Boosting the number of potential customers visiting your website is an affordable and effective way to increase sales and boost your bottom line. Here we share some tips for improving your visitor numbers.
Search engine optimization
Statistics show that search engines such as Google and Bing are the starting place. In short, search is huge and if you’re not listed near the top then you’re missing out. Well-implemented SEO can be the backbone of your business. Get this right and web users will come knocking at your door.
Pay-per-click
The next step along from SEO is often advertising, and the great thing about the web is that, in many cases, you only have to pay for what works. Pay-per-click is exactly as it sounds. A website, whether that’s something general such as Google or YouTube, or a site that’s more specific to your industry, will host your advert, but you only pay when somebody actually clicks through to your site.
There are campaigns for every budget. You can set a maximum expenditure or time period and experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Or if you’re already confident, a well-executed campaign can drive your traffic stats through the roof.
Email marketing
Once a potential customer has visited your site, you know there’s some interest. You can capitalize on this by asking for their email address, then keeping them updated. Got a new product? Write and let them know. Having a sale? Email the link. Email marketing is cost-effective and a rich source of potential customers, and it means you’re not relying on old customers to remember you.
Marketplaces
Sites such as eBay and Amazon give you the opportunity to sell your products through their portals. There is a great upside here, in that they spend millions every year bringing in huge volumes of shoppers, which you can then connect with. Of course, they will want to take a cut of your sales in return, but this can be a fantastic way of accessing a large target audience and selling in huge numbers. eBay is now a very professional setup that’s no longer just about knick-knacks and Amazon has evolved well beyond books and CDs
Affiliate networking
Another method of increasing your traffic is to promote on other, similar websites. Services such as ShareASale allow you to choose how you would like to advertise and what rates you would like to pay, and when a sale or lead takes place on your site, the referrer will be commissioned according to your set rates. In addition, you can use your website to gain revenue by choosing to promote others. As a member of the network, you decide which merchants to advertise and how to do so, and you can monitor stats in real-time so that you know when commissions have been generated.