How to get customers to my site?

[balloons]

I have had my site up and running now since the begining to January and so far have only had two people register and have had no sales.

 

I have posted quite a few times on here and have had alot of help as to how to set up my site and make it look better and more secure etc, but after all this I thought I would be doing better than I am at the moment!

 

I am considering maybe changing the design of the site to maybe include more on the pages so that it displays three columns rather than just the two I have now, but not sure if this will help at all.

 

It has been mentioned that I should install Ultimate SEO's, which I have tried to install but always find it dificult to install for some reason, although I will try to install it again later today so fingers crossed I will get them working this time round.

 

I have not been using any real sort of advertising as I am really not sure which way to go, I have read that google adwords are good but I am not too sure on the cost etc. I have also set up an ebay shop again and am getting a few sales through that route and with each purchase include a business card leading back to my own website.

 

Am pretty stuck as to what I can do next considering I am on a tight budget! If I had lots of money I would buy a hueg amount of stock and advertise everywhere, but alas my budget is very small and I am a bit stuck!

 

Any ideas?

[gazza72]

I have had my site up and running now since the begining to January and so far have only had two people register and have had no sales.

 

I have posted quite a few times on here and have had alot of help as to how to set up my site and make it look better and more secure etc, but after all this I thought I would be doing better than I am at the moment!

 

I am considering maybe changing the design of the site to maybe include more on the pages so that it displays three columns rather than just the two I have now, but not sure if this will help at all.

 

It has been mentioned that I should install Ultimate SEO's, which I have tried to install but always find it dificult to install for some reason, although I will try to install it again later today so fingers crossed I will get them working this time round.

 

I have not been using any real sort of advertising as I am really not sure which way to go, I have read that google adwords are good but I am not too sure on the cost etc. I have also set up an ebay shop again and am getting a few sales through that route and with each purchase include a business card leading back to my own website.

 

Am pretty stuck as to what I can do next considering I am on a tight budget! If I had lots of money I would buy a hueg amount of stock and advertise everywhere, but alas my budget is very small and I am a bit stuck!

 

Any ideas?

 

 

unless your going to advertise, you may as well just close your shop as nobody will know you even exist.

 

There are a lot of FREE ( I love that word ) ways of advertising, and some which are pretty cheap

There are a few sites that spring to mind

www.brandzsearch.com - currently offering £50 worth of free pay per click

www.anyads.co.uk - free classified advertising

Also look at eBay classifieds ( Its free ! )

Finally, put your website address in all outgoing emails, and maybe you should consider getting some cheap fliers printed and leave them around shops, or hand them out in the street.

There are really millions of ways of getting your message out

[Guest]

Nothing happens on the internet overnight. Building an online business takes time. You should install Ultimate SEO (yesudo version) or SEO-G.

 

Make sure your pages are set properly such as lots of text, keywords in your header tags and used in the page text, relevant descriptions, etc.

 

Then spend about an hour or two a day submitting your site to directories and posting on related forums (include link in sig), yahoo answers, social bookmarking, blogging, write articles, add rss feeds from your shop, etc. It takes time to get to page 1 for your keywords, you just have to keep plugging away at it. The joy is now you have the time to do this. If done properly one day you will be too busy shipping product to spend time doing it.

[balloons]

Thanks for the advice gazza.

 

I have had a look around and have now signed up for google adwords with a maximum monthly budget of £30, so wether this will help or not I will have to wait and see. I know it has hard to get your site noticed with so many others selling the same things and I do not want to give up before I have even started!

 

I give business cards out with my details on the front and back as it worked out cheaper than having flyers printed, but hopefully my budget and sales will increase so that I can spend more on advertising.

 

Has anyone got any more advice on how to advertise and also what do people think about google adwords?

[wargaming]

Its a great short term fix just make sure you setup your keywords properly or you'll end up running your budget in a couple of days on mostly irrelivent clicks, as is repeated on here hundreds of times getting your SEO setup and working is the best answer you then get free page clicks Ultimate SEO has made a huge difference to our listings in google we are now appearing on page 1-2-3 for over half of our keywords in a very competative market coupled with header tags and cdynamic tags.

I had issues with SEO-G aswell and found ultimate very simple to install and very simple to run.

Back to adwords dont get carried away with your minimum bids and if your not showing in searches instead of pumping up bids add more content to your items in descriptions and make sure you have directed links from each search so if they search for red balloons they get taken to red balloons.

Content network for us did not work we found we were having "unusual activity" and a bounce rate which was insane bare in mind these adds will be shown on relevant sites including competitors.

 

Hope that helps and good luck

[digilee]

Adwords with a £30 budget will get you nowhere. Sorry, but come back in a month and prove me wrong.

