Yeah you finally launched your ecommerce store congratulations! I know how hard and time-consuming it could be. I know how many hours and dollars you have put into it.
Some of you might think that I have no idea what I am talking about. Thanks to ecommerce platforms like Volusion people can build an online store in a few hours. Thats true but these people have spend months before that to gain the knowledge needed.
They had to have at least basic understanding of what web hosting, website domain and shopping cart is. If your business requires a custom website to be built you will need to know what exactly you want, work with wen masters and manage them.
Do you understand now why I said congratulations to you in the beginning of this article to those of you whose e-commerce websites are already online? Next preorder that new Benz and honey chill the champagne, were going to celebrate tonight. I wish it was just that simple.
The next step in the process is driving traffic to your online store. To do that you will have to get a grip on banner advertising, article and blog marketing and facebook advertising, but this is just a small part of what you need to know.
Hard yes, but thats a good thing because only a few people will have the will power to do it. And it takes time, a lot of time to master this subjest. On the conservative side you will need at least one year to become somehow proficient.
The bad news is that during these 12 months you wont be making a lot of sales just because traffic will be minimal.
Sure, you can set up a pay per click campaign in a few minutes from now (if you know how) and start driving traffic but it is likely that you are going to lose your shirt.
If forking out money before you have made money isnt an option you can always try to drive organic traffic from the search engines. Remember though that this is time consuming, too.
Hey, what it looks like whatever you do you cant get fast results and the big dogs in your niche will keep getting all the traffic and sales.
I dont know about you but it does not sound fair to me. Fortunatelly, even today it is still possible for the small guy to become a big guy in his chosen field.
Ill digress for a second Not so long ago on a lazy afternoon my phone rang and on the other side was a guy I barely knew who had just launched his store for bowling shoes, bags and that kind of stuff. If you want to see the site in question visit LongLiveBowling.com.
So, here is his dilemma he had a decent website with almost no traffic and just a few sales here and there that couldnt cover his monthly expenses. After asking him a few questions I found out that he couldnt afford to spend money to purchase traffic or to hire a professional who knew how to drive traffic. He did not have money and he didnt have time to master these valuable skills himself.
And yes, he did need sales like yesterday. So it was time for me to roll my sleeves up and get down to work. Being the nice guy that Im I got down to work immediately because every day mattered back then. Want to know what I did? Ok, I guess youll have to read this article to the end to find out.
My plan was to do video marketing. So we started making and posting videos to YouTube.com. There is no way uploading videos to YouTube.com to be the key to traffic and sales youre probably thinking, right? Wrong, because it works if done right. You must have videos on topics your customers are genuinely interested in.
So heres what I did with this customer of mine LongLiveBowling.com. We found out that people are interested in things like the best bowling balls for dry lanes, oily lanes, for lefties or newbies.
It took us a day or so to compile a list of about 100 bowling-related questions people were asking online and started answering them. The videos were simple or should I say plain just a guy talking in front of a camera. However, they were full with useful information. For that reason alone viewers couldnt get enough of it.
Next step was to upload them to YouTube. In this article I am not going to talk about the importance of title tags, meta tags and video description to video rankings in the search engines but you definitely want to know more about that and Google would be be your best friend.
We chose You Tube because Google loves it. And it cant be any other way because Google owns the video site.
But I digress. After we uploaded the videos it took us about two weeks for the majority of them to reach page 1 in Google for the targeted terms. After all the bowling related videos were up on You Tube it took about 14 days more or less for them to reach page 1 in Google for their respective terms. The rest as they say is history the site got a ton of web traffic.
Luckily for me early on I figured out that this man was a National National Bowling Team coach and I took advantage of that. We made sure he mentioned it all videos, he was likable and he knew the bowling stuff. People were instantly attracted to him.
They felt that he was genuine and passionate about bowling and they trusted him with their wallets. Yes they were buying on his site the same products they could purchase somewhere else. The minute I found out that the owner of LongLiveBowling.com was a former US National Bowling Team coach I took advantage of that fact. I made sure he mentioned it in all videos.
He obviously knew what he was talking about, was likable and people responded well to that. So well in fact, that his sales when through the roof.
So there you have it a blueprint you can can implement in your business. You do not need an expensive camera to make this type of videos. As a matter of fact all you need is a smart phone. Therere products that you do not have to be an authority on the subject matter or have extensive knowledge for example hammocks.
If you decide to talk about bowling shoes however but have no idea what you are talking about people will sense it and wont buy form you. It is quite possible that you dont have extensive knowledge on whatever you are selling but there is a way around it.
Simply find someone who had that knowledge and talk him into jving with you. Offer him percentage of each sale or a fixed amount for X number of videos or something therere plenty of ways to do that.
There you have it a foolproof way to generate traffic to your site even if you have just launched it and have no money to advertise it. All you need is a smart phone with a camera and time to do some research.
If you want to see for yourself what I have done for LongLIveBowling visit their YouTube Channel as well as the Track bowling bags page.
This article is copyright free.