usually will likely be an informational page, giving your visitors an idea what kind of product categories you carry and also giving first time visitors a general idea how your website is structured. There are just too many things a visitor can do (which may not be a good thing in some cases) on your Home Page making the data your get from it rather ambiguous. This doesn’t mean it’s not useful but we must now focus on the more pressing issues, such as sales and conversions.

So, all your pages in your website must be optimized and be treated with the same TLC you give to your Home Page, and yes, that includes your Terms and Condition page. Every pages on your website has its unique functions, and it should be designed to accomplish them. Otherwise, they should be removed from your sitemap.

For instance, your “Contact Us” should list down as many information as possible where your customers can contact. Emails, phone numbers, address, GPS location should be in there. If you also have a retail front, include a Waze link or a Google Map link. Instead of using a clip art of a phone, put in a friendly photo of your sales team to give it a personal touch. If getting an enquiry is all you need from your website, then let the visitors know that they will get a mysterious free gift if they ask you a question via email.

Signaller with his instruments makes himself a comfortable seat in an old bath tub

In short, you want to keep improvising the pages on your site so they really work hard for your business.

Next, we are going to figure a strategy to boost these numbers. And a good strategy is first to get a pair of socks and then place yourself in your customer’s shoes. No one other than yourself can provide the most useful inputs in this section. There’s a reason why consultants are not running your business. Consultants are useful for their advice on best practices, upcoming trends and identifying opportunities outside your core business. But they should never ever tell you how to run your business.

So now you are ready to start looking at things from your customer’s viewpoint. Let’s start with the questions they are likely to ask when it comes to searching for products/services that your company offers- the ‘Hows’ and the ‘Whats’. Answering the ‘Hows’ allows you to give an air of authority to your prospects, that you really know your stuff.

If you are selling vintage clocks, you can write about ‘HOW’ to evaluate these clocks in an auction. ‘HOW’ to refurbish a vintage clock. ‘HOW’ to verify authenticity of a vintage clock. From these content, you may get a lot of emails soliciting for free advice, but that’s the whole idea- the ‘Hows’ really gets the conversation going and conversations is the foundation of building trust.

The ‘Whats’ is somewhat definitive, you basically write about the common questions relevant to your industry. Again, it’s to show them your credibility and give a more established feel to your site. Try not to plagiarize if you can help it since major search engines reward originality and visitors prefer reading opinions and reviews, rather than plain product descriptions. Compare an official product description provided by a manufacturer and a simple 100 words testimonial from a recent customer, which one do you think has a higher impact in convincing a customer?

How to Respond to Online Reviews

Also, take into account that you are not the only one offering the products/services. In fact, the odds are very much against you on the web. But fear not, if you are very confident with your products and customer service, in the long run, you are going to win. In the short run, run as fast as you can to get there ;-)

In the next post, I am going to share how you can buy traffic. Like one of my friends always tell me, “if you can solve a problem with money, it’s not really a problem.” And in our context of traffic building, I would like to add that although you can have all the traffic in the world, but what you really need is “Highly Targeted Traffic”.

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