At fast you have created your online shop, all your products are up and waiting to be sold, your virtual shopping cart is sat waiting, your ecommerce software is ready to start taking in orders and start making you money.
Many years ago when the internet was first picking up the saying "Build it and they will come" was more or less true, anyone could create a website and with little work you could have a site getting several visitors per day if not hundreds.
Building your online shop is easy with ecommerce software like BangTech Corp. and anyone could do it. Getting visitors and more importantly customers to your online shop is much more difficult.
This is a new kind of advertising model that has been around now for just a couple of years and is gaining more and more advertisers everyday and is quickly becoming the only way to appear on the first page of many search engines. For example here is a screen shot from Google...
... Here we have searched for 'dog food' and as you can see the search engine display has a list of websites along the left hand side. These are all websites that have been indexed in Google and have both relevancy for the term 'dog food' and also have good site popularity, the number one result is www.iams.com which is a worldwide brand.
What you also get on all Google result pages are the Pay Per Click adverts which are shown along the right hand side in coloured boxes, they can also appear in two coloured boxes along the top of the screen. These adverts (as you can see) are also for dog food however Google hasn't decided who comes up first, the advertisers have.
The way Pay Per Click advertising works is pretty simple, you select a search term such as 'dog food' and then say how much you are willing to pay for every visitor that clicks on your advert and comes to your website, this could be anything from 0.10 right up to 20.00 or even more.
If you decide to pay 0.50 for every click but someone else is offering to pay 1.00 per click then they go above you in the list, as obviously they are willing to pay more. However they don't pay a 1.00 per click, instead they just pay a penny above what the person below them is paying, so in our case they would pay 0.51.
For example a typical list of 5 adverts, the costs and positions might work out like...
Now what this also shows is that the company in position 2 'Your best friend' is getting a much better deal as although they are not in number one, second place is still pretty good and they are paying 0.36 per click where as number one 'It's a dogs life' are paying a hefty 1.01 per click.
This demonstrates why you should check your Pay Per Click listing everyday to ensure your getting the best deal.
Pay Per Click advertising is great because you only pay for results. With a traditional media advert like TV you pay a set figure per advertisement shown and you have no guarantee about the number of potential customers it's going to bring in. With Pay Per Click your getting targeted visitors who are interested in your products and your not paying for those who aren't.
Its also worth trying to avoid the most popular keywords if your on a tight budget. For example the search term 'toaster' will be more expensive than the term 'Phillips toaster' and the second term is more relevant and is more likely to bring in even more highly targeted visitors as they are actually looking for a Phillips toaster not just a general toaster. Another example of this would be our music store, the term 'music CD' is just too generalised and would cost a fortune, where as 'Britney Spears In the Zone' would be much more specific and bring visitors that are looking for that specific album.
Do all the obvious things like getting your website address displayed in as many places as possible, and don't be scared by the Pay Per Click systems, we can always help you through it and its all pretty simple once you get your head around the different systems.
This has only been a quick look into the various ways of promoting your ecommerce website. Feel free to email us for more information, we are always happy to help our customers and potential customers to get their ecommerce online store performing as well as it can.