Creating traffic beyond Google
A solid SEO approach for e-commerce is vital for your revenue. Yet the traffic from Google, Yahoo and LIVE is mostly dominated by Google now and that is hard to get. Even with a good keyword base, profound knowledge and good backlinks it is getting harder and harder to harvest users and potential buyers out of search. So where should one look to raise the amount of visitors?
YouTube is great:
go and publish videos about your products on youtube! It is a great traffic source and the buyers have a visual impression of what they gonna get! Do not forget to paste your links to your youtube submissions!
Also: the other Google online estates (like Google base or Maps) can be solid traffic sources!
Digg and other bookmarking services:
The buzz word is “recommendation marketing” - get your products or art mentioned and bookmarked by others on platforms like digg, stumbleupon or weboftrust (wot). This is a rising source!
Social networks and twitter:
The traffic from MySpace has been higher, I admit. But with facebook and a good amount of followers on twitter, new music releases and fresh information products can be sold quickly!
The good ol’ mailing list:
No one wants to be spammed! But if you distribute good information and you put your buyers from tradebit in your mailing list (use something like campaignmonitor.com) - you have a good chance to motivate first buyers to spend some cash on your uploads the second time, too!
These traffic sources are your alternatives if you do not rank too good on search engines. Important is: The quick “hit and run” techniques advertised on the web do not work for most of the world. Stay on it, publish and promote - itterate until you are happy. Percistance is the key!
April 16th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Ralf:
Excellent information! I’ll just mention that I’ve found the email mailing list idea extremely effective. About a year after going into business, I’d evolved the practice of sending out a BCC email using my AOL account, every few weeks or so. As my mailing list (harvested in part from Tradebit sales) swelled, though, those mass emailings began to look like spam to the AOL filter, and many or most of the emails were kicked back.
So I asked around, and I ended up settling on an email service called Emma (www.myemma.com). It’s not the cheapest–it costs me about $45 to send out 2500 emails–but I love every single feature of the system, including the various track-back applications that let me see who is clicking on which link in which email. I can easily create subset of my mailing list–”prime” mailing lists, if you will, made up of people who clearly want to buy my stuff. I recommend Emma highly. ALL my emails are delivered; my spam problem has vanished. I keep in regular touch with my customers. It’s easy for new folks to add themselves to my mailing list, or opt out.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Just got some traffic from YouTube. Thanks for the idea.
Chris
April 24th, 2009 at 6:26 am
Hey all,
Is there a way to see the number of views my tradebit page gets???
If there is plz tell me how…
Many sales to ya all tradebit members
April 24th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
pecn: we will give you a tracking tool, soon!