Ty Rothstein
As human beings, air is what keeps us alive. The air we need to stay alive is a specific combination of different gasses that are proven to help us continue our lives. Without the right air, we can’t live.
Your eCommerce business also needs air to stay alive. Without traffic, there are no sales. Without sales, you can’t keep running the business. Like air, your traffic also needs to be comprised of shoppers from the right sources in order to help your business survive and thrive. A bunch of traffic, without considering where it is coming from, can be useless and even harmful.
In this post, you are going to learn how to start driving targeted traffic to your web store today.
Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Webstore
1. Be a Guest Blogger
It does not matter what you sell, there is a blog about everything, and I mean everything!
With guest blogging, you have the opportunity to get in front of the right audience to display your knowledge on a topic that they too care about. Let’s say you sell organic dog food. You could reach out to site like Organic-Pet-Digest, The Bark, or Dog Food Advisor. When reaching out, come ready with topics and brief outlines, but also be ready to take on a topic that might be of better use for them (and still helps you).
Getting Traffic:
- Write something engaging. If you excite or educate the reader, you’ve got a real chance to sell.
- Find the right publications. The more it is related to your niche the better
- Get on a blog that has proven to engage its readers (likes, comments, shares, etc).
2. Add a Blog
As we’ll discuss shortly, one of the best ways to get more targeted traffic on your web store is by utilizing great SEO. Blogging has proven to improve a web store’s SEO (getting more traffic directly from search engines).
In addition to SEO benefits, blogging enables you drive traffic to your site from a plethora of different sources, such as groups, social media sites, email, and more.
Let’s say you sell kitchen appliances, such as cutlery, dishes, and glasses. What can you blog about? Time spent in the kitchen – whether preparing meals or cleaning after them – can be time consuming. Hence, you could launch a blog on how to get more done in the kitchen in less time. The options are endless.
Getting Traffic:
- Use the right keywords so that Google indeed directs traffic back to you (longtail vs. short tail)
- To get posts ranked on the first page of Google, consider writing more than 1000 words.
- Share posts on your social media profiles/pages
- Comment and leave links for your posts on high-quality websites
3. Join Relevant Social Groups and Forums
Although in today’s age some of us may think that forums are a thing of the past, online forums and different social media groups are fantastic spots to get the right traffic for your web store. Depending on your target audience (millennials vs older folks) you can find more success on Facebook or on an online forum. From a quick Google search for “home cleaning forum” I found myself staring at a dozen different forums!
To exemplify the effects that this can have on your site, consider a web store that sells vacuum cleaners and other objects to help with cleaning the house or office. Posting your products in a general eCommerce group won’t get you the right traffic.
On the other hand, you could post insightful information with links to your store when necessary to show how much knowledge you have on the topic and the solutions you offer. This in essence can turn you into an influencer in your niche, something that can do wonders for sales and traffic!
If you want to take this up a notch, you could open your own Facebook group so that you can have more control over the way the group works (and have a nice cover image for the group that shows off your store).
Getting traffic:
- Make time to interact on a constant basis, much like social media. Save an hour every other day to check what is going on in the relevant groups and forums.
- Start using Reddit and Quora to drive instant traffic to your store.
- Comment and assist other more often than when you open a new thread.
4. Influencer Marketing: Blogger/Social Media Outreach
Every niche has influencers, and with the rise of eCommerce and social media, finding those influencers has become much less of hassle and now a more efficient process.
According to a study by Convince & Convert, on average, businesses generate $ 6.50 in revenue for each $ 1 invested in influencer marketing, with 70% making over $ 2 (on the $ 1 investment). The conclusion is simple: you have to try influencer marketing (and here’s some help: 5 Amazing Outreach Templates That Get Results From Influencers)
Getting Traffic:
- Create a plan: either start with the heavy influencers or start from the bottom (and make your way to the top).
- Do you need influencers that blog or is an Instagram or YouTube start going to give you a better ROI (return on investment)?
5. SEO
Google and search engines are still one of the leading sources of traffic for all websites. Although email and social media get a lot of love across the net, SEO is still alive and kicking – although it has changed over the years.
By utilizing the best practices (which we’ll sum up below), SEO results that bring you to the first page of Google search results will help you get more traffic (much more!), while helping you save money on ads (not as crucial when you appear in the first few results) and get results for your work over a long period of time, and not just for a few days.
Getting Traffic:
- Use the relevant keywords for your web store.
- Get high-quality backlinks from popular sites (this takes us back to influencer marketing and makes the tactic even more important).
- Avoid duplicate content (don’t have the same identical piece of content or text various times on your site).
- Have a responsive website (Google does not like sites that are not optimized for mobile use).
Bonus → 17 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites
6. Buy Misspells of Competitors’ Domains
This might seem a bit off, but it is certainly a valuable, and very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your web store. Do any of your competitors have domain names with more than one spelling? If so, then odds are that at least a few people are ending up on the wrong site.
Think about it this way. If the domain is getting misspelled 200 times a month (6-7 misspellings/day which is not a lot), and you owned that domain, you could either list a few products on this domain or link it to your store and now you are looking at 200 more targeted visitors on your site. That’s what we call easy money (and taking a bite out of the competition).
Getting Traffic:
- Before making a purchase, track whether or not the competitor has increasing sales.
- Buy domains that have a history of being misspelled. There is no point in buying a similar spelling that does not get searched.
- Buy a domain that has as many similar products to yours as possible, as this will increase your conversion rates because your store will be seen by the right people.
- Only buy the domain if the price tag is low enough. Are your products priced high enough for you to start profiting off the investment in a month or two?
