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How To Drive Traffic To Your Online Store

Advice on maximizing your online store profits by targetting the right type of visitor.

Richard Adams

April 15, 2009

It's all well and good setting up a beautiful online store filled with the best quality products at prices that nobody else can match but if you're not getting any traffic you're still not going to make any money.

In contrast, if you *can* get a load of traffic to a good quality online store you can be pleasantly surprised by just how many sales you can make each month! And when Christmas comes around the numbers can get literally quite scary! You start to wonder if you'll have enough stock to see you through! But what a great problem to have.

If you're reading this article now then I can only assume you're not yet in this situation - but at least you're taking the time to discover how to grow your visitor numbers. In this article we're going to look into a number of tried and tested techniques for driving more traffic to your site at a reasonable cost (or ideally free!).

Before we begin though, there is one thing that I want to mention to you, and that is that not all visitors are created equal. Some people online are merely looking for information or entertainment. While I have no problem with these people, they're not the type of person we're going to focus on. Instead, we want to focus our energies on people who are actually looking to *buy*. They have gone online with their credit card in hand looking to order a fridge, or remote control helicopter or whatever.

These are the people who will actually buy from you, and so when you focus your energies on attracting people who are ready to buy, you don't actually need too much traffic to make a decent income. We don't need thousands of visitors who are just browsing - instead we want just a handful who actually *want* to buy from us.

Before we look at the actual methods for driving traffic, what it is important to realise is that buyers type in very specific phrases to a search engine. So if your website is selling pet products, a buyer is unlikely to search for phrases like "dogs" or "rabbits". These are probably just people seeking information or photographs.

A buyer is likely to type in phrases like "plastic dog bed" or "order rabbit hutch". Therefore before you even begin to learn the traffic-getting techniques, it is adviseable to sit down with a pen and paper and come up with a long list of these type of keyword phrases that buyers in your market with likely be searching for - and then marry these up to specific products in your online store.

Once you have done thatm it's time to actually go and get some of that traffic. The absolute best way ia via the free search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN. And the best way to get visitors from the search engines is via article marketing. In essence, all you need to do is to write an article focused on each of the keyword phrases you have come up with.

Put half of them on your own website if you can, and distribute the other half on the various article sites such as EzineArticles.com, HubPages.com and Squidoo.com.

Ensure that there is a link at the bottom of every article back to your online store - and ideally leading to the product that exactly matches that keyword phrase. So using our previous example if your article was about rabbit hutches, link to your rabbit hutch page at the end rather than your main home page.

Doing this for a whole list of keywords will obviously take some time, but it is a process that is well worth it and will pay you back time and again.

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