Bodega Sale Blog

Free Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store

I’m writing this article to give you an idea on how to drive free traffic into your online store and hopefully bring paying customers.

For many, marketing usually associate to spending money. For example, Pay Per Click Advertising or PPC. When I started using Google Adwords I spent about $70 and all I can say is that it can bring you decent traffic quickly. However having traffic didn’t convert to any sales to my bookkeeping software for online stores. I am going to discuss more into Google Adwords on one of my next articles.

While you do get instant traffic with PPC, it has a high learning curve and if you are new and don’t have any idea on how to do keyword research and optimizations it will burn your pockets really fast.

So having said that, I’m sure we all have limited budgets, we need to consider a few free alternatives to sell our products. It’s not going to be easy and it will need constant work. The basic idea is to make friends and if you are successful some will probably tell their friends about you.

So, below are free ways to drive traffic to your online store:

1. Maintain a Blog - This is upfront. Anyone who is going to do business online needs to maintain a blog.

A blog serves two purpose:

a. A way to communicate with customers and

b. A way to get listed on Google’s search engine results page or commonly called SERP.

Don’t worry about the topics to write here just write as much as you can every week. Just make sure you are on-topic 50% of the time. For example, you sell gift items for baby showers. Once a week, blog about which gift item on your store would you would give to Angelina Jolie’s baby.

Next post comments on similar blogs. This will not only give you traffic but you’ll make friends with the author and the other commenters too. Soon, they’ll be curious on what is your blog is all about. A word of caution, don’t ever post “Good article.”, “Thanks, this was really helpful.” instead ask a follow-up question. This will add value to the article and you’ll make friends with the author.

You’ll need to be a consistent commenter here. Don’t just comment and never come back, instead stalk the blog and whenever there is a new post make sure you’re there. So they’ll remember you and that means a lot to your online store.

I know these blogs will pile up and probably hard to be a consistent commenter to them. So I suggest putting them all in Google Reader. Which is a great tool that compiles all of your frequently visited blogs into one page.

2. Tweet - If you tweet frequently, follow and hopefully get followed. You can get to gather a community that you share the same interests and are interested on what you’ll say. Be genuinely interested on them and soon they’ll also genuinely interested with you.

Don’t ever tweet the words “Please visit my online store.”, “Please buy” or anything that will sound like a you’re a marketing person. Remember your goal in twitter is not to sell but to make friends. Please register as yourself and not as your online store’s marketing department. In other words be a person. You can tweet about the weather, tweet about the frog you saw in your backyard this morning and etc..

It is important to leverage your twitter campaigns with tools that will help you. Tweet Caddy will do the tedious work for you. Schedule your tweets two weeks ahead and at the right time your audience is online.

3. Participate on forums - Forum posting is an old but very effective marketing technique. Besides having more friends you’ll get to create back links to your online store. That signature link is very important. A back link is what search engines determine websites on which one will show up on search keywords. I’ll give back links and SEO a more in depth discussion on my next articles. But below is a short explanation.

For example, if your online store is all about personalized baby diaper bags. You then join a local parenting forum and on your profile signature, put an html link to your online store that says “Personalized baby diaper bags for sale”

Google will save this to its database and the next time someone types “personalized baby diaper bags” on google search your store will appear. Okay, my example here is just to make it simple to understand. Google has a very complicated system on which websites show up first and a lot of companies spend a great deal of money so their website will show up on the first page. But don’t get discouraged, Rome wasn’t built in a day. You’ll just need to work hard on building more quality back links. Soon your store will show up on the first page of Google.

So, back to forum posting. When you join, make sure that just like blogging and tweeting your goal is to make friends not to sell. So when you post, just try to join the discussion. Be nice and avoid conflicts at all cost. You’re signature is the only space where you’ll mention about your store.

That’s about everything. Being an entrepreneur, the basic fundamental skill you need is social skills and making friends. I remember when I was 10 years old, I have a dog. And whenever I walked home from school. He would wait for me behind the front gate of our house and showed how much happy he was to see me and that I’m back. You know that wagging of the tail, barking.

And that meant a lot to me back then. And now, to think of it, if my dog was going to sell me something that I need, I would seriously consider buying from him.