When you’re running an ecommerce business on your own, things are tough.
You might have your own website with products.
You might have your products on Etsy.
Or maybe you have both of those setups and even a few other ways to sell your items.
But one big challenge is getting traffic to those product pages. You know that you need customers and those customers come from traffic to your site.
Even with a good budget the traffic challenge is still difficult.
Here are some ideas for generating more traffic to your ecommerce business.
1. Create Weekly Top 10 Lists
People love Top 10 lists. There are entire sites dedicated to top 10 lists.
If blogging has become a challenge you can do something a little more fun by creating top 10 lists for your site. Aim to do it weekly and twice weekly if you can.
Before you get started, create a simple calendar and brainstorm the first 10 top 10 lists. This will make the writing easier because you won’t have to find the idea to write about each week.
For the lists, include your own products on occasion, but mostly look for things you love including complementary products to yours or just create fun lists that you know your target audience will find to be entertaining.
For example, let’s say you sell homemade bags on Etsy. Your target customers are women ages 35-45. You could create lists for shoes, tops, jewelry and more, but also fun things like the top 10 movies from the early 90s.
When you do complementary lists, reach out to the product owners and let them know that you included them. They will likely share the list with their followers.
2. Interview Suppliers & Publish As Blog Posts, Podcasts
You can also build content for your ecommerce site by interviewing your suppliers and partners. You can turn these into blog posts or podcasts (or both).
You can do this via email with a few questions or over the phone or Skype by asking a few questions over a 10 minute or so conversation.
The things your customers likely want to know are trends in the industry like what colors or styles are going to be big in the upcoming months.
Also include some fun questions like favorite websites, coffee, movies, etc. A good mix of industry information and fun information make for fun interviews that your target customers will connect with.
Once the interview is published make sure to ask the interviewee to share it.
3. Partner With A Complementary Ecommerce Business
Sometimes the best ways to grow a business is to latch your horse to a team that’s already moving forward and growing.
Many startup businesses do this by looking for a way that their product improves the offer of another company. And together the companies grow together.
It will vary depending on what you sell with your ecommerce business, but just about every business has a complementary business out there as a potential partner.
Let’s say you’re that Etsy seller focusing on some really cool bags. You could partner with another (hopefully more popular seller) on Etsy that has some really cool jewelry.
Reach out and say that you’d like to do some kind of co-promotion where you package your items together. It could have a special price that is beneficial to all customers.
You could even create something unique for the partner to offer exclusively to their customers.
When the business promotes your products you’ll get sales through their store, but you’ll also get traffic to your store as customers look at your other items.
4. Create A Weekly Video Series
The ecommerce world is becoming very visual and especially with video.
When it comes to traffic we often think of organic search (SEO) from Google. But YouTube is one of the biggest search engines in the world.
Video can improve the authority of your site and attract traffic, but you can also attract traffic from YouTube to your store by publishing regular videos.
Create weekly videos about your favorite products; similar to the top 10 lists from earlier. You can mention other products, your favorite interests and things like that. Also discuss new trends you’re seeing in your industry.
The videos don’t need to be long, but do what you can to have good lighting and good sound. Those are keys to success with video.
5. HARO
Finally, this is a neat little tool for getting exposure in a PR fashion all the time and it works even if you’re just starting out.
Get signed up for HARO.
Signup for the categories that best fit what you’re selling (fashion, lifestyle, etc.).
Every day you’ll get three emails from each category. Each day look to answer as many of the inquiries as you can.
You won’t hear back from most of them, but keep putting in good effort on the responses to make yourself stand out to the reporters.
Over time you’ll start getting included and once you are those articles can send immediate traffic and ongoing traffic to your site.
Conclusion
Traffic can be the most frustrating thing for a small ecommerce business. Even if you’re looking to grow your ecommerce business it’s challenging to find new sources of traffic.
Organic search traffic is a nice idea, but it takes time to build your authority. You can work on those strategies while also working on some other strategies like the ones mentioned above.
The key to everything here is to turn these strategies into habits so you’re doing them on a regular schedule and that will ensure that you see results building over time.
