Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

This is going to be about ecommerce, even if it kills me. That's the problem with most ecommerce related screed, it doesn't lend itself to exceptionally engaging prose. Think back to your Econ classes in college. I bet they are not fondly remembered as the best way to kill an hour Monday-Wednesday-Friday at 9AM. Since it was college, I'd much rather be asleep at that time.

Given sufficient motivation, anything can be rendered engaging. If you're wondering about how best to get your net business up and running, then perhaps you can overlook dry, stilted delivery while seeking the nuggets of knowledge within. So with that, we're going to deliver a nice, quick primer on some basic marketing techniques for your ecommerce endeavours. Taken separately, each point is worthy of additional volumes, but in condensed form they might give you inspiration to seek out more detailed information from other sources. Sometimes