Adwords with a £3,000+ budget then maybe you'll get somewhere.

[luckyno]

Adwords with a £30 budget will get you nowhere. Sorry, but come back in a month and prove me wrong.

Adwords with a £3,000+ budget then maybe you'll get somewhere.

 

I don't agree with you... With this budget and proper ads text, correct keywords, and a hard work in landing pages...you can do a good job.

[digilee]

As I said, I enjoy being proved wrong (because then I get to learn something) so please let me know how you get on.

[balloons]

Well sometimes you just have to try things so I will give it a month and see if I gt any orders or customers!

 

I joined up on google adwords about three days aggo so here are some stats:

 

Dates: 13.3.08 - 16.3.08

 

Number of time ad has been shown: 1,102

 

Number of visits to site: 7

 

Total cost so far: £3.95

 

Amount of new customers: 0

 

Amount of orders: 0

 

So far it has been a great waste of money! But, I am hopeful that it should bring new customers to my site who will hopefully make purchases.

 

I think its just trial and error so I will give it 30 days and spend up to £30 and see where I am from there, so I will keep posting to let people know how I am getting on and if it is worth spending the money on google adwords!

 

Oh yes, my most succesful word is 'party' with 521 adverts shown generating 5 visits to my site!

[luckyno]

Well sometimes you just have to try things so I will give it a month and see if I gt any orders or customers!

 

I joined up on google adwords about three days aggo so here are some stats:

 

Dates: 13.3.08 - 16.3.08

 

Number of time ad has been shown: 1,102

 

Number of visits to site: 7

 

Total cost so far: £3.95

 

Amount of new customers: 0

 

Amount of orders: 0

 

So far it has been a great waste of money! But, I am hopeful that it should bring new customers to my site who will hopefully make purchases.

 

I think its just trial and error so I will give it 30 days and spend up to £30 and see where I am from there, so I will keep posting to let people know how I am getting on and if it is worth spending the money on google adwords!

 

Oh yes, my most succesful word is 'party' with 521 adverts shown generating 5 visits to my site!

 

try improving your ads text... include call to action tricks... learn how to write good ads... these are my suggestions. 7 clicks with 1000 views is bad.

[balloons]

I have changed the wording slightly and will look at the words etc.

 

I know 7 clicks with 1000 views aint that great, but everyone has to start somewhere and I will try refining the advert and the wording to see if that helps at all!

[satish]

A long term solution is reaching a good rank in serach engine for Your key Phrases.

 

This will take time.

 

If You keep adding good content and follow good development practice.

Slowly traffic will come.

 

Try this to start with.

1)SEO-G

2)header tag controller.

3)Kill spider session.

4)Google site map.

5_Some good content pages.

6)Add a blog,FAQ,wiki and keep adding contents tot his.

 

further You can add rss feed etc.

 

Also have category and product description.

Give due care while writing these description.

have many many products on Your site.

 

 

The more is the content the more is the traffic and chances of getting sales.

 

Add SSL,define Your trerms and condition,shippingand other policy.

 

Display Your office address.

 

 

Satish

[koalaphil]

I am in the same boat I LIKE FREE have submitted my website to 10 plus directories, used Ineedhits.com and used their cheapest listing service, now on AOL (USA) lycos and Yahoo, they wanted much more money directly, i have between 70 and 200 visits per day have had a few join my affiliates but still no new customers, will be getting an ssl after easter,biggest outlay yet, am just adding as much stock as i can whenever i can as google picks up on quantity of stock as well Google has over 200 entries for my website(mmmm) i'm even going to get an Australian Business name so i can advertise and sell through my shop online on Trading Post (AU). I have no doubt it will happen just want it yesterday!!! I submitted my site to Google, MSN manually by clicking on submit a website (Works free) I may be a few pages in but am between 30 and 50th listings of some 675,000 lookup directly and i'm No.1 trying different items i sell and one or two in first 5 of 1,000's, and one of the reasons i look at many of the posts on these pages for snippets that i can use myself.

[Guest]

Adwords with a £30 budget will get you nowhere. Sorry, but come back in a month and prove me wrong.

Adwords with a £3,000+ budget then maybe you'll get somewhere.

 

I don't think that true digilee. I used ad words on a non-ocs site and I would put €20 or €30 in the account every now and again just to keep it running, I had my click rate set at €0.20 at the most. Allot of the time the site would have been in the top 3 on the right hand side and every now and again it would be at the tops of the searches.

 

Ok, granted it did not bring in as many clicks as I would have liked but it did do something else that supprised me. It started to get rated by google and was slowely comming to the top ten in the normal results (non-adwords). So I have now stoped using adwords for that sites. The only time I use adwords for it now is if I have a promotion or something.

 

Basically, a small amount in your adwords account every no and again can work to your advantage.

