: I’ve just got my first ecommerce website up and don’t know what to do from here to get sales. I know that being successful with ecommerce websites requires good advertising. So, is there anybody that can tell me what the best ways to advertise my ecommerce website are?

Hi SusieB. You’re right in the fact that good advertising has a direct correlation to how successful your e-commerce business is. I’ve tried a variety of different ways to advertise my websites. Below are the strategies that I’ve had the best luck with.

• Business Cards: Even though your e-commerce business is an online business, it’s still good to have business cards made. I do the following with them: hand them out when someone asks me for my phone number, leave them in waiting rooms, drop them in a bowl (or box) to enter a drawing and a variety of other things. The point is that every time I leave one somewhere, I’m leaving my website information with them and have the potential to make a sale.

• Placing Ads: I’ve gotten several leads by placing ads in a variety of places. For example, the newspaper is a great place to advertise your website. All you need to do is come up with a catch title and put your e-commerce website URL below it and you’re set. If you don’t want to pay for the ad, you can always check out Craigslist or print of flyers to leave at your hairdresser’s place, grocery store or anywhere else that will allow you to post it.

• Building Links: This is also known as “backlinking” and is very powerful when advertising your e-commerce website. Basically, how it works is you strategically place your website link in different places online. You can do this by submitting relevant articles to article directories, creating a blog that links back to your website and participating on forums.

Those are the best advertising methods I’ve came across so far, but I’m sure there are many others out there. A good “rule of thumb” to follow is to advertise wherever and whenever you can. Hope that helps!

It did! I like that you didn’t give me about 50 things to do and kept it simple.

What about all those sites promoting traffic generation software? I’ve checked into it and it seems like it couldn’t hurt, but I for sure don’t want to screw up and waste money on it if it’s not worth it.

While the traffic and lead generation software will increase your traffic and give your website more exposure, it’s not the kind of exposure you want. I know that sounds little confusing, but basically with an e-commerce website there is a certain type of traffic you want.

You want people visiting your website that have a genuine interest in the products you have, which means you want specifically targeted traffic. Traffic and lead generation software doesn’t give you that, which means you’re website will have a high turnover rate and low customer conversion rate – something you don’t want.

One of my favorite – and easiest – ways to advertise my ecommerce sites is by talking it up on the social networks. I love Twitter and Facebook because they make it so easy for me to get the exposure my sites need.

The social networking thing is one area I just haven’t understood. How can you use Twitter and Facebook to promote an ecommerce site…or anything for that matter?

Oh, there are so many things to say to your question Susie…

First, I’ll start with Facebook. FB is where it’s all happening. Practically everyone who’s anyone is there, but the key is that to see what they’re up to you have to be accepted as a friend. This means you’ll start out with a bunch of friends – but these are the people that want to hear what’s up with you. So, it’s easy to post nonchalant things about how the day is going and then sneak in a post that has a link to my website in it.

Twitter is a lot similar to FB except you don’t have to be accepted as a friend and you can’t type as much. With Twitter, people decide to follow you which means that the people following you like what you have to say. So, I use twitter to tweet about some of the products I’m promoting and also to share links to any blog posts or article’s I’ve written that link back to my website.

So – I don’t get how twitter is a targeted audience…isn’t that what Bill1357 said I need? If just random people are following my twitter page how are they targeted?

They aren’t necessarily targeted…by you. Instead the people that are following your tweets have chosen to make themselves your target. Whenever you tweet something, it shows up on their twitter page. Therefore, since they’ve clicked the “follow” button, they’re basically telling you that they want to read everything you post.

Does that make sense? You are more likely to make a sale with these people because they are interested in what you’ll be posting next. Whereas the people that visit your site as a result of traffic generation software don’t get there because they want to be…which results in low viewing times.