With all
great wholesale companies available, virtually anyone can through up a WWW shingle and start a gift shop. Additionally, there are thousands of wonderful gift shops online specializing in everything from apple art to zebra prints. How do you compete with your online gift shop?Success Promotions has spent five years building successful internet businesses and we'd like to share some valuable information with you. Not every online business can afford a full time internet marketing employee or an outsourced internet marketing service.
If you go to any search engine and search for gifts you will get thousands and thousands of returns. For example, a search run on AltaVista.com today for search string "gifts" returned 12,332,556 results. After narrowing search by adding "women's" to search string AltaVista returned 12,499,266 results. Incidentally, this search returned so many jewelry sites in first results that if you sell women's gifts and they aren't jewelry you need to choose your keywords very carefully. Needless to say, sites not in first 20 to 30 results aren't getting a tremendous amount of traffic from AltaVista.com.
Here are some tips for internet marketers and gift sellers alike to help build a more successful online business.
1. Specialize and Categorize
If you are selling two gifts or 3000 gifts you need to manage them in categories. Think about it. Would you be able to find anything at Walmart if they mixed shoes with electronics with crafts with hardware? You'd walk around aimlessly for hours searching for a pair of size six sandles with salmon colored strings. Don't make your site visitors and potential customers search aimlessly around your site.
It helps to have a search option, but for this to work you must keyword each product under every imaginable search word. Shoes alone wouldn't work for sandles. You'd need to also have it pop up under footwear, summer wear, women's attire, etc.
Furthermore, once you begin to break your gift site down into smaller, more manageable categories, you can market EACH page to search engines under different keywords. Its great if every single item you sell can be managed under a keyword or category from your main doorway page. But why not create a sub-category doorway page for each product category and each product line? Then you can submit all doorway/front pages to search engines and instead of appearing as search return #1,456,825 you can be in top ten for shoes, and footwear, and socks, and sandles, and gifts, etc.
Lynn Korff, of Korff's Ceramic Originals, http://www.korfforiginals.com knows this works. Her products vary from ceramic piggy banks to dinner ware to candle holders. She breaks them down not only by product but also by glaze patterns. Shoppers can readily find anything and then find matching products making her site more shopper friendly and more marketable. If you don't believe me, go to any search engine and search for "ceramic piggy banks". Lynn is always right up there at top.
Additionally, besides being more search engine friendly and successful, your site can also be more shopper friendly. How many times have you followed links for search engine returns that required you to go through far too many multiple pages to find search engine return you were actually looking for? How many times did you stop searching particular site before you got to object of your search?
Don't fret if this sounds like a major site re-design. The improvement in marketability and shopability is worth every second of work.
There is no limit to amount of products you can sell. But make them easy to find and you will sell a lot more of each one.
2. Advertise
No surprise to find this one, huh? If you don't advertise, you don't sell anything. People don't knock on your front door to see if you might possibly have free puppies unless there is a sign. Don't expect web site visitors to knock on your front URL to see if you maybe have exact gift item they are looking for just because you sell gifts.
You can advertise on other gift sites that market to similar niches without selling same products. You can advertise in online and offline publications. You can advertise on any imaginable site that caters to same people you are catering to. Going back to free puppies analogy, suppose that you sell embroidered puppy collars. Wouldn't a site run by Humane Society also cater to people with puppies? Wouldn't they be happy to swap links if you could help drive a few puppy shopping families to their web site?
Where all you could advertise depends entireally on what you sell and who you are attempting to sell it to. But be creative. Go to any search engine and do a search on some of your own keywords. See if there are special interest groups, clubs, or other organizations who comprise of members who are your potential customers. If you sell sportswear, start hitting little leaguers, co-ed leaguers, etc. As fast as internet is growing, and as many new users as appear online every day, you should never, ever stop looking for new places to reach potential customers. While you are advertising, remember to keep your message simple and specialized. Don't just create a big banner that says "gifts" in eight flashing colors. Tell potential visitors what type of gifts you offer. We all have to have traffic to sell, but wrong traffic doesn't create sales.
