In the November 2006 StoresOnline Merchant Newsletter, we discussed the process to create a successful website. We laid out the specific ingredients needed, and the actual process to follow. For the next several months we will look at that process and provide more detail in each month’s Merchant Newsletter.
The first step of the process was to build version 1.0 of your website. Which was followed by doing the initial site promotion or in other words bringing 100 +/- visitors to your site a daily.
This is the subject we will discuss this month. Remember, at this point, we have not executed site promotion or spent hours trying to bring hundreds of visitors to your site yet. Eventually, we will do that, but not at this point in the process.
Some of you may be asking, why? Let’s pose a question:
Q: Why would you want to bring hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site daily, if you can’t convert those visitors to buyers?
A: It wouldn’t be worth your time or money.
Now, how do we bring 100 +/- visitors to our website daily? The easiest way to quickly generate 100 daily visitors to your web site is through bid-ranked search engines.
Use Bid-Ranked Search Engines
Submit between 1,000 - 3,000 relevant keyword phrases to 7Search.com, GoClick.com, Miva.com, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture), Google AdWords, and MSN adCenter. Start with the minimum bid on each engine. You may need to raise your bids later to generate increased traffic.
Before we go any further it is important that we understand the "type" of traffic that we can get from each of the Bid-Ranked Search Engines discussed above. Hands down, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google Adwords and MSN's AdCenter are the three largest Bid-Ranked Search Engines on the Internet, but can also be the most expensive. That is not meant to scare you away from using these Bid-Ranked Search Engines, only to inform you that the cost involved could potentially be higher.
Another thing to consider is the "Quality" of traffic that each Bid-Ranked Search Engine can bring you. Because we are trying to bring the most qualified visitors to our site we are also concerned with where to find the most qualified visitors. Typically Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google Adwords, and MSN AdCenter will bring you the highest quality visitors. That is not to say that these other Bid-Ranked Search Engines are going to bring your unqualified visitors, it is only to help you understand that there can be a difference between the Bid-Ranked Search Engines.
We suggest, as mentioned above, that you start with some of the smaller Bid-Ranked Search Engines and then move into some of the larger Bid-Ranked Search Engines. We also suggest that you test running campaigns in the two sets. For example, you may start running your Bid-Ranked campaigns in 7Search, GoClick, and Miva and run them for a while and note the type of traffic that comes in, are they buyers (you can tell by your conversion rates). Another way to test this idea is to stop your campaigns in these smaller Bid-Ranked Search Engines for a while and run campaigns in the larger Engines and not the results as well as the difference between the two groups of Bid-Rank Search Engines. It is very likely that you see no difference at all and if so, GREAT!
Remember, we are just trying to bring 100 visitors daily at which point we can begin the process to “dial in our site” or increase our conversion rates to a healthy rate.
Stay tuned next month for the next step in the process to creating a successful website. If you would like to learn more about Bid-Ranked Search Engines and how to use them, log into Merchant Services and read the Bid-Ranked Search Engines article.
Logoworks and StoresOnline have teamed up to provide
your business
with a logo design solution that offers tremendous value.
Car Seller Takes Local Business Resources to International Markets
As Therese Villa was busy selling and rebuilding cars, she found a StoresOnline promotional email. As it turned out, this was perfect timing, for she was in need of a second source of income.
Therese, originally from California, went to college so she could work on a dairy farm.
But she never made it to the farm. Instead, she ended up in Missouri, got out of school, and started selling insurance. Before too long, she began working with a friend at a salvage yard, selling and rebuilding cars.
Like most StoresOnline merchants, Therese received promotional material concerning Internet marketing. “It sounded interesting,” Therese said after looking through the material. “It intrigued me, so I went to the seminar. I thought it had potential and followed through with it.”
Therese went to the Internet Marketing Workshop and a subsequent, all-day workshop, where she bought six website licenses. “When I left the workshop with all six websites, I was very optimistic and looking for all kinds of potential and actual ventures to spread off in different areas,” Therese said. “I had a lot of general ideas of what I’d like to do.”
Soon Therese began working with her website licenses, but found she needed specific information about the products she wanted to sell. “Every time I tried to get with the website, it seems like things weren’t just quite fitting into place, and I was getting a little frustrated,” Therese said.
“Then one day a customer had asked me to get them some parts. While I was ordering it, I flipped a catalog over and I saw that my wholesaler [of aftermarket headlights, taillights, mirrors and door handles] had a website. I called him up, got an online access account, and said, ‘Wow, this is the information I need to build my website.’ Then, I just started building like crazy and things started to make sense.”
By building her own site, Therese became familiar with all of the options and flexibility of the StoresOnline software. “Once I understood how the website worked, I set up the basic levels and sub-pages. As I got farther along into it—a month or so—I realized it was going to take way too many pages. I revamped it, found a better way to make it more efficient, and kept on going. I just kept plugging it in.”
“When I was building my site, the live chat was very, very helpful. Anytime I got to a stumbling block, I’d get online. The [customer support representatives] were overly helpful, and I appreciate everything they did,” Therese said.
Soon afterwards, Therese began a pay-per-click campaign. “When I got my site up and running—since there were so many products to use—I immediately set keywords up on Yahoo and Google. With my product, each product could possibly have 10 or 15 keywords, and with 1,300 products, you could imagine the task is kind of overwhelming, because of descriptions and year variations,” Therese said.
Starting a pay-per-click campaign was just one of the Internet marketing strategies presented to Therese at the all-day workshop. In addition, her knowledge of different marketing techniques has continued to grow. “My strategies and the information I’ve learned since I was at the workshop, have probably multiplied ten-fold and that’s not even a drop in the bucket of what I can learn. Every day I’m learning how to go about finding new ways to market. StoresOnline has always been helpful with suggestions. I just have not had the time to follow up on a lot of the suggestions.”
“StoresOnline has a lot of information and suggestions for different areas. They kind of open the doors and give you information on areas that you have not even considered. Then, you can follow up and do more research. They show you and point you toward many different directions on how to get things accomplished,” Therese said.
As soon as her merchant account was active, Therese’s marketing efforts began to pay off. “The first day that the merchant account was active, I had three orders that week,” Therese said. Within eight months of it’s launch, Therese’s website brought in an average of USD$2,000. “My relationship with StoresOnline, financially, has given me a second source of revenue.”
While her Internet business continued to increase, Therese made updates and changes to her site. “The software StoresOnline provided and the backdoor management, is just awesome. The changes that need to be made here and there are finished with just a few clicks and a few copy-pastes. Then you publish it, and it’s online and ready to go. It’s very convenient and very helpful. It’s real easy to use.”
Visit Therese’s website at
http://www.affordableautoparts4u.com
*Testimonial results are not typical and your individual results will vary. Your success depends on having the right price, product, and marketing efforts.
