So you want to increase traffic to your store without breaking the bank.
Today, we're going to discuss some simple strategies that any entrepreneur can use
to gain traffic to their store for free.
The only thing you need to invest is good old sweat equity.
While paid ads are a great way to generate traffic quickly when
done properly, the reality is that this traffic is short-term.
The cost can be prohibitive and continual reinvestment is necessary.
If these things don't make sense with your current business situation, fear not.
There are tons of other ways to drive traffic to your online store.
Since gaining more traffic is one of the most frequent problems of new
online stores, we created a video to offer simple, actionable strategies
for gaining more free traffic.
These tactics won't be rooted in the lottery ticket mentality, like
trying to get press coverage or hoping you go viral on Reddit.
Rather, these tactics are rooted in simple actions you can make to generate results.
Now, one thing I want to be clear about is that traffic acquisition
success is found by doubling down on the most relevant traffic you can find.
That is to say you should aim to choose a strategy you can do consistently,
get results, then add on another.
If you spread yourself too thin, trying too many tactics and
strategies at once, you may find yourself overwhelmed and frustrated.
Remember a mountain is hiked one step at a time.
Before we go through the tactics and strategies, as an e-commerce
business it's important that you have passed this vital checklist
before trying to scale your traffic.
The reason for this is simple.
We don't just want traffic for traffic sake.
What we want is a steady stream of potential customers.
We want to turn traffic into revenue and profit, so make
sure you have these things down.
First you need a great product that is profitable.
Next you need a substantial target market.
And this means a solid amount of people are already buying this type of product.
Then you need an addressable target market.
This means a group of people in a market with shared values, behaviors,
or other qualities you can focus on.
Lastly, you need a great product story.
Your website's product page copy needs to be compelling enough that it will
turn a website visitor into a customer.
Now I'm going to assume that these things are good to go so let's get started.
We're going to start with high-level strategies and drill those
down into some simple tactics.
Content isn't just King content is the whole kingdom.
That quote by Lee Oden summarizes why I want to lead with this strategy.
Content is one of the main reasons that people use the internet and creating
the right types of content can help you generate some serious traffic.
Content marketing is about creating interesting, informative and engaging
content to organically attract customers to your online store.
This is such a powerful method of building traffic, because it helps
you position your business in the industry as a thought leader, and
also helps you build your brand.
Now, this is a long-term strategy that demands consistency and patience,
but the rewards are well worth the effort.Annual growth and unique
site traffic is 7.8 times higher for brands that use content marketing.
Beyond that you will build trust with customers, improve conversions,
generate cost effective leads and significantly improve your SEO.
Now don't limit yourself to producing content that focuses on
your products and your company, because that's not content marketing.
That's shameless self promotion.
The key with content marketing is to include anything your
customers might find relevant or interesting, providing real value.
Now, if you're looking to get started, Shopify is offering a free 14 day trial.
Simply click the link above to take action to level up your e-commerce business.
Starting a blog does not mean simply sharing your thoughts and feelings
and hoping it leads to a sale.
It is most profitably done by creating educational content that solves
a problem for your audience and making it search engine find-able.
We created a separate video that tells you everything you need to know about starting
a blog from strategy to execution.
Websites with blogs have 434% more search engine index pages
than websites that don't.
Furthermore, 61% of us online consumers have made a purchase after
reading a recommendation on a blog.
Making a blog is certainly worth your time.
And I'm going to talk about some tactics to help make your
blog that much more effective.
Tactic number one is long tail keywords.
What creating articles thinking SEO first will positively benefit your traffic.
Conduct keyword research to identify ranking opportunities for educational
keywords related to your niche.
Like say, how to increase web traffic and commercial keywords
like, best standing desk.
Long tail keywords are those longer, more specific keyword phrases they're easier
to rank for, and usually get clicks from search engines at a much higher
rate than shorter, more generic terms.
And for a site without much traffic and very few backlinks
this is a great place to start.
Because while long tail keywords might have less of a search volume,
when you rank for a lot of them, it can equal a lot of traffic.
Focusing on evergreen educational content is a much more beneficial
long-term strategy for a business than news style articles.
They provide value to a reader, no matter when they're discovered,
and you can even include links to your products, if they genuinely
solve the problem the reader has.
Beyond keyword targeting make sure to optimize your content for SEO.
Here are some quick tips.
Make sure your page title matches, search intent.
Write meta descriptions that are clickworthy.
Use a hierarchy of header tags to organize the content simply.
And keep the URL short and keyword focused.
Tactic
number two is interview and collaborate with experts.
Even if you don't have a ton of traffic, don't be shy in reaching out to interview
and collaborate with influencers.
Most people are highly receptive to being interviewed if the content you
are creating aligns with and will help them further their mission,
and you'd be surprised by how many people are willing to promote a piece
of content on their social media
once it's published.
Making an expert Roundup like a top 20, 50, or even a top 100 list of leaders
in a given industry can be a powerful tactic to getting influential people to
share the article with their audiences.
This tactic can be even more effective if you create a badge that they can
feature on their website, which can link back to the original article.
It's a win-win situation.
It's great for the experts and great for your traffic.
Now let's face it, marketing is a deep topic.
So if you're interested in learning more register using the link below
to gain access to a free 30 minute webinar, that will help you level up your
marketing, by changing the way you think about your store's marketing funnel.
Learn how to go from first day to first sale in this free training course.
Sign up right now.
You absolutely do not need to be Steven Spielberg or have expensive camera
equipment to drive traffic through video.
Content quality is much more important than production quality and the best
camera is the one you already have.
By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer traffic.
YouTube is already the second most popular search engine on the planet.
