(journal) Marketing an e-commerce site: a good starting ground

lemon

lemon

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Jul 19, 2009
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I just got a part time job working for a local business who is trying to expand into the online market. It really is nothing special pay wise, i'm making basic wage for 20 hours per week however I really have full control over where I take this project. and it gives me a chance to experiment and see what works without having to worry about development costs, product, etc. just marketing.

I have limited internet marketing experience. I did do some facebook marketing a year or so ago (facebook groups) and made enough to pay a years tuition however this is definitely not a long term plan and I did not put enough thought into my execution to really maximize my earnings.

Tools I have:
-Fully built website with products and current customers (mostly customers to the local store who choose to order online)

-Business consultant who calls me weekly to check up on my progress and offer me advice regarding any area I need assistance in (generally I ask her a question and she consults a contact)

-designers in india employed by the local business to work on any design work I need.

The first thing I did was re-do all the item categories so that products are easy to find from the front page and also to get some of my keywords in the URL for each category. The next thing I did was open a new blog and get some worthwhile content up there. We had a "giveaway" and the response was not what I was expecting but we had about 200 entries and a definite spike in sales. On the plus side close to 95% of the entries subscribed to my newsletter so this is a venue I have for the future as well.

Right now the important thing is to focus on improving seo because the site really does not rank for much. I need to do a lot of reading today because I was hoping to get on this project asap but i'm not really sure exactly what approach I should take. The business owner has a masters degree related to her niche and loves to write so i've had her crank out a few blog posts and the response has been pretty good, i'd like to spin these into articles and throw them up on some article sites to get a backlink. I'll also be building facebook/twitter/etc pages with our link on it so that may help. Does anybody think an xrumer blast is necessary or even helpful?

anyway i'm still wrapping up a few "repair" projects to get the site ready for prime time, once thats done i'll throw together a more comprehensive plan.
 


How many products are on the site? Product categories? I would focus on keyword research for all of the products to find which ones are searched for the most and then optimize around each of those.

Also, don't XRumer directly at your site. You might get out of it fine, but it's not worth the risk since it's your job to get sales from the site. Build a buffer around each of your pages and launder links through them.
 
There is about 400 products on the site, I dont really have time to do keyword research for each of the products but i've got a good idea of what is popular on the site so i'll do some more research and come up with a "top 10" list to focus my energies on initially.

There is currently 15 categories (each with subcategories) however there is a lot of repetition between sub categories to make things easier to find.

for example if I have a category "safety" and a category "boating" and i'm trying to sell life jackets then i'll have:

safety>Swimming and watersports>
boating > boating safety>

just an example but you get the idea.

as for the buffer, would you suggest registering cheap .info domains with my keyword and sending xrumer blasts to each of my domains? For example if I am again selling lifejackets I could register "buylifejackets.info" and redirect it to the life jacket category on the sales site?
 
you need a couple of years on a site to safly throw shitlinks on it. you could buy links permanently on older already ranking sites that are not in direct competition and xrumer those. for example.
 
Overall a pretty productive couple weeks, although I did not really focus in the areas that I had intended.

Set up my mailing list using "constant contact" (the business owner had already paid for a subscription but hadn't used it yet) and fired out my first mailing. Actually it was more of an opt-in email. Although there was a button "subscribe to your mailing list" on the contest entry form I figured it couldnt' hurt to have a double opt in list.

Had a couple of the girls I work with write up some tutorials on how to choose qualty products in my niche as well as a tutorial I wrote up about how to safely buy things online (this is not a very computer savvy niche and i'm a little concerned about this, I know a number of people who frequent the store mentioned that they had never purchased anything online before). Anyway I didn't "require" them to sign up to the mailing list to access the article, it was all plain text, but I did make it clear that unless they subscribed with the box on the left they would not get any more email from us. I've got my next newsletter drafted up and i'll send it out next friday.

Also threw up a couple blog posts, I tried to have some interesting content up there but pretty much built the whole post up to sell something at the end (the post was about a safety concern and I was selling a government approved solution). Post has only been up for 14 hours or so but already seeing a couple sales which isn't bad! Unfortunately I dont really have the traffic to see any huge boosts so I think I need to focus more on getting the traffic before I put too much energy into my sales posts.

anyway, now I really need to do some more reading on backlinking strategy because I did set that as a priority for myself this week and have not really done any work on it at all.
 
Just a quick update:

had a very busy week this week. Ran into some major issues with the site which turned into me testing every single piece of functionality and pulling tons of hours trying to get the indian web developers to fix every little function that didn't work quite correctly. There is also a bit of a concern as NOBODY outside of the developers has access to the server the site is hosted on or a backup of the site. I've been urging my boss to push for at least a backup copy, but she is not very concerned with it as the server works fine for now and they are hosting it for free. I still feel a little paranoid about it.

office politics aside, I really am stumped as to what I should do for SEO. I've pretty much done all of the on page optimisation I can, aside form adding new contend which is a weekly thing for me. My question is regarding links, the primary domain has been indexed since 2006. There was some major seo issues with the site, but since those have been resolved we've seen some amazing resluts. I am on the first page for a numeber of the longer keywords I was searching for, and on the 3rd and 4th page for a few of the more competitive keywords.

I think the problem stemmed from the fact that all of the content was hosted on a second domain and the text was being served up with javascript in a way that would have prevented google from indexing any of it. Fixed that, and put up a sitemap so I assume that is what gave me such a large boost.

Now as for linkbuilding, what exactly should I spend my money on? I've got 150$ given to me to spend on some linkbuilding packages. I will need to carefully track results if I am going to be given any more money to spend on SEO.

I'm really having a hard time deciding. Xrumer? Mini-net? Directory submit? A combination of all three? I think I will stay away from the more black hat stuff but still want good value for my money.
 
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