Apart of their purpose, e-commerce websites are just the same as any other websites, including aspects related to attracting traffic. Related to search engines, the two main ways to generate traffic through search engines is organic search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC).
SEO takes more time and effort to start seeing results. It requires a serious and continuous commitment that includes time, efforts, and money. However as you start to see results, you can get steady stream if visitors without having to continuously spend money. Most of investment in SEO is one time, once you start to get result it only takes a small fraction of investment to maintain.
One of the most prominent part of SEO is unique content, lots of it. It includes carefully writing textual content. If your e-commerce website is selling a third-party products, you may have to rewrite all of product descriptions and specifications to make them unique from other competing websites that sell the same items. You build even more content you may also want to consider adding certain sections in your website to host even more content like article, news, or blog.
Do not think those additional sections as auxiliary as properly written they can surpass the popularity of the website itself – especially for long-tail keywords – and funnel visitors to the commercial part of the website and generate sales.
Look carefully into the keyword you are targeting in your campaign. Using keyword research tools is essential as it has continuously proven, what your target audience have in their mind is can completely different from what you may think.
Theme your website around one primary keyword then ad between 5 to 10 less competitive keywords as your secondary target. You also need to look at the keyword terms you wish to target. Again, use keyword research tool to find the secondary keywords as well. Obviously secondary keywords are long tail but closely related to the primary keyword.
The last element in SEO is link building, which means getting links from other websites to you website. The key here is to use relevant anchor text placed in a webpage of other website that full of relevant content to link to relevant page in your website. There are various tool to help you manage this tedious process easily but even with the most expensive tool it is still a tedious work that requires a lot of time and attention.
The second option, PPC, is faster to start generating result. In fact, properly set, it will start to deliver traffic in a matter of seconds since you set it up. Choosing keyword is also essential here with another aspect to consider, cost per click you have to pay for every click you get through the keyword.
On the other side of the coin against instant result is cost. You will have to commit to pay some money for every visitor you get. If you stop spending your money, you will stop getting visitor immediately. Another catch here is that the more competitive your target keyword the more expensive the cost per click you have to pay.
No matter what path you go down you should also have some sort of mailing list setup to capture leads. A good mailing list is going to be the most valuable asset of the website (secondary only to your mailing list of actual buyers and paying customers).
Even if all of your other traffic sources dry up for whatever reason, you’ll always have the mailing list to pull back interested visitors with a simple email. It is also THE DEFINING FACTOR in being able to secure joint ventures with complementary websites & businesses no matter what market you’re in.
As for Fivver – I’ve never personally used the service as I already have solid outsourcers that take care of many of the tasks we don’t want to do in-house. But I’ve heard from many associates who have used it for a multitude of different things (link building, content creation, video promo creation etc) with some success.
If you like the idea of this website I just wouldn’t go expecting too much for my $5 (remembering the person doing whatever task it is only gets $4 of that).
I would also use it as an entry point to find new people, who would then become regular part time outsourcers for you, away from the Fivver website where you can negotiate more agreeable terms for everyone.
