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“Hi Duncan, Thanks for all the emails you send and the tips and advice you provide to your subscribers. I recently started an ecommerce website – Medieval Swords - and was wondering if there is a specific or advantageous way to get traffic to an e-commerce site. Also what is your take on fiverr? Do you use it and what are the best gigs to outsource at fiverr. Many thanks” ~ Maurice

Hi Maurice,

Ultimately an ecommerce site is no different to any other website when it comes to traffic generation. Your two primary options are organic search engine optimization, and setting up a pay per click campaign.

The first option will take more time to see results.

It will also take a decent amount of commitment (and no mater what anyone tells you some investment of money), but at the end of the day you can generate a steady stream of low cost organic visitors that you don’t have to continually pay for. Your investment to get good rankings will largely be a one time investment, although smaller “maintenance costs” (primarily in relation to link building) might be required to keep those ranking depending on how competitive the market is.

Here you need to look at providing unique content (content that is only available on your website and if that means re-writing product descriptions to describe them and make them unique from competitors selling the same product then so be it).

There is also no harm in including “article” or “news” style content on a section of an ecommerce website. You can use that to act as related traffic generation content which will funnel visitors into the “shopping” section to close sales.

You also need to look at the keyword terms you wish to target.

I tend to theme websites around my primary keyword term – in your case I would imagine this to be “Medieval Swords” – and then select 5-10 less competitive keyword terms to focus on as a secondary objective. These secondary terms are generally longer tailed terms and are usually related to the primary. We’re working to create an “overall theme” that Google will recognize to help boost all content on the website.

Finally you need to look at a strategic link building campaign. That means getting out there and generating links. The most effective will relate to your website, using relevant anchor text as the links, and linking to the most appropriate areas within your website. There are many ways to build links, some are more effective than others, some will generate results much faster but require a decent initial investment.

I could go on and on about organic search engine optimization but the “expanded version” of the processes I’ve just described above is already contained within my book “The Ultimate Link Building Dossier” so I won’t repeat it here…

http://www.linkbuildingdossier.com

The second option will be much faster as it’s simply a matter of setting up a pay per click campaign, selecting the right keyword terms, and determining how much you’re prepared to invest.

Also you should always ensure you’re tracking the conversion rates of those visitors for any desired action you would like them to take. This is the only way to know your true return on investment without having to “guestimate it”. You can even pin down successful conversions to a keyword term level. Once setup you simply turn your campaign on, let the visitors arrive and monitor everything closely so you’re not blowing the budget.

Google Adwords is obviously the most popular pay per click advertising platform. It can send the most traffic but it’s also more expensive per click – MSAdcenter will send smaller volumes of traffic but also at a lower price per click.

Obviously there’s a lot more to setting up a decent pay per click campaign but it can be useful to start here even if you don’t turn a profit on the initial campaign. You’ll be collecting valuable keyword research data which you can then work to tweak & turn the campaign profitable. You can also use that keyword information in your organic search engine optimization to target the right keyword terms.

Of course you also have a bunch of other traffic generation techniques you can turn to (social media and networking etc), but being old school I start with (and put 95% of my focus) on the above. They are the most consistent sources of regular traffic you’ll get.

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.

Hope this helps.

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