→ Store Traffic Website → Initial Marketing
Once you have finished and launched your site, please take a moment to read "Adding content to your site for targeted traffic" as it talks about three different methods for targeting buying customers…which you should be aware of before you start your marketing efforts.
This module covers the basic initial marketing that I recommend doing once you have completed the first three modules of my "Creating a website for driving traffic to your store" tutorial.
If you follow the instructions contained within this module, you will end up with:
- 9 to 11 decent to excellent backlinks to your site
- 3 automatic backlinks for each future article or product showcase you create
Introduction – Ranking up a website in search engines |
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Ranking up your web site in search engines consists of two primary activities:
In this module, we will be focusing on building up your backlinks. Much of what is needed for creating good, optimized content was taken care of when you built your site, but we will certainly cover it in more depth in a future module. |
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What is a good backlink? Backlinks ( links to your site from other sites ) can be of various quality. Some can even lower your page rank a bit, especially if you have no good incoming links from external sites. See The Nature of a Quality Backlink for a detailed explanation. |
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Passing your page rank to others When you create links on your site which take people to other sites, you can choose to help out their page rank ( at some expense to your sites own pagerank ) or not, as you see fit. See "How page rank is passed on to other websites" for more information. The end result is that most of your external links should look like the following: |
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Search Engine Optimization Tools Before you start your search engine optimization efforts, I recommend installing the google toolbar so that you can easily see what google thinks of a particular competitors web site ( or your own ) and find out what sites are linking back to them…as some of them might be good candidates to get links for your own site as well. |
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The Web of Search Engine Ranking When you are ranking up a site ( or particular pages within a site ), it can be very useful to do so in a weblike fashion, with certain sites pointing to your store traffic site and/or store, other sites pointing to the ones pointing to them, etc. By doing this, the pages which are linking to your store and traffic site directly gain page rank, which lets them become more effective at giving your traffic and store sites page rank.
The main thing to note here is that links flow in one direction. I advise against making circular links ( e.g. linking from your site to a page that you built to link to it ) as a variety of people I know to be both honest and good at internet marketing note that doing so is, at best, sub-optimal. If you want the information from your articles in more than one place, simply rewrite the information so that it is not the same in different places. |
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Part 1 – Email |
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If you have not done so, I highly recommend creating a custom email account for your site and setting it up in a mail client of your choice. The reason for doing so is to keep your store and site email separate from your personal email. If you already have an email account that you use for your store, then you might opt to just use it instead. Either way, before you start your marketing efforts, be sure to setup an email footer which links to your store traffic site (and/or online store), so that anyone you contact via email will see that it exists. |
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Part 2 – Twitter |
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Twitter is an online system for letting people who have decided to follow you know what you are up to. It can be used for social purposes, business purposes, or a mixture of both. Quite a few internet marketers that I respect note that they seem to get the best results when they use a mixture, including various offers as well as neat or interesting things that they have come across or done. |
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Part 3 – Plumdrop |
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Plumdrop is a site where you can setup a profile that contains all of your current selling venues, create blog entries, add friends, and put up various random information about you and/or your enterprise. I recommend creating a Plumdrop account because:
It is true that it currently has a rather low pagerank (2), but that is better than your site is likely to have starting out and it is setup quite nicely…so I expect that with time it will gain a higher page rank. |
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Part 4 – Feed Aggregator Sites |
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With your WordPress site, you have an RSS feed that is setup automatically. RSS allows people to subscribe to your feed and automatically see new posts from you as you create them. By submitting your RSS feed to RSS aggregators:
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Part 5 – Internet Directories |
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Directory sites are web sites that list numerous other web sites in an organized manner. In many cases, search engines use them to get information about different web sites. By submitting your website to directory sites, you can quickly get a fair number of backlinks without a lot of work and provide another place on the internet for people to find your site at. |
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Take Action and Traffic Will Come |
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The most important thing is to take action. If you do one or two small search engine optimization or marketing tasks each day, you will avoid burnout and end up with a site that ranks quite well for your chosen keywords. If you spend days working over a "perfect" plan, but get burnt out implementing it, then you will have accomplished very little or nothing. While fast and steady is great, slow and steady is far preferable to burning yourself out. At this point, you should have a few initial backlinks setup as well as two decent tools for supporting the backlinks that you will continue to build for your site. |
| Current Page: Store Traffic Website → Initial Site Marketing |
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← Previous Step: Creating Your WebsiteYour site is complete! |
| Next Module: Online Marketing for your Store Traffic Site |
