How to Increase Traffic for Your Online Store

If you’re a small scale seller, you may find it difficult to drive traffic to your online store. But don’t worry - there are plenty of things you can do to increase traffic and boost sales on your ecommerce site. Here are some of the most popular methods…

1) Write and distribute articles

This is one of the most popular ways of driving traffic to your store, especially if you’re an eBay or Amazon seller. Use sites like Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Isnare.com, Goarticles.com to write articles about your niche - say you’re a seller of fine wine, or jumpers for dogs - and link back to your web store. Contact high-ranking blogs related to your niche and ask to write guest posts for them - you need to choose reputable sites, so your Google ranking will go up. 

2) Optimise your landing page

If your landing page bounce rate is high, then you need to be proactive and do something about it. Creating a successful landing page is not that difficult. Include images, convey your brand by keeping the same look and feel as your primary website if you’re selling on eBay and try to keep it simple by reducing the amount of navigation needed. You should also include an obvious call-to-action, such as a “buy now” button. (Unfortunately, if you're an Amazon seller, you can't really personalise your store as much as eBay, but fingers crossed Amazon Seller Central will introduce more branding options.) Use the geo-targeting functionality to ensure your traffic is directed to the most relevant eBay site. Consider which landing page on eBay you direct your traffic to carefully, as the eBay homepage is not always the best option. For example, if your content is about t-shirts, try linking to a t-shirt search results page. You can also use Advanced Search options to further target your landing page

3) Comment on blogs

This is another great strategy for generating traffic. Make sure the site is relevant to your niche - fashion, beauty and interior design based blogs can have hundreds and thousands of followers, so if you sell in any of categories, you’re in luck. Don’t worry if that’s not the case - there are millions of blogs out there dedicated to almost anything imaginable, so you’re bound to find your niche. Other things to take in consideration for your comment to be approved is to provide content, be respectful, and know what you're talking about.

4) Strike up partnerships

When looking for partnerships, you should ideally approach companies in the same or similar industries as you. Ask them if they would be interested in partnering up so that if you have your logo and link on their site (and vice versa, of course) you could tap into their customer base, who may not have heard of you before. Simply get them to add your logo and link and do the same for them in return, with an affiliate link to your and their websites so you know who the traffic is coming from. You’d be surprised at how many companies are willing to do this, but it’s mutually beneficial and costs nothing so everyone is a winner. 

5) Social bookmarking

This is one of the most popular methods of building traffic. Simply share your website on social networks to build links and gain interest. Some of the more obvious sites are: Twitter, Facebook and Google+, but check out Pinterest, Reddit, and Stumbleupon as these are great for pinpointing users who might be interested in your products. 

6) Strategically name your store categories

If you’re selling on eBay, you can maximize SEO (search engine optimization) and drive more traffic to your listings by strategically naming the categories in your store. An example of how to sell on eBay with strategically named sore categories: Firstly, set up your store preferences so that the navigation bar showing all of your categories is on every single listing. You can do this by going to: Manage my store > Listing frame > Under “Listing Frame Features” click the radio button next to “show my store listing header and left navigation bar in my listings.” This will put all of your categories on every listing in your store. Next, you should add subcategories to your main categories using brand names of the items in your store. You can still keep your items categorized by size, gender, color, etc. The key is to display on the left hand navigation bar so that the search engines can see them. For example, a seller offers gourmet tea, tea sets, and other tea-related accessories in their eBay store. This seller can set up categories as tea bags, tea leaves, cups and mugs,strainers, tea flavorings, and tea gift baskets. Then, under tea bags, the seller lists the brand names such as Twinings, Whittard, Teapigs, and so on. They do this in every category and lists out the brand name of all of her items. After doing this, instead of having a few pages with each of these keywords on them, every single page in the store has all of these keyword. The tea seller has just increased the number of times a keyword is used in their store. This also increases brand recognition in the store, so customers can easily see that they carry Twinings tea bags if that is what they are seeking.