We all know that marketing is one of the most important parts of any business, but it’s especially important if you’re trying to make money online. Marketing your product or service will help get people interested in it and drive sales. There are many different types of online resources you can use to promote what you’re selling. Clever marketing can help get your product in front of the right buyers.

ECommerce Sales Channels

• eCommerce Website: Having the ability to sell via your website is a must nowadays. You can use a free blog to start your sales, or you can have a sales account with an eCommerce website like BigCommerce or Shopify. These sales tools let you list your products for sale, create sales accounts, including the means to take payments, and some offer marketing and search engine marketing tools.
• Paid Search Engine Ads: You can market your store by creating ads with websites like Google AdWords or Bing Ads. The advantage of this is you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your sales page, it’s also cheaper than having a sales display on another website that users have to visit before they can see your sales page plus you can target very specific terms – that is, when people search for your product or service your adverts will show, as opposed to mass marketing (above the line marketing) which can be very expensive and yet not even reach your target.
• Facebook Marketing:  Facebook has become one of the best marketing tools for online sellers. It’s easy to set up an account and promote products that way, or you can use one of the many business apps like Storefront Pro that allows you to manage your products (or services) and makes creating your store easy.
• Instagram is a social media where you can sell your products or services by posting photos of your product or service with a sales link.
• Other Social Media Sites: Many sales go through social media sites like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. The social media that you choose, is really dependant on where you think your potential customers are and what type of industry you are in.
• Websites like Etsy and eBay are popular sales platforms for goods. These sites also have payment providers where you can get paid directly into your account, this is useful as it means that the time to receive payment from sales decreases drastically.
• Selling on Amazon can reach large audiences and generate lots of sales if optimised properly. This sales channel is suitable for large or bulky goods such as furniture and other household appliances.
• Influencer marketing is a form of sales where you would pay an influencer (a popular person with gravitas on social media, usually with tens of thousands or even millions of followers, or very specialist niches) to promote your product on their social media channels, this helps establish trust with online users as the influencer seems genuine and does not seem like a salesperson.
• Public Relations, or PR, is where you can pay a public relations firm to promote your product in the media. Newspapers, radio shows, and TV channels all fall under this category and can cost thousands of pounds, but PR is probably one of the best ways to sell your product as the exposure goes way beyond what other forms of marketing can do.
• If you sell a service or a lifestyle class, such as tickets to a gig, massages, meditation classes, or yoga there are many other websites where you can place your adverts including Event Brite and MeetUps.

Search Engine Optimisation

You have a great website, you know how it is structured and what content needs to go where. Search engines are the big guys when it comes to getting your business noticed by your target market, so why not take advantage of that? Search engine optimisation is the key to increasing the number of visitors that come through from search results. It can be hard work but with the right advice, everything will fall into place nicely in no time at all! Here are some things you need to do to get high rankings on search engines with some search engine optimisation tips.

Optimise every page on your site for a chosen keyword or phrase. Search engines lookout for this in their algorithm so make sure they find it! This will give each product or service more credibility in the search engine’s algorithm and let them know you have made an effort to get high rankings. Search engines may give your site the thumbs up and rank it higher in their search results which means more visitors and more money!

Search engine spiders look for keywords every time you create a new page on your site, so put them in the title of that page. The meta title should be around 7 words long and will contain one or two keywords or phrases that relate to your website.

Use unique meta titles, descriptions, headers (h1, h2, h3, etc), and image alt tags on every page on your site. The text between the two tags tells both humans and search engines what that piece of content is about.

Search engines often use title tags to determine how well a web page might be relevant for a particular keyword or phrase, so make sure you include it in your title tag and on each page across your site.

The first sentence on the first paragraph on your home page should contain one or two keywords that fit into the search phrase you are targeting. Think of all the words people might type in to find a product on eBay and put those words on your site as many times as possible. For example: “Next Day delivery available on mobile phones and accessories” so it might read: “Next Day delivery available on mobile phones and accessories”. This tells Google and other search engines you have relevant content for their users.