 

My site now gets about 10 hits a day (directly from google searches) without adwords. It's a landscaping site so that to me is plenty. But 10 hits a day leads to at least 5 people contacting me about their gardens every weeks. And out of them 5 I might get 3 jobs, if not all five. Although I havent done much work for a while (stay at home dad) I still get a number of emails and phone calls comming directly from my site that was found on google.

 

 

I will say tho, dont just rely on Google, look at other ways of advertising. One good way that I used to use is gumtree.com

About 30% of the people who found my site through gumtree.com contacted me for a quote to have work done on their gardens. And it free to stick up as many ads as you like.

 

Anyway, its Good Friday and I am going to relax. Chow for now ppl and Happy Easter.

 

Mammys and Daddys - Leave the kids easter eggs alone! Just because you paid for them does not mean you can eat them aswell, LoL :-"

[♥Vger]

The one thing which Google denies absolutely, but which is absolutely true - is that if you open a Google Adwords account the whole of your site will get indexed by Google pronto.

 

Whether the Adwords work or not is largely irrelevant - it's worth the money just to get Google beyond the index.php page and trawling all of your site.

 

Vger

[Guest]

Hi,

 

## unless your going to advertise, you may as well just close your shop

## as nobody will know you even exist.

 

100% agree! Setting up a website is only the first step. How to get customers to your website is a long battle challength especially for those (like me) who has no budget to advertise.

 

You begin to upset and frustrate after spending thousands of hours to set up and maintain your website yet only a few visitors visited your website every year.

 

Best regards

[koalaphil]

Hi,

 

## unless your going to advertise, you may as well just close your shop

## as nobody will know you even exist.

 

100% agree! Setting up a website is only the first step. How to get customers to your website is a long battle challength especially for those (like me) who has no budget to advertise.

 

You begin to upset and frustrate after spending thousands of hours to set up and maintain your website yet only a few visitors visited your website every year.

 

Best regards

 

I agree you have to advertise like you not much money so which forms of advertising are best, National Newspaper? small add, Local newspaper, small add, A Trading paper / YES but they won't print website unles you have registered your business name(Costs lot more than budget). have submitted to many directories online and been accepted, but don't have tracking on them so i don't know whether any traffic flows from them, have written wesite signature onto all my emails, have had some looks from this i know, put website on back windscreen of our car! there are so many possibilities yet actual buyers well.... i know i'm competing with large corporations but i believe and hope for some success!!!

koalaphil

[luckyno]

I agree you have to advertise like you not much money so which forms of advertising are best, National Newspaper? small add, Local newspaper, small add, A Trading paper / YES but they won't print website unles you have registered your business name(Costs lot more than budget). have submitted to many directories online and been accepted, but don't have tracking on them so i don't know whether any traffic flows from them, have written wesite signature onto all my emails, have had some looks from this i know, put website on back windscreen of our car! there are so many possibilities yet actual buyers well.... i know i'm competing with large corporations but i believe and hope for some success!!!

koalaphil

 

I think that newspaper ads are useless. They are expensive, often not targeted, and when people are reading, they don't remember the url, they'are often not in front of the computer screen and they often don't have a piece of paper to write down the url.

[Guest]

Hi balloons,

 

Ok so I haven't read through what everyone else has said but I thought advise.

 

I noticed that you have been using adwords and you are on a tight budget. To tell you the truth I think this could be a case of flushing money away. It seems like you are in a competitive sector with 1000 views. If you are only getting 7 clicks it could be that either your bid price isn't high enough in which case £30 isn't going to get you very far or your ad copy isn't great which is going to result in google giving you a bad quality score. Either way maybe adwords isn't the route to go down.

 

The best route for you to go down is to look at what skills you have. I am presuming that you are running a store in a sector that you know about? Why not set up a blog using wordpress (which is amazing at getting indexed) on your topic, post 3 times a week, comment on other blogs about your topic (not spammy) and before you know it you will have visitors.

 

Write articles with a backlink to your site and submit them to article directories, build relationships with other sites and trade links. Create a useful tool or guide that people will link to.

 

There are hundreds of free ways to get traffic and before you start playing with adwords you should know what you are doing and maybe start with Yahoo which cost you less and help you learn the ropes.

 

Hope this helps.

 

--EDIT: I have just taken a look at your site and noticed what you sell, If you advertise on adwords it would be best to look for some longtail terms because I don't think your products have enough margin in them for adwords to be successful.

[balloons]

Well, I have had my site up and running since I submitted it to the search engines at the begining of January and so far progress has been very slow indeed!

 

I have been trying with adwords for a short while and after it costing me nearly £50 I have only had two customers who have bought anything and no new customers signing up, also I e-mailed the customers who bought items asking where they heard about my site but got no reply so no idea if they came from adwords or not!

