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By Sarath Samarasekera
Run sales, create coupons. Everybody wants a deal, so why not give them one? Here’s some ideas for running sales and using coupons effectively:
• Run sales on popular items in your inventory that are fairly inexpensive. Cut your profit margin on them, then when the customer is purchasing the popular item, up sell them on related items and accessories and make your profit there.
• Offer a coupon to repeat customers and advertise that first time customers receive a discount on their next purchase.
• Create different coupons for different campaigns and track your campaigns that way. You’ll know where your customers are coming from and what’s working.
Search Engine Optimize your content and store. You can do a variety of things to help search engines pick up on your site:
• Pick keywords that your target customer is searching for and that you can actually compete on (Wordtracker.com is excellent software to do this with).
• Build content around those keywords (product description, company description, help articles, blogging etc). This not only helps you with the search engines, but it gives your customers a reason to come back and keeps your storefront fresh. Click here for a handy tool to check your keyword density.
• Get inbound links to your store (can be accomplished with a link exchange program or affiliate program). This is critical if you want to achieve good natural results in Google searches.
• Build page titles for each page around the keywords you want to be found under. Remember to give each page a unique page title.
• Add meta tags of your keywords and site description, customize them for each page on your site where possible.
• Put the keyword in the page URL.
• Focus your product descriptions around the keywords you are competing on.
Press – get yourself in the news. Write up a press release once every month or two for your business. Focus your release on something with a story feel. Rather than strictly informative, it can be a story about how your business got going; one of your customers and how they use your products or it can cover trends in your vertical. Post your press releases for free on http://www.i-newswire.com/ or www.prleap.com. Make sure you link to your storefront in the release as these will count as inbound links for search engine page rank and will drive traffic to your site.
Work your contacts. Word spreads quickly. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way to promote and advertise your store. It’s as easy as it sounds. Tell your contacts, tell your friends – they’re the most difficult customers for your competition to take away from you.
Find partners – exchange links. Contact others whose sites are related to yours, and exchange banners and other ads. Remember that there is a difference between competition and complementary sites. Competitive sites aim to take your visitors and your business. Complementary sites sell products or services that complement the ones you sell – they do not sell the same products you do.
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