What you write depends on what’s relevant to the product/service you are offering so use this wisely! Again, search engines see if websites follow these rules when ranking sites so make sure they find at least one keyword or phrase in the title to get good rankings. Search engine algorithms work by comparing how many times a specific keyword or occurs on the page, where it occurs on the page, how these words link to other parts (pages or other documents) of your site and external websites. Search engines look at how many links (also known as backlinks or incoming links) your site has pointed to it and where they come from. Search engines also look at the amount of traffic a particular website gets, for example, whether it is getting lots of visitors or not. The more times a web page is viewed by other users, the better chance the search engine has in realising it is popular and may be helpful to others looking for information related to keywords searched. Search engines don’t want sites that are only looked at once after being posted because that shows the site doesn’t have much value to offer. Search engines can easily detect when people have copied content (plagiarised) from another website or if they have just repeated information found elsewhere – this is a massive no-no! Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing want sites that are relevant to the content they hold. Search engines also take into account a site’s Page Rank which is a number from 0-10 assigned by Google, so if you have a higher page rank this will help your rankings.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engine spiders or crawlers find new information on websites going online every day so being visible in search results takes planning and research. Search engines look at keywords people type into their search boxes when looking for certain types of information, but keywords alone won’t rank your pages well because it doesn’t show context for what people are really looking for. Search engine ranking is determined by two main factors: relevancy or how related a web page is to the search, and trust – is your site trustworthy, is it safe or spammy? DO you have a landline phone number and domain email address? Is your site hosted in the country you are selling? Does your name, address, and phone number on the website appear the same as it does on your social media? Search engines consider all these factors. If you want to rank high on any search engine regardless of your industry, focus on improving the user’s experience by providing accurate and relevant information. Search engines have a goal to provide searchers with what they are looking for. Search engines don’t care about whether or not someone clicks on a result – the most relevant results may never be seen by anyone because nobody ever visits them! This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important as it helps web pages rank higher in organic search results, meaning more people can find them when searching for relevant keywords. Search engine marketing (SEM), which includes Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per- advertising, brings traffic from search engines and is essential for a successful eCommerce website. Search engine marketing is an extremely competitive industry, however, Search Engine Optimisation can be done successfully in-house. Search engines are constantly working on their algorithms to improve search results to keep up with the changes that occur online. Ecommerce website owners need to know how Search Engine Optimisation works so they know how best to market their site using SEO techniques. You can find out more about how to undertake SEO here.

E-COMMERCE WEBSITE TIP: The primary purpose of Search Engine Optimisation is to help search engines find your products or services, rank them higher than competitors and bring you traffic to your website. Search engine users generally use keywords and phrases when they search, so SEO is all about using those words and phrases as effectively as possible. Search engines look at many different factors when determining where a site should rank in search results for a given keyword or phrase. It’s worth finding out as many of these ranking factors as you can.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has become widely popular due mostly to its high return on investment (ROI) and ease of use. Email marketing allows you to target your customer base with very specific messages, at times when they are most likely to act.

Getting started with Email Marketing is pretty easy. There are many email providers available, so finding one that fits your needs should be fairly easy. Email can be sent manually through the Email Service Provider’s website, but the easiest way to do it would be through a mailing list application like MailChimp or AWeber. These applications allow you to build an email list of contacts who have given their permission (opt-in) for you to send them messages via email campaigns. They also generally offer tracking statistics to help you see who’s opened your email, who clicked through to the site, and other valuable statistics.

Subscribers and email capture

One of the biggest benefits to Email Service Providers is the ability for you to set up an email autoresponder series. An automatic response is sent by your Email Service Provider on a schedule.

Abandoned Shopping Carts

For example, if someone subscribes and enters their e-mail and first name, you might want to send them a thank you message with some special offers or product recommendations. Also, If they subscribe but don’t complete checking out (don’t buy) your product then maybe you’ll want to send them an e-mail that says “hey thanks for signing up!” Then maybe offer a discount code so they can return easily?

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a form of advertising online that uses online tracking techniques to display advertisements to people who have previously visited the website. It allows marketers not only to promote their brands but also to generate online sales by targeting customers with banner ads based on their online behavior.

You can read more about Google AdWords and Remarketing on: https://www.howtodevelopmorecustomers.com/advertising-ads.html and http://hubpages.com/internet-marketing/Remarketing-and-Google-AdWords