Hey Andrew!

I have finished my online shop; everything is in place and would like to ask you the best way to start generating some targeted traffic to my site? My budget is very low but I have plenty of time.

Cheers,
Alan

Hi Alan,

By this post I’m opening the “Traffic Strategies” category on ChatWithAndrew.com. This is really huge topic and one of the most important for any e-commerce store owner as without traffic there’s no business, right?

Ok, today I want to cover one of the oldest & easiest ways to start generating targeted traffic to your website in a very short period of time. Plus this strategy will help you to boost your search rankings by building links back to your website. And it’s free! I’m talking about Article Marketing of course.

There are millions of people, who browse the Internet daily in search of information. Providing them with immediate information they are looking out for, can help you to attract them to your website. Once they are at your website, it’s your job to convert them into buyers. Article marketing is widely used by information product sellers but not so by merchants selling tangible goods, operating traditional e-commerce sites!

And this is great news for you – less competition means better results for you! I have tried article marketing with many different products and in majority of cases I landed on first page on Google with the article page. So this is for real. Don’t expect huge volume of traffic but it will be there and if you’re committed enough and say submit one article per day, within couple of months you’ll get 100+ visits per day, from these articles alone.

So here’s what you need to do:

1)    Write an article! Write about product you sell or about topic that interests your target audience. Keep the article around 400-600 words long. Do not advertise your website here!!! You want your article to be as informative as possible, it should help your potential buyer to make a proper buying decisions. How to guides, reviews, comparisons are perfect for this purpose.

2)    Create attracting article title – it should grab attention, offer some benefits to the reader. A great starting point would be to use “How To…”, “Learn to…”, “Top 10…” and similar intros. These titles work every single time so you really can’t go wrong! IMPORTANT!!! Make sure your target keyword is included in the title. So for example, if you write your article about “winter dog coats”, make sure “winter dog coats” is a part of the title.

You should use Google Keyword Tool whenever you write and publish any content on your website. This tool will instantly show you which keywords to target based on volume and competition.

3)    Once an article is written, you have to submit it to article directories. There are literary hundreds of article directories out there but you really need just one to begin – EzineArticles.com. It’s the world’s largest article directory and from what I have seen, gives the best results in terms of ROI. You can publish articles to Ezine Articles for free, so it won’t cost you a penny!

4)    When publishing article, make sure you include a link back to your website using author resource box at the end of the article.

5)    Finally, to check the results of your work, make sure to use Google Analytics to track down how many visitors & sales each article brings in. This way you can learn and adapt – write articles in a more profitable way!

All this process shouldn’t take more than 1 hour of your time – so if you can just write and submit one article per day, for at least one month, you’ll have 30 – highly targeted articles published by the end of first month. And don’t forget about links which will help you in never ending fight of your Google search positions.