Digital Marketing Training Week 22 6 Steps to Promote Your E-Commerce Site

Task 22: 6 Steps to Promote Your E-Commerce Site This week, spend a few hours promoting your e-commerce site.

Why is this important? E-commerce websites serve the sole purpose of increasing the sales of your products. To increase sales online among the numerous other similar websites it is important to have a strong e-commerce promotion strategy. Applying these various strategies keeps your e-commerce site active, spreads your brand over the web, improves citations of products online and attracts search engine bots so that your site ranks higher in searches.

Step #1: Distribute Product Feeds Product feeds allow users to search and compare products on third-party websites. Distributing your product to product feed sites helps you reach a widespread audience on the web. You can list your products on the following product feed sites: Free Sites: ▪ RetailTower ▪ Google Merchant Center ▪ Bing ▪ GoShopping ▪ Ciao ▪ TheFind ▪ SortPrice ▪ PriceRunner ▪ MonsterMarketPlace ▪ Blujay ▪ DealPlus Paid sites: ▪ Google Product Search ▪ Shopzilla ▪ Shopping ▪ PriceGrabber ▪ NextTag ▪ Become ▪ Pronto ▪ YahooShopping ▪ Buy ▪ PriceFight Tips to optimize your product feeds for searches: ▪ Keep your product data feed up-to-date. It must be relevant, complete and accurate. ▪ Remove unnecessary text and HTML. ▪ Create unique product titles and descriptions including keywords and relevant text. ▪ Include tax and shipping information in your Google Merchant Center account and other product feed sites where applicable. ▪ Include appropriate product categories and types. ▪ Provide high quality product images. ▪ Test your data feed with the Google Merchant Center at regular intervals. ▪ Include at least two Unique Product Identifiers in your product feed. ▪ Log in to the Google Merchant Center once a week to check for errors and notifications. ▪ Remove broken URLs and image links.

Step #2: Submit Products to Social Shopping Sites Social shopping sites are communities of online shoppers who add and share products online. You can either list your products on their sites or add buttons to your site that allow for a one-click share of your products. The following is a list of social shopping websites: ▪ Kaboodle ▪ ThisNext ▪ Etsy ▪ WishListr ▪ Wists/ Wists Social Share Button ▪ ProductWiki/ ProductWiki Connect ▪ ThreadFlip ▪ Svpply ▪ Blomming ▪ StyleHive ▪ Ownza ▪ Silkfair

Step #4: Utilize Social Media Brand Pages Facebook: Here is a tool that will help you design your own Facebook brand page for free. ▪ Share regular, informational updates with your Facebook fans. ▪ Share photos of your products. ▪ Announce any product discounts in your status updates. ▪ Set up Facebook Coupons and share them with your fans. ▪ Share product videos or customer testimonial videos on your timeline. ▪ If you have many active fans, add a discussion board to your Facebook page usingForumForPages. Here is list of useful Facebook Apps for e-commerce pages: ▪ Install the Friend Card App to send customized cards to your fans, to set up a reward system based on friend-level and send coupon invitations. ▪ TabJuice allows you to create a Facebook store with custom branding features, unlimited product uploads and an analytics tool. ▪ Ecwid lets you set up a store on Facebook, supports 43 languages and supports many payment options. ▪ The MailChimp app for Facebook helps integrate a form to build a mailing list from your brand’s Facebook fans. ▪ PromotionsHQ allows you to create store promotions in the form of coupons, contests and special deals on your Facebook timeline. ▪ VendorShop helps you create a Facebook store, run contests and provide deals to your fans. Twitter: Twitter offers a Twitter for Business page that suggests options for your brand page. ▪ Share updates about your blog, product launches and discounts with your followers using relevant keywords with hashtags (#). ▪ Share updates about contests and events. ▪ Provide direct call-to-actions in your tweets, for example, a link to the product page or email subscription page. ▪ Chirpify allows direct purchasing on Twitter. Pinterest: Pinterest has quickly gained a widespread social media audience that is on-par with Twitter and Facebook. ▪ Create a business account on Pinterest. ▪ Create product boards based on categories and pin high quality product images to each of these boards. NOTE: If you have a vast array of products, pin images of the best items available. ▪ Include the product’s name, price, and URL with relevant keywords in each product description. ▪ E-Commerce site owners can also include Rich Pins for Pinterest to automatically pull the product information from their sites. Validate your Rich Pins on Pinterest using this validation tool.

▪ Hold contests for the best pinned photographs of products bought in your store. You can also promote your products on other social media brand pages, such asGoogle+ and LinkedIn. Remember to integrate social media into your website in the form of social share buttons, social logins and so on. Read our post on Tools and Tips for Integrating Social Media into Your Website.

Step #5: Acquire Product Reviews and Publish Them on Your Site Ask your customers to leave a product review on your site or on third party sites in return for an incentive. Product reviews have a high significance when published on your Google+ Local brand page. This improves your Google search ranking. You could even ask loyal customers to give a video review to publish on your site or on your site’s YouTube channel.

Step #6: Product Image Submission/Bookmarking Create business accounts on the following sites and submit your product images to them along with a detailed product description that contains your keywords. These images act as additional citations for your brand and some sites may even pass link juice to your site. ▪ Flickr ▪ Instagram ▪ Manteresting ▪ WeHeartIt ▪ Juxtapost ▪ Lookbook ▪ DartItUp ▪ ImgFave ▪ PhotoSig ▪ SmugMug ▪ Visualizeus ▪ PhotoSynth ▪ Photoshop ▪ Fotolog ▪ Dumpr ▪ Knack You can also promote your e-commerce website via email, pay-per-click advertising, video, blog marketing, press release marketing and coupon marketing, which have all been discussed in detail in previous WooRank digital marketing e-mails.

Resources for Further Learning: ▪ Blog Article: 15 Ways to Sell Your Products Online ▪ Blog Article: 10 Tips to Boost Holiday E-commerce Sales ▪ Video: How to Run Social Media Contests