Online shopping cart software and ecommerce shops

In this last post in our series on marketing your online shop we look at offline marketing. This is one area of marketing that is frequently neglected by site owners. This can be an enormously powerful marketing channel and it is becoming more and more apparent that big companies are spending increasing amounts of money on offline marketing of their sites. Websites are being marketed in print advertising, television ads, billboards and even endorsements by sportspeople and actors.

Offline marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and making use of good Gorilla Marketing techniques can boost your site’s image with little investment. A good place to start is to tell all your friends and family about your site, and ask them to spread the word. Print and wear shirts with your site on, and hand out those shirts to anyone willing to wear one. Print business cards for yourself with your site’s URL on. Print stickers and stick them wherever your can. You can even advertise your site in your local paper. In this area of marketing you can really be creative.  Another extremely effective means of offline marketing is using customized promotional items as giveaways - this will help get your brand noticed, especially if your giveaways are useful products.

Conclusion to our series on marketing your shop

Internet marketing has become a immense industry – and one that is very competitive. These days everyone has a webpage, and it has become a war for traffic. So start marketing your site, and persist with it. It might take some time, but if you keep on doing the right things, like cream, you’ll rise to the top.

Last night I attended my first 27dinner in Johannesburg. The meeting took place at Primi Piatti in Melrose Arch.

I was looking forward to getting to know some interesting people in the new media industry and build some networks. And I wasn’t disappointed. I met some people I had only worked online with before (like Christine Anderssen) as well as some new people (like Henno Marias) who are doing interesting things online. We had some entertaining discussions on the problems we face online (customer care, support, user experience, etc.), and on where the online industry is going. I also had discussions with Ferdie Bester, Phillip van Coller and André Clements

Mike and Dave from Cerebra weren’t at the meeting, so there was no fixed agenda, and I suppose since it was a Sunday it was a bit more informal than usual. We did hear some interesting stuff from Brian Brown from Blue Catalyst on veture capital for online businesses - thanks also for the dessert...

All in all a very rewarding evening – something I can recommend to all internet entrepreneurs. Looking forward to the next one.

For part 4 in our series on marketing our online shop, we look at paid traffic.

Paid traffic can also be termed pay-per-click (PPC). The best known PPC system is Google’s Adsense system. This is the ads you see on websites under the heading Ads by Google. With this system you pay for every click on your ad. Your ads are displayed in Google search results (right at the top and on the right, termed sponsored links), and on sites displaying Google ads.

Recently there have been some new entrants into this market, and significantly for South African websites TrafficSynergy has launched AdRands, which operates in a similar way to Google Ads, serving relevant ads to your site based on the content on the site.

Through analysis it has been determined that people generally tend to ignore these ads while searching for information, while clicking on them when searching for a product or a service to use. These ads are also a great way for new websites to gain exposure, because even if somebody doesn’t click on your ad, they are still displayed and this helps build your brand.

By making use of Adsense (or similar services) you also gain insight into the keywords people are searching, and which keywords are getting high click-through rates. This gives you additional user info for your site.

Paid traffic should be an integral part of you marketing strategy, as it has been proven that having a high natural ranking as well as occupying a high listing on the sponsored links results in the most traffic.

This is part three  in our series on marketing for your online shop, and in this post we’ll look at online brand building.

Building an online brand links closely to off-site SEO. However where off-site SEO focuses on obtaining links to your site to increase your site’s ranking, online brand building focuses more on establishing your site’s brand than on getting your site to rank well with search engines.

A way to illustrate this is that when your brand is so recognisable that people type it into their browser address bar, you know you have build a successful online brand, effectively cutting out the search engine. You rely less on your page ranking well in the search engines.