How To Efficiently Drive Organic Traffic To Your Ecommerce Store

One of the advantages of owning a brick-and-mortar store is that you only have to do a small amount of marketing to succeed. If you put your store up in a nice, highly populated location, people will come. If they have a good experience, they’ll tell their friends, and their friends will visit your store too. Ecommerce stores that are starting out aren’t so lucky. People won’t just stumble upon them as they would a brick and mortar store that just popped up in a shopping center. Ecommerce merchants have to spend a good portion of their time marketing themselves if they want to drive traffic to their stores and make money from customers.

Most ecommerce storeowners will spend money and time generating paid traffic and organic traffic. Driving paid traffic to your ecommerce store costs you money. On the other hand, driving organic traffic to your store costs you time. If you’ve decided you want to attract more potential customers to your store the organic way, you may be wondering how you can do so efficiently, without using up too much of your precious time.

Here are some strategies you may want to try out:

1. Comment backlinking – As another webmaster-success contributor noted in his article, you can build the page rank of your site relatively easily by commenting on other blogs with the appropriate anchor text related to your business niche that links to your store.

If you spend an hour every day doing this, you can expect that your page rink will go up.

However, it make several months of you to see the kind of gains you want. If you do decide to go the comment backlinking route, make sure the comments you contribute on other sites and blogs are thoughtful and well-written. You don’t want Google to penalize you because you’re spamming every blog on the internet with your link.

2. Networking online – A tried and true way to get links on your site is to network with other ecommerce sellers and bloggers. Once you form relationships with people online, they’ll be open to linking to your store (if you’re open to linking to theirs, of course).

In the online world, relationships matter. Plus, the more you network, the more you get the word out about yourself. The more people who know about you, the higher chance there will be that people will refer others to your store. Networking online is one of the most viable and overlooked ways to generate traffic and earn customers.

Of course, networking takes time, but that doesn’t mean it’s inefficient. If you reach out to one new person every day, you’ll be surprised by how many people you’ve made connections with in a year.

3. Social Media Marketing – You may be wondering if social media marketing is truly that efficient. The truth is that you can spend a lot of unnecessary time on social media marketing. Let’s face it. It’s easy to get sucked into the world of Facebook for hours and hours and then realize that you’ve wasted half of the day away.

However, it doesn’t always have to be that way. And social media marketing can be a very viable way for you to get the word out about your store. If you just spend thirty minutes each day on Facebook and Twitter, you can actually get a lot done. Just limit yourself to thirty minutes and make sure everything you do is for the purpose of marketing your business or connecting with fans, friends, and followers.

So, try out the three efficient strategies above, and get creative. There’s no need to spend a ton of money or endless amounts of time marketing your store. As long as you don’t totally neglect your marketing efforts and you provide products that people will actually find useful, you can make quite a bit of money in the realm of ecommerce.

 [box]Author’s Bio: Carolyn is a guest blogger who writes about ecommerce store management, small business management, and finding order management software that works with 3dcart, Shopify, and BigCommerce.[/box]