I have been looking for a way to make a little spending money for myself and decided to sign up with a company that does online sales. I have set up my online store, but I have had no traffic and I mean no traffic.
I emailed everyone I know, I've left brochures showing the product with my webstore link on it. I've posted in places that are "friendly". Is there anyone with experience on the web that could help me get the attention of people that might be interested in my products?
By Meemaw
Please don't take my comments wrong it is just my opinion of how I feel from my own experience. Just because you have an online store doesn't mean you are going to get traffic. You might check out setting up your own blog on wordpress.com I have a blog with them, I am getting traffic because they do the work for me. I provide what is called meta tags and they publish them for me. My blog is Cabin Annie's and the address is http://ramblinannie.wordpress.com It is set up in pages and on each page I write I add a meta tag such as if the page is a story about saving money the tags might be the words coupons, money or saving. If I am selling jewelry it would be pearls, or sterling or necklace, you get the idea. You have to have a product the person that happens to run across your site wants and that is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Again from personal experience you might be better off selling at craft fairs or consignment shops.
There are agents on the Internet that will work with your webpage, if you have one, for a fee (around $250) that guarantee to get it listed with the search engines if you want to invest that kind of money. Unless you have an ongoing business such as a kennel or something like that which you can turn high dollar on for a continued period of time I wouldn't advise using them. That is only an example. Feel free to contact me for moral support or if I can help in any way. Also I would like to see your online listing. If it fits with my site I would be willing to consider adding it to my site for you free of charge.
I've never tried internet sales, but I'd suggest you try using any social media site you're on. Several of my Facebook buddies use the "status" and "event" features as free advertisement.
There are a lot of different ways to advertise your store, but the question is, how much is your budget?
There are a lot of stats out there relating to the use of social media, but in general, it is clear that people under 50 are using social media for the majority of their searches. In fact, recent headlines indicate that YouTube is the number two search engine in the US. Google is still number one overall, but is lagging with the younger population.
If I were you I would put some of my products on eBay using the same names and keywords as used on my site. Once you have some items there, the information will last indefinitely and be propagated throughout many other related sites that scrape information. When a web-user looks for items with the same name or keyword (e.g. price shopping or product reviews), your site will have a better chance of showing up.
Do set up a facebook page and link back to your store as well. Another site to look at is Squidoo.
Good Luck!
