Short answer: Write a story that will appeal to your customers and add it to your news or content section.
I’d like to talk to you about how to get visitors to your website reasonably quickly and easily. Again, to be fair, I’m not talking about bazillions of people suddenly rushing your little site. I’m just talking about small gains. But if you repeat the ‘small gains’ often enough it builds into its own tidal wave, and brings its own momentum. To be sure, to be sure!
Your product descriptions will naturally bring visitors to your site over time. People looking to buy an 8-ball belt buckle might just end up finding you through a search engine. But this will be quite slow as there’s not a huge amount you can write about a belt buckle, and whatever you do write tends to be 80% the same as all the other belt buckles for sale on the Internet. Your competition for selling belt buckles is vast in that it is too similar between sellers.
So you need to differentiate yourself from the rest of the sellers and one way to do that is to write some unique content.
Often mentioned online marketing advice is that ‘great content’ will bring visitors to your site. But what exactly is ‘great content’ and how do you get it or create it?
Don’t be daunted by the word ‘great’. Great is obviously better than average, but average is better than nothing. Having said that nothing is better than a kick in the head! So it’s all about balance.
To give you an example we recently wrote an article called “Market Stall Display Ideas” and added it to our Gazebos Australia store. I collected a bunch of market stall photos from Google and then wrote up a quick description about what I thought on each market stall owner’s ability to display their products.
I picked a topic that would interest one segment of our customer base. We sell gazebos, and many of these are sold to market stall holders. These people need a gazebo to cover their heads and products and protect themselves against sun and rain. So it would be a natural conclusion that these buyers might also be interested in ideas for displaying their products in their market stall. I mean, if they’re in the business of selling, you’d think they’d want some new ideas on just how to do that.
We added the content just using the built-in content editor that comes with BigCommerce. You’ll have the same sort of function available in Magento, or any other eCommerce tool you use. Even if it’s not specifically designed for adding content, there’s always somewhere you can add a story or news article of your own making.
Now, as you know Gazebos Australia has only been running for 2 months (August 2011) so it is interesting to note that the Market Stall Ideas page is already the second most visited page on the website, just after the home page.
The majority of visitors are arriving via Google searches. If just a few of these new arrivals end up buying a Gazebo then the article will have been a worthwhile use of time.
Do you need help writing the content for your online store?
There are some excellent freelance writers available on oDesk. Mark, a freelancer on oDesk, is an Irish man now living and working in the Philippines. I haven’t worked with him yet (as of writing this article) but he comes highly recommended from a friend. Once you’ve signed up to oDesk, let me know and I’ll send you his profile.
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