5 FREE (And Easy) Ways To Boost Your Online Sales

You've got some great products, a beautiful w ebsite design and amazing customer service. You should be watching the sales roll in, except they're not.

The reason? No one knows you exist. However great your products are, if customers haven't heard about your awesome website design, then how can they buy your product? You need to get your business seen and heard. Once people see what a great product you've got, you'll see traffic rise and visitors clicking on that buy now button.

It's important to note that these strategies are free - not easy. If they were free and easy, everyone would be doing them. Fortunately, not everyone is, so you can take advantage. You'll have to put in a bit of graft, but with a bit of dedication and just a few hours each week you will see the fruits of your labour pay off.

(1) Get Involved in The Community

The internet is a massive place so you need to find your niche and introduce yourself. Quora is a great place to start and is a website where people all over the world ask questions about absolutely everything.

If you look at a popular entry, the first contributor's answers could have 336K views. If just a fraction of that had visited her profile and seen her website, that's some serious traffic. If you offer services or sell products nationally/internationally, Quora is a great place to show everyone what you know about your industry.

You can also get involved in forums that are relevant to your industry. People visit forums to get information and discuss relevant issues, so be careful you don't start irritating people by overtly promoting your business. Take part in discussions that are relevant to you and which you can contribute to in a positive way.

(2) Give Your Product out for Free

Okay, this one is not strictly free, you'll be spending money on the product you send out for free, but it's a great way to get your product seen.

You've probably heard what an influencer is. Anyone on social media with a significant number of followers is an influencer. If you can get your product seen on a channel with 500K followers, then a sizeable chunk of that 500K will be able to see your brand.

Obviously, anyone with 500K is going to charge you a hefty price to ‘use' your product. So you need to aim a bit lower for the micro-influencers. These are the smaller fish who have 1K, 5K or 10K followers. Many micro-influencers will advertise your product for free – especially if they believe in your brand and feel it would benefit their channel.

The great thing about micro-influencers is that their audience is often far more invested in their channel and much more likely to buy your products.

Make sure you only collaborate with micro-influencers who really fit in with your brand. You should also support your search for influencers by using one of the many analytics tools available on the web.

(3) Sponsor a Competition

Get in touch with other ecommerce website designs relevant to your industry and tell them that you want to run a giveaway with your great products as a prize. Both parties will benefit from this. The website can post some newsworthy content that will interest their audience, while you get some much valuable promotion to publicise your brand.

There's another reason to do this - you'll be able to get your hands on all those precious emails from all the people that sign up to the competition. These will be emails of people who are genuinely interested in your product and you can save them for later for some targeted promotion.

Email marketing, when used correctly is a great form of marketing because you can reach millions of people and it won't cost you any money. Effective email marketing is a topic in its own right which we'll get into another time.

(4) Write Quality Content

Content is king, and everyone knows this – so the internet is awash with content. Mindlessly writing articles just for the sake of it, is not going to cut it. What you need to do is create something special that benefits the reader, and get it seen. As you can see from this quality piece of content, that means creating something substantive that takes time to research, edit and write.

Whenever people read content that makes an impression on them, they bookmark it, sign up to a newsletter or actively search on the author's website to learn more about their services and products. If you can do that with your readers then you'll have captured some devoted customers.

Perhaps you are in the solar panel industry. This is a rapidly developing market and many people will have questions that require complex answers. An eBook guide or long form blog post that answers these questions would really help readers. Once you have written it, upload it to social media and offer it to any blog, news outlet and forum related to the energy industry.

Hopefully you created your ecommerce website design because you have a real passion for your industry. If you can illustrate this passion through quality content that builds trust and really engages with your customer, this will benefit your business in the long term.

(5) Collaborate with Other Businesses

Work together with businesses in the same industry as you and you'll both benefit from some cross-promotion. If you sell herbal teas, you could collaborate with businesses in a related market, such as organic food producers, vegan product brands or tea utensil makers. Both you and the other business would be able to reach consumers that are relevant and ready to buy.

Alternatively, you could set up a referral scheme, where you give a percentage to any company that recommends you. Perhaps you are a cleaning company that offers end of tenancy cleaning. Get in touch with local estate agents and property managers and offer a cut of to any landlords/tenants that are sent your way.

Conclusions

These are just some of the strategies that you can use to increase your traffic, find customers and boost visibility. Whatever strategy you embark on, make a plan, stick to it and make a note of results. You'll then be able to identify what works for you, so you know exactly what marketing tactics to implement in the future. It may not always be clear what is working and what isn't, but so long as you keep at it, you will see results eventually.

At DotGO, we have been producing affordable business websites for over 17 years. So we know quite a bit about what will make your website work, and what won't. To find out what we can do for your business, get in touch with the team today.