Active-Server Webhosting Blog » Ecommerce http://www.active-server.com/blog Bloggin about webhosting, SAAS and whatever else comes to mind. Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:50:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Marketing your site for fun and profit – getting started http://www.active-server.com/blog/marketing-your-site-for-fun-and-profit-getting-started-13/ http://www.active-server.com/blog/marketing-your-site-for-fun-and-profit-getting-started-13/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:15:22 +0000 admin http://www.active-server.com/blog/?p=13
  • Marketing your site for fun and profit
    • ]]>     In order to market a website you need to start with a website. We picked Spicy Mama as our test website as while has been around for a while, it received very few hits as the owner was going to school and never had time for it so she did zero to promote the site. Now that she is out of school she wants to “activate” this ecommerce site and start selling products. This was a typical billboard in the wilderness website, the only way anyone would find it was to know it was there.

    SEO Optimizations
    The ZenCart storefront with a two SEO related modifications:

    We installed the Ultimate SEO URLs plugin to convert non-search engine friendly URLS like:

    http://www.spicymama.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=24

    to search engine friendly URLS like this:

    http://www.spicymama.com/arizona-gunslinger-smokin-hot-jalapeno-pepper-sauce-p-117.html

    We created an xml sitemap of products which could be read by Google and let Google know about it.

    Product information and images were entered into ZenCart giving as much information as was felt necessary about each item.

    The final step we took was to add the site to Google Base and Google Product Search. Google Base is a free Google service that allows you to publish your information for inclusion in Google search results. Google Product Search uses Google Base to get listings of products, making it easy to get listed there as well.

    Tracking Visitors
    In order to see how effective your marketing is you need to have a baseline to measure things by. We used Google Analytics to track the visitors to the site and came up with a baseline of zero hits which is just like a new website.

    Tracking Sales
    Just getting visitors who don’t buy anything does nothing more than eat up bandwidth. One needs to also be able to track conversions or sales. In order to do this we selected the page which is displayed when the sale is completed as our Goal. We then added this into Google Analytics as the last step in the order process.

    Don’t Expect Instant Results
    Once a site is added into Google it takes time for Google to actually index the site and to display the site as one of many possibilities when someone searches Google. We don’t expect instantaneous results and the actual results will vary based on key words searched for and where the site is positioned in the Google search results list. By doing the above we set the very basic foundation for marketing our site on the Internet. The following graph shows relative sales over a 6 month period after we did just the simple changes outlined above.

    relative-orders

    As you can see the site went from zero sales to a lot more than zero sales after 4 months.

    Related posts:

    1. Marketing your site for fun and profit

    ]]>     http://www.active-server.com/blog/marketing-your-site-for-fun-and-profit-getting-started-13/feed/ 1     Marketing your site for fun and profit http://www.active-server.com/blog/marketing-your-site-for-fun-and-profit-5/ http://www.active-server.com/blog/marketing-your-site-for-fun-and-profit-5/#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:15:54 +0000 admin http://www.active-server.com/blog/?p=5
  • Marketing your site for fun and profit – getting started
    • ]]>     We decided to setup this blog as a way to show our customers how to promote their sites in conjunction with Google, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites and methods.

    We are going to use a real live customer site, Spicy Mama, as an example to let you know how it works in the real world for a real site.

    As we market Spicy Mama we will post followups here to let others know how it works and about how much time it takes to do this. We have already done some of the work and will fill in the details a little later. Our next step is to setup wordpress and to get the theme match the main site. Once that is done we will be adding in adding in necessary plugins, the first ones being Akismet, the feedburner plugin and the All in one SEO plugin.

    Related posts:

    1. Marketing your site for fun and profit – getting started

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