E-Commerce

1. Marketing an Ecommerce Business
You have the products, the website, the PayPal account, and the packaging materials all ready
to go. Now, the next step is bringing traffic to your website and converting the traffic into
paying customers. Marketing an ecommerce business can be challenging, but with the following
smart strategies, you can jumpstart your online success.
Optimize Your Site
Optimizing your ecommerce site for ease of use and search engines is the first step in marketing
an ecommerce business. This begins with ensuring that your page load times are as fast as
possible. If necessary, you’ll want to clean up any issues with navigation, caching, images,
themes, and modules.
From there, you’ll want to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. This includes
weaving keywords through your content and meta data, having a clear hierarchy, text links, and
a site map to list the pages of the site. Not sure what keywords to use? Try Google’s Keyword
Tool.
Email Campaigns
Email blasts and newsletters are a great way to spread the word about sales, promotions, and
company news. Many hosted ecommerce providers offer email marketing capabilities within
their solutions. And for those who don’t have hosted ecommerce sites, there are many
solutions for email marketing that will enable you to create email marketing campaigns from
customer databases. These campaigns can be used in conjunction with other forms of
marketing and provide a useful opportunity to share information with prospects and nurture
relationships with existing customers.
Blogs
The addition of a blog to an online store can significantly help with marketing an ecommerce
business. Like with email campaigns, blogs provide an opportunity to share information about
your products. Many online business owners update blogs weekly or even daily to stay in touch
with their customers. Blogs can also provide a boost in search engine optimization by providing
fresh content to your site – something that the search engines reward.
When launching a blog for your business, think beyond just promoting your products. Providing
“behind the scenes” information about how your products are made, what is happening in your
industry, or sharing the latest trends can be entertaining and informative for your customers.
By providing high quality content on a blog, you can position your business as an industry

2. expert and build credibility with customers. Blog content can also be repurposed in newsletters
and off-site articles, increasing its value even more!
Partnerships
Is there a way to partner with a fellow business owner who sells a complementary product? It’s
worth investigating opportunities to cross-promote with others. This could take the form of
having an ad on another business owner’s blog or offering a bundled package of products at a
promotional price. The possibilities are endless, and the more ways you can market your
ecommerce business, the more opportunities you’ll have to reach directly to your customers.
Pay Per Click
Depending on what you’re marketing, pay per click (PPC) may be a good option. It is definitely
one of the fastest ways to market an ecommerce business, but it can be costly. To leverage the
value of PPC, you must ensure that traffic is arriving on a website that is relevant and that
you’re able to capture contact information to continue to market to them.
Public Relations
Sharing news with the world about your business is a cost-effective strategy for marketing an
ecommerce business. Yes, you can generate press releases and publish them on news wires.
However, there’s much more to public relations than just press releases. Consider contacting
newspaper and journal editors, magazine publishers, and news producers to share unique
stories about your business. It only takes one story in a national news outlet to bring countless
new customers to your website.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a hot new marketing buzz word for something that every business should
have already been doing – sharing information with customers. Content includes your product
descriptions, other content on site pages, images, social media channels, videos, blogs, articles,
testimonials, reviews, and more. The more compelling information that you can provide your
customers, the more likely they’ll buy from you. Yes, it’s really that simple!
Marketing an ecommerce business takes a level of commitment and it also takes money. If
you’re in need of a cash infusion to launch a new campaign, improve your website, or even to
buy inventory or hire help, there are a variety of lending options to choose from including
banks, family, friends, and credit cards. A new option that is increasing in popularity
is Kabbage which provides online businesses the cash they need to grow, when they need it.
Unlike traditional lenders that often take weeks or longer to approve loans, Kabbage offers
advances in under 10 minutes. Learn more at http://www.kabbage.com.