 

I am considering setting up a blog as that seems to be a common theme to getting your site noticed, but the negative side of me would like to know if my comments about the site will help sales or just bore people to death! I have been looking at 'wordpress' as suggested by Fresh24, but it seems a fairly complicated thing to install on my site so is it just better to sign up with wordpress and have my blog hosted on there site and just re-direct people from my site to there? Also, out of curiosity where do you go to read other peoples blogs? Are they on there own sites or on a central site somewhere, as I said blogging is all new to me!

 

With a limited budget and limited time as I work nearly 50hrs per week in my full time job its hard to get the site noticed and busy, but I aint defeated just yet!

 

One final thing, I have checked my site on 'http://mich.in/tools/xinu/' to see where my site ranks etc, and according to that google has not indexed any of my pages and the only backlinks are from Astalavista and Alltheweb. It also lists that my site has errors and not valid, but I have no idea how to correct this issue?

 

Any feedback or comments are greatly appreciated!

[luckyno]

Well, I have had my site up and running since I submitted it to the search engines at the begining of January and so far progress has been very slow indeed!

 

I have been trying with adwords for a short while and after it costing me nearly £50 I have only had two customers who have bought anything and no new customers signing up, also I e-mailed the customers who bought items asking where they heard about my site but got no reply so no idea if they came from adwords or not!

 

I am considering setting up a blog as that seems to be a common theme to getting your site noticed, but the negative side of me would like to know if my comments about the site will help sales or just bore people to death! I have been looking at 'wordpress' as suggested by Fresh24, but it seems a fairly complicated thing to install on my site so is it just better to sign up with wordpress and have my blog hosted on there site and just re-direct people from my site to there? Also, out of curiosity where do you go to read other peoples blogs? Are they on there own sites or on a central site somewhere, as I said blogging is all new to me!

 

With a limited budget and limited time as I work nearly 50hrs per week in my full time job its hard to get the site noticed and busy, but I aint defeated just yet!

 

One final thing, I have checked my site on 'http://mich.in/tools/xinu/' to see where my site ranks etc, and according to that google has not indexed any of my pages and the only backlinks are from Astalavista and Alltheweb. It also lists that my site has errors and not valid, but I have no idea how to correct this issue?

 

Any feedback or comments are greatly appreciated!

 

 

why don't you install google analytics? So you can easily knwo where do the customers come from. On www.decoracasa.ch , my last project I got the 3 last topics of the corporate blog in our website. If you are interested I can give you the module.

[frostybroc]

I would also suggest that maybe you do some footwork. Post flyers or sponsor an event maybe at a community center, school, etc. These are low cost options where people can directly check it out, and if they like spread the word.

[DataMouse]

When it comes to SEO, you can't beat AdWords - but not for the reasons Google advertises.

 

First of all, if you take AdWords, you get indexed fully - regardless of what Google say.

 

Second of all, don't expect a lot of click throughs from AdWords - that's not what I use it for.

Instead, use AdWords to help you workout which keywords customers are searching for and clicking through to your site from.

Then go back to good old fashioned SEO and optimise for these keywords.

 

As soon as your ranked and starting to see traffic, drop AdWords - it'll just suck your money.

 

Feel free to check out the blog at my site (www.datamouse.biz) for SEO articles that you can do yourself (link building and popularity, meta tags etc). There's always stuff being added.

[Guest]

Hiballons,

 

Your not only one haveing som probs, but my site has only been opend a few weeks so im not to worries, as most said work on key words, that you people will be looking for, if u have firefox, go to a high ranked site see what key words there useing, fire fox, can be a nices asset to finding what keywords people use!

 

www.angelafterdark.co.uk

[luckyno]

When it comes to SEO, you can't beat AdWords - but not for the reasons Google advertises.

 

First of all, if you take AdWords, you get indexed fully - regardless of what Google say.

 

Second of all, don't expect a lot of click throughs from AdWords - that's not what I use it for.

Instead, use AdWords to help you workout which keywords customers are searching for and clicking through to your site from.

Then go back to good old fashioned SEO and optimise for these keywords.

 

As soon as your ranked and starting to see traffic, drop AdWords - it'll just suck your money.

 

Feel free to check out the blog at my site (www.datamouse.biz) for SEO articles that you can do yourself (link building and popularity, meta tags etc). There's always stuff being added.

 

You're wrong. It isn't necessary to spend money in adwords to find which keywords people are using. He can use google keyword selector tool. Adwords is usefull for keywords where it is difficult to rank high with normal SEO optimization. Adwords doen's suck money if you optimize well.

You need to choose the right keywords, to write brilliant ads, and have a good site and really good conversion optimized landing pages.