How to build a successful ecommerce business? (Part 2)

Now that you have built an ecommerce website that converts (How to build an effective ecommerce web site?), you will have to drive traffic to your website so that you can make sales. There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, free and paid traffic. The goal is to use freely available resources first, and then explore the paid resources when you're ready to expand your business.

Part 2. How to promote your ecommerce website?

  1. Before spending any money driving traffic to your website, you must sign up to receive free traffic from shopping comparison engines. The three most popular shopping comparison traffic you can draw freely include (1) google prduct search, (2) bing, and (3) thefind. Those are shopping portals that allow merchants to add products to their shopping engine at no cost to you, and send traffic to your site for those customers interested in the products that you sell.
  2. You may also consider selling your products through 3rd-party marketplaces. You'll pay pre-determined commission (rate up to 15%) on each sale you make through marketplaces. The most popular marketplaces are Amazon, EBay, buy.com, newegg, sears and Walmart which will join the force in the very near-term. The benefit of selling through 3rd-party marketplaces is that you only pay comission when your product sells at the price you want.
  3. Join an affiliate marketing program. Allow other publishers to advertise your business and drive traffic to your website by joining an affiliate network. By joining an affiliate network, you agree to pay pre-agreed percentage of commission to affiliates when they help you sell products (or services) on your website. Similar to marketplace sale, you only pay fee when sales occur.
  4. Build search engine traffic by optimizing your website for major search engines. Although it takes much time to rank well on SERP (search engine result pages), it is worthwhile investing preset percentage of your marketing dollars in search engine optimization. Paid PPC traffic stop immediately when you suspend you advertisements, but when you have organic search traffic you'll be less pressured spend hefty marketing dollars in drawing traffic to your site.
  5. Explore CSEs such as Nextag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla/Bizrate, shop.com, Amazon Product Ads, and etc.