Today I would like to talk about attracting traffic to your online web store, in particular where your web store is not a supplement to a “Bricks and Mortar” business, or a supplement to your hobby or trade shows. In my previous blog I mentioned three types of online web store, as a quick recap:

1) Mom and Pop run a Bicycle store. Their main bread and butter is the store, the web site was just an add-on to their business later. Customers find out about their web site when they visit the store, or see a mention of it in the advertising in the local paper. Slowly, along with some Search Engine Optimization, Mom and Pop eventually start selling bike components to customers across the country via their web site. Should Mom and Pop actually be offering a service, such as “furnace cleaning”, they can tailor their internet advertising (such as Pay Per Click) to only be offered in their local region.

2) Joanie has a hobby producing quilting patterns. She typically sells quilting fabric, supplies, and her unique quilting patterns at trade shows and craft shows. Over time she has collected an email list of customers, whom she emails a quarterly seasonal catalog. She already has a starting point for potential traffic. Of course Search Engine Optimization will help. She might even try to generate some traffic using Pay Per Click advertising. Maybe Joanie does some blogging on the topic and signs off each article with her URL. Also, she has published articles in e-zines to share her knowledge and again get note of her URL out there. An e-zine web site makes your articles available as content to other web sites, the pay-back being that your signature, or pen name, with your URL gets propagated to other web sites.

3) The “Lone Wolf” online web store. Whereas the previous two types are “supplements” to existing businesses, this online web store IS the whole business. So here you are starting from square one! Unlike the first two examples, your online web store lives and dies by the whims of internet traffic. Is an attractive, professional looking web site selling desirable product all you need for high traffic? Not likely. You usually need to provide an extra “value add” to attract customers. Much of the traffic on the internet is from folks who are looking for free information and entertainment. So if you are selling product, are you able to provide relevant, informative articles to go along with the product? Or actually, the reverse may be more accurate. Are you able to offer compelling content for free, and have relevant product offered for sale? For example; your hobby is putting together crafting projects for children. You could offer a series of “how-to” articles and “project plans”, and sell crafting supplies to help build those craft projects. Another example; you want to sell sports supplies, can you write articles to help the average Joe or Jane improve his or her game? Such extra information will help set you wet site apart for those that only sell “stuff”.

The Search Engines like to see informative content, so a web site that only offers product will not rank as high. And if you can keep adding fresh articles that will help even more, since Search Engines like web sites that get updated on a regular basis. The more relevant content you offer, the more keywords and key-phrases you will have for the Search Engines. Importantly though, you will want to keep your website focused on your specialty. If your web site is a hodge-podge of different stuff, you will hurt the “relevance” to your main business, and thus you may hurt your Search Engine rankings. Of course, there are other strategies that can help, such as advertising via Pay Per Click systems, but that will be a topic for another blog.

In conclusion: You need to choose a product line you are passionate about, otherwise it may be a struggle to maintain the creativity needed for compelling content.

Here’s a strategy you may want to try before you make the time and financial commitment to build a full fledged ecommerce website, along with the credit card processing, arrangements for stock warehousing, finding a drop-shipper, home office space, setting up a Business name and business bank account, and so forth. For relatively few dollars, you can start by creating a web site on the topic of your interest. As a “hobbyist”, put in the time commitment to build compelling content. After a few months or a year, if your web site gets reasonable traffic, then build your ecommerce web site and use your first web site as a traffic funnel for prospective customers. If your informational web site cannot generate adequate traffic, then you will have saved the effort required to build the commercial web site! I suspect though that most ecommerce web sites don’t start with an “information only” web site. But then again, the failure rate is high, which is why I suggest this particular strategy.

Even some of the big web sites started off by giving away services for free in their first year. Back in the days of where you could only connect to the internet via a dial-up modem, there was one company that offered free internet access to you if you dialed them up, they had set up local telephone numbers in most large cities. Once they were well established, then they started to charge a modest fee. Another big web company originally offered free storage space (back in the days where a home computer was lucky to have an entire Gig of storage), after about a year, they started to charge for the service. This is just a couple of examples.

Next time I will talk about choosing product for your web site.

Cheers!

Michel

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