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?

To a great extent, we've been covering this all along. But it can't be emphasized enough. Don't make me, shopper, search high and low on your site for a statue that perfectly matches my wizard logo. Combine wizard, sorcery, magical, knights of roundtable products together. Think of every way that someone like me - or any other shopper - might go looking for them. And make them easy to find by organizing.

8. Monopolize

Many merchants worry that this is a taboo form of marketing. Not at all.

Would it have been taboo to sell flags on 9/11/01? Perhaps. But every day since then they have been selling like hotcakes. And if you offer American patriotism in form of products on your gift site, then you need to monopolize on new American patriotism. For years merchants have monopolized on Christmas, Mother's Day, and every other gift giving occasion. Let's face it, Hallmark and American Greetings would go belly up if this year we all decided to boycot our moms on Mother's Day.

So how do you do this? Jog your memory by looking at everything we've covered. Specialization and categorization. Organization. Preplanning. They all come into play.

You don't need a crystal ball to see what trends are coming along in consumerism. And if you see them, you need to monopolize on them if you want to run a successful gift sales business.

Look at what eToys.com, Walmart.com, BlueLight.com, etc. did this year. A rather unstable economy kept people from spending quite as freely as they have in years past. Rather than give up all together, merchants increased their specials and discounts. And didn't we all buy at least one thing this past holiday season not because we or our gift recipient needed it, but rather because it was too inexpensive not to buy?

9. Design Your Site Carefully

This could be an entire article on its own. But let's look at general mechanics of a site that would rank high in search engines.

Quality and quantity keywords and meta tags are imperative if you want right kind of traffic. Speed of loading and ease of navigation are required to get visitors where you want them to end up - order page. Aesthetically pleasing visuals make shoppers happy and turn them into buyers. And finally, more payment methods you are able to accept, more buyers you will receive.

Invite a friend, preferably an internet newbie, to shop from your site. Perhaps even offer a free gift as incentive. See how long it takes them to find what they are looking for and order it. Do they get frustrated? Do they smile or frown? Re-think your gift site design accordingly.

10. Market Every Day

What no holidays or Sundays off? That's right. You should always be prepared to hand out a business card or zap off an email when you see a marketing opportunity. And you can be marketing even when you aren't marketing. Your signature text in your emails should ALWAYS contain a link to your business site. Every thing you ship should have your URL printed everywhere. When you leave a pen at bank, it should have your business contact printed on it. If you stop at a yard sale and see that someone obviously likes Teddy Bears, you should tell them how to get to your Teddy Bear Site.

What about getting other people to market for you?