7. Social Media Profiles & Pages
Social media can be a great resource of targeted traffic to your web store, if you play your cards right. First and foremost, getting the right social traffic can only work if you have got the right people following your profile/pages.
Buying likes or targeting a certain audience because it costs less to get those likes, might be a short-term solution to being more popular on social media, but it is far from a viable way to get the right traffic (or more traffic) to your eCommerce store.
Getting Traffic:
- Share the same thing more than once, but differently. With the quick updates in Twitter and algorithm of Facebook, most of your community won’t see the post the first time around.
- Optimize the post for each network, meaning that images,hashtags, and the text should be appropriate for the target audience and norms of each platform.
- Call to actions matter and can influence clicks. Although you might think it’s obvious that the person should click, you shouldn’t assume that to be true.
- Share product reviews in a fun way and link back to the product.
- Constantly look for news to engage your followers.
8. Create Awesome Videos
If you are debating on whether or not creating videos is a good use of your time, then here is what you need to know: 73% of online shoppers are more likely than not to go and make a purchase after they’ve seen a branded product explanation video. In addition to that convincing statistic, 96% of consumers say that videos have an influence on them when it comes to deciding whether or not to make an eCommerce purchase (source).
What videos should you be making? There is no need to rush to make 100 tomorrow, but start off with a few tutorial videos, which is a tactic that works extremely well for brands using Vine and YouTube.
Getting Traffic:
- Share videos on Vine, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Add YouTube cards to the videos you share on YouTube.
- Embed videos on relevant product pages to increase conversion rates.
- Share the videos with relevant bloggers to improve your SEO and get more traffic at the exact same time.
Speaking of awesome videos, check this one out! Imagine what a video like this could do for your business.
9. Facebook Advertisements
Advertising on Facebook can be one of the best tactics for increasing the amount of traffic on your site. However, whether or not that traffic converts into purchases is another question. To ensure that you are getting the right traffic (targeted visitors) to your site, be sure to get the targeting done correctly.
To make sure your ads are targeting the right people, use your page audience insights. Also take into consideration using either a custom audience, lookalike audience, or advanced connection targeting.
Getting Traffic:
- Use the right call to action. Don’t expect clicks without telling people what to do.
- Match your text and image so that they portray the same message. There is nothing more unattractive than a confusing advertisement.
- Make sure you are driving the traffic to the right landing pages. At the end of the day, you want the traffic to convert into sales.
10. Google AdWords
Besides Facebook ads, this is another great option for getting more of the right traffic on your web store.
For those not familiar, Adwords works based on a keyword scheme, in which a businesses bid on industry related keywords in order to have their ad displayed in a high performing spot when that keyword is searched: at the top of search-engine results.
For example, an eCommerce store that sells running shoes from various brands could make a bid on the keyword “running shoes” so that their store appears first in the search results (as an ad, not part of search results).
Getting Traffic:
- Bid on the right keywords. If you don’t want to track multiple keywords, consider bidding on one related to your most popular product.
- Focus on the quality score (and not just the bid amount), which is a grade that Google gives your advertisement based on its relevancy: keywords, landing page, text in the ad, and your ad’s click-through-rate.
11. User Generated Content (UGC)
One of the most successful types of marketing is classic word of mouth marketing. We covered the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing in an older post on how to use word of mouth marketing to get people talking about your business.
User generated content is the 21st century’s form of word of mouth marketing. Nothing says to people that your products rock than seeing a friend post images of the products on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and/or Pinterest.
This type of marketing helps you drive large amounts of traffic to your site, without you having to do any extra work, which makes it one heck of a tactic to use. Notice how Eggo used UGC to not only drive more traffic, but also got someone else to design their new cover image!
Getting Traffic:
- Ask people to post and use either a unique hashtag or tag your brand.
- Add an incentive to posting, such as a contest or prizes for all the shared content.
- Respond to the person’s post/status with a compliment.
- Share the UGC on your own profiles/pages to engage your fans with new content.
12. Social Listening
Sometimes the best things happen as a result from listening. When it comes to social listening and generating large numbers of targeted shoppers for your website, using tools to see what is being said about your competitors and your market/products is one very smart way to go about driving large amounts of traffic to your site. Just ask Arby’s!
Social listening can be implemented into your business’ strategy to do all of the following, and not necessarily only on social media, rather also across the web: attract new customers (lead generation), customer service, identifying influencers, understanding the market, understanding trends, tracking the competition, and getting more user generated content.
In a sense it’s a mean to generate more traffic without creating anything new – just interacting/responding – as well as nurturing other means of traffic generation that have already been mentioned.
Getting Traffic:
- Decide what shoppers you want to drive to your web store: people talking about your competitors, people talking about your market or market trends.
- Track the relevant keyword for the type of traffic you want to drive (from what source).
- Listen to what is being said and answer the questions or issues that people are talking about.
13. Traffic Booster App
This is our best kept secret, and now we’re letting the cat out of the bag. Get anywhere from 220 to 5000 targeted shoppers on your web store every month.
Getting Traffic:
- Just create an account, select a category type, tell us who you want to target and where you want them (what pages), and we’ll handle all the rest.
Start Getting Converting Visitors Today
Now you have 13 viable sources and tactics to use to get the right traffic on your web store. The days of excuses for a lack of traffic – whether the excuses were good or not – are gone. Pick two-three of these tactics and start implementing them into your daily schedule.
My question for you, is what are you going to be focusing on? Will you start with blogging, or go with social listening? Maybe the Traffic Booster and social media are your choice, whatever it is please share in the comment section below.
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