Now not all video is equal when it comes to driving traffic and
delivering a return on investment.
Rather than trying to be the next viral sensation one of the best areas to focus
your attention on is to follow the three E's: engaging, educational and evergreen.
The reason for this is simple.
Creating content that is useful to an audience, whether they watch it
today, tomorrow or two years from now can help you generate leads for years
to come to make this strategy work.
You will need to ensure that your videos are optimized for search.
For example, Beard Brand creates men's grooming tutorials.
Actually to tell you the truth we're using this strategy right
this second at Learn with Shopify.
Here are some quick tactics to make your video marketing that much more effective.
Tactic number one is content upgrades.
Content upgrades, like cheat sheets, checklists, webinars, and templates are
powerful ways to get customer emails where you can continually stay in contact,
provide value and deepen the relationship.
They provide a simple reason for people to leave the platform and come to your site.
Tactic number two is live videos and webinars.
Live video feels more personal and engaging than
other types of video content.
In fact, you can now live stream on multiple social media platforms
at once from the same video source.
Live video humanizes brands and makes the experience feel more exclusive.
It also gives viewers an opportunity to interact with the brand.
As a result, conversion rates can be as high as the double digits.
So while there might be less traffic generated from this tactic
than other methods, the quality of traffic can be extremely high.
Social media is about a lot more than getting the dopamine hit of likes and
endlessly scrolling your life away.
It's also about getting people to buy things.
Just kidding.
Social media is really about encouraging conversation, building
a community and driving excitement.
Now, building a social media following is incredibly important for helping promote
and establish your brand but our goal here is to get traffic back to your website.
So I'm going to focus on tactics that help you do just that.
Tactic number one is giveaways and contests.
Contests and giveaways are a great way to drive traffic to your website
and can also have a really big impact on your followers and engagement.
Prizes and rewards are powerful incentives for people promoting your website, but
rather than simply getting people to sign up with their email, create a viral
loop by using a points based system where people earn points for promotion.
This is a gamified process where people increase their chances of winning based
on the amount of people they sign up.
And it's really easy to track this using referral links.
Tactic number two is offering time sensitive discounts.
Putting an expiration on your discount leverages scarcity, which is a
powerful psychological sales trigger.
That's why offering time-sensitive discounts can help generate a lot
of traffic and sales because this tactic is a short-term traffic driver.
Make sure to capture the customer's email and have them opt in to a
newsletter, so you can continually send them valuable content and
bring them back to your website.
Tactic number three is a leverage social commerce.
Social commerce is the meeting point of social media and commerce, social
media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram have streamlined
the buying process for customers.
Customers who see products they like can add them to their cart directly
on the social media platform.
And depending on the platform, customers can then finalize their
purchase right then and there or move to the retailers official sites.
With smartphones and social media only increasing in popularity social commerce
is getting more mainstream by the minutes.
And while social commerce fever has it reached tipping point in the United
States, in China, social commerce accounts for 11.6% of retail e-commerce sales.
In 2019 social commerce sales in China
topped $186 billion.
That is approximately 10 times the number of sales in the US for social commerce.
Simply put, social commerce in North America has it ton of room to grow
and this is a traffic and sales opportunity you don't want to ignore.
I'm sure by now you have heard of influencer marketing, where Instagrammers
or tik tokers are paid flat fees, sometimes outlandish sums, for simply
making a post endorsing a product.
Besides the upfront cost, not knowing how many sales will come
from that post is a huge risk to an entrepreneur just starting out.
And of course you can approach influencers and just offer them free
products in exchange for a post.
But the reality is most influencers want to be paid.
Well, what if I told you you could enlist influential people and
blogs to help promote your products without spending a dollar upfront.
Enter affiliate programs, a process by which an affiliate earns a commission
for marketing a company's product.
The affiliate simply promotes the products and earns a piece of the
profit from each sale they make.
The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website or app to another.
Launching an affiliate program with blogs and influencers can be a
powerful way to grow traffic and sales.
It creates a win-win situation that incentivizes influencers and blogs to try
to actually make sales because they have the potential of making a lot of money.
Affiliate commission percentages can really range depending on the influencer,
blog, product, industry and company.
And while you will end up making less profit on an affiliate sale, you can
make up for this in volume by gaining access to a whole new audience and a
whole new set of customers you may have not had access to in the first place.
When customers search for your products, you want your store to be one of the top
results that appears for their query.
Especially considering that 75% of clicks go to the top three results
on a search engine results page.
Now like we spoke about before, one of the best SEO tactics is strategic
content creation, but here are some simple things you need to have, right?
About your site tactic.
Number one, optimize your site structure for SEO.
Number two, find and submit your site map to the Google search console.
Number three, add bread crumbs to your product categories to
instantly create internal links.
Number four, identify the pages on your website that have the
most authority and page rank.
You can do this with a free tool like Moz toolbar for Chrome.
Number five, add a link from your authority pages to your target pages.
Incorporate the link naturally on the authority page using anchor
text related to the keyword you'd like the target page to rank for.
Now, SEO seems a lot more complicated than it really is.
So if you want a little bit more background, go check out a previous
video we did on SEO for beginners.
Then come back to this video and use this SEO tactics checklist.
Hopefully this video has given you some solid ideas for strategies and
tactics you can use to grow your traffic and sales without breaking the bank.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is an effective one.
If you commit and put in the work and apply the lessons you learn along the way
you'll reap the rewards in the long run.
Also don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss it a more
tips to grow your online business.
Remember, we're a channel for small business owners with big plans
I've been your host Tyler, and I'll see you next time on Learn with Shopify.