Yeah you finally launched your ecommerce store congratulations! I know how hard and time-consuming it is. Its time-consuming and it cost a lot of money.
Its true that for $30 a month you can set up an ecommerce website in a matter of minutes using BigCommerce and the likes but you still need to know a lot of things before that.
They had to have at least basic understanding of what 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 web developers and manage them.
Do you understand now why I said congratulations to you in the beginning of this article to those of you whose ecommerce websites are already on-line? Now it is time to sit back and start counting money, or is it? I wish that was the case.
The truth is that now its time for you to master traffic generation. To successfully do that you have to get a grip on banner advertising, article and blog marketing and facebook advertising, but thats just a small part of what you really need to know.
Hard yes, but that is a good thing because only a few people will have the willpower to do it. Be prepared to spend a lot of time if you really want to be a success in that endeavor. To give you a general idea 12 months will do it.
The bad news is that during these twelve months you wont be making a lot of sales just because traffic will be scarce.
Sure, you can set up a ppc campaign in a few minutes from now (if you know how) and start getting traffic but it is likely that you are going to lose your shirt.
If forking out cash before you have made money isnt an option you can always try to drive organic traffic from the search engines. Keep in mind though that this is time consuming too.
To me it looks like youre stuck between a rock and a hard place. The big guys in your niche will keep sucking the majority of visitors to their sites and get the lions share of sales.
However, it doesnt have to be like that. Luckily, even today its still possible for the small guy to become a big guy in his chosen field.
But first, let me tell you a personal story. Not so long ago on a lazy summer afternoon my phone rang and on the other side was a man I barely knew who had just launched his store for bowling shoes, bags and that kind of stuff. For the most curios among you the site can be seen at LongLiveBowling.com.
He was not happy with the current state. He knew he had a good site but that was not enough to make people come to it and spend money. After asking him a few questions I found out that he cant afford to spend money to purchase traffic or to hire someone who knew how to make people come to his site. He did not have money and he didnt have time to master these skills himself.
Nevertheless, the site had to start making money like yesterday. So it was time for me to roll my sleeves up and do my thing. The situation seemed hopeless but nevertheless I decided to take a chance. I devised a plan and started implementing it. If you want to know what I did just keep reading.
Here is my secret we started making videos and posting them on YouTube.com. Heres what you think. Is it possible something that simple to actually work? First off it isnt that simple at all. The videos have to be on topics your potential clients are interested in.
After doing our homework we unearthed that people needed help to choose the best bowling ball for them. For that reason we did a bunch of videos explaining how the lane conditions affect the ball choice.
So we came up with a list of about one hundred questions people needed answers to and started doing videos. Im not talking about Hollywood quality videos, I am talking about the talking head kind of videos. Nothing fancy, but useful to the viewer.
With the risk of repeating myself once we had the videos done we uploaded them to our channel on YouTube. We played around with meta tags and videos titles until we got them just right. In this article I wont talk about that but you can always use Google to learn more about it.
Why did we chose video marketing and YouTube in particular? Because Google tends to push videos on You Tube to the front page for specific term easily.
But I digress. After we uploaded the videos it took us about 2 weeks for the majority of them to reach the first page in Google for the targeted terms. After all the bowling related videos were up on YouTube.com it took about two weeks more or less for them to reach page 1 in Google for their respective terms. The rest is history the site got a ton of web traffic.
Fortunatelly for me early on I found out that this guy was a National National Bowling Team coach and I took advantage of that. We made sure he mentioned it all videos, he was likeable and he knew the bowling stuff.
People were instantly attracted to him. They felt he was genuine and passionate about bowling and they were willing to spend money on his site. Yes they were buying on his site the same products they could buy 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 any one of the videos. He definitely knew what he was talking about, was likeable and people responded well to that. So well in fact, that his sales jumped immediately.
So there you have it a blueprint you can can implement in your business and see immediate results. You do not need an expensive camera to make this type of videos nor you need to buy expensive lighting.
Actually, all you need is a smart phone. There are products that you do not have to be an authority on the subject matter or have extensive knowledge for example hammocks. However, if you decide to talk about bowling shoes and have no idea what you are talking about people will sense it and will not buy form you.
You might argue with all day long that you have no knowledge on the products you chose to sell. And it might be true, but you can always find someone in your area who knows just enough and offer to compensate him for their time and effort. You do not have to pay him with cash just give him some product, or give him percentage of each sale, you got the idea, right.
There you have it a fool-proof way to drive traffic to your website even if you have just launched it and have no money to spend on advertising. All you need is a smart phone with a camera and time to do your homework.
If you want to see for yourself what I have done for LongLIveBowling visit their YouTube Channel as well as the 900 Global bowling balls page.
This article is copyright free.