Now that you have the basics of your store traffic website completed and launched, you should take a little bit of time to add the kinds of content to it that people who buy what you sell are looking for.
Types of potential paying customers
Typically, online store sites spend a lot of time selling individual products or services, but fail to put up content that will naturally bring targeted traffic to their site.
When potential buyers go looking for something, they tend to fall into a couple of categories:
- People who want to buy something and know what it is
- These people will find what you offer via search engines with product keywords
- They will search on product names
- Some will include "$" in their search as they want pages which actually sell items
- Some will include words like "Buy", "For Sale" etc.
- They are also the people who have the most competition for their money.
- People who want to buy a specific type of thing, but have not decided upon a particular product.
- These people will find what you offer via search engines with category keywords
- They will search on general types of products
- Some will include words like "best", "good", etc.
- There is generally decent competition for these peoples money.
- People who want a solution to a problem, but don’t know what the solution is
- These people will use search engines to hunt for solutions to some kind of perceived problem.
- They will search on problem words rather than product or category related words.
- If you can provide a solution to their problem, then you can sell to them.
- The words they search on may appear to have nothing to do with what you sell.
- Competition for these customers varies greatly, but if you take the time to do keyword research and locate these customers, you can make a lot of sales fast…provided you sell something that will solve their perceived problem.
There are certainly other types of potential customers out there, but the above are all perfectly reachable and willing to buy if you can lead them to your products.
Content creation for potential paying customers
With the above three types of people in mind, here is how I recommend adding content to your store traffic site:
- People who know what they want
- These are the people that I would build product showcase pages for.
- Since they already know what they want, they may buy from you without a second thought if you can show them what they want.
- However, some will be looking for:
- Specific details about the product such as color, size, brand, etc.
- Specific details about your service such as shipping information, return policies, etc.
- Any special reasons to buy from you rather than someone else
- A clean, simple page with a good picture, clear information on the features and/or attributes of the product you are offering, and links to your selling policies will usually be more than enough to make a sale to these customers.
- If they are bargain hunting or comparison shopping, they might also be interested in knowing about anything extra they get should they buy from you. Some easy to create extras which cost little or no money are:
- E-books / pdfs containing information such as
- Clear, concise instructions on assembly or usage
- Extra uses for the product in question
- How to care for and/or clean the product
- How to customize the product
- Storage cases
- Low cost, closely related products
- Coupons for services related to the product
- These can be from other places
- People who know what kind of thing they want
- These are people I would build category and/or product showcase pages for.
- Since they know generally what they want, they are often looking for:
- Recommendations on good products of the type they seek
- Information about how different related products compare to each other
- To increase sales in this group, you might consider the following:
- Providing detailed articles on the benefits of particular products
- These I would place on product showcase pages either as part of the description or as links
- Providing articles comparing closely related products
- These should weigh the pros and cons in comparison to each other
- I would place such articles as links in category showcase pages and perhaps note which you believe to be the strongest product for particular uses on the category showcase page itself.
- Providing testimonials from people who have bought particular products and recommend them
- These can be testimonials on other sites or direct testimonials from your own customers.
- If you use testimonials from other sites, I recommend using a small snippet of the testimonial along with the provided name and site name that you found the testimonial on…but the site name does not need to be a link. If you do provide a link, I recommend having it open in a new window and making it into a nofollow link.
- People who are looking for solutions to a problem
- Doing this can work very well, but requires more than simply targeting obvious keywords and using them to bring in potential customers.
- To find these people, I recommend looking over the products you offer and trying to think of how your products could take care of a perceived problem or need.
- Sites such as ask.com, yahoo answers, and let you see what kinds of perceived problems people are trying to get addressed. Looking them over, if you can match one of your products to the solution for a problem, you have a good candidate for an article.
Tying it all together
You can create posts on your site and link them to and from your category and product showcases.
Additionally, you could write articles on other sites and/or create digital products based off of them to sell directly on your site.
For now, I recommend doing the following:
- Update any product showcases with specific information about the product.
- You can do this in this in your product description or via the sideboxes.
- Check out "Creating boxed areas with html" for information on possible ways to cleanly show attributes of your products.
- Check out "Creating custom sideboxes for product showcases" for information on ways to create sideboxes.
- Update or create a shipping information and return policy and link them from your product showcases.
- Check out "How to create a shipping information page" if needed.
- Make note of other reasons to buy from you rather than someplace else
- You might add a link to your store feedback if the store you sell on has such.
- You might make note of any special discounts such as a percent off if they buy over a certain amount of goods from you.
- You might create information products for certain products or product categories and note that they are free with any purchase.
Don’t get carried away. For now, I’d hold off on creating too many articles on your site because we will discuss article marketing before long. However, a couple of comparison or informative articles to give visitors more information about what you offer couldn’t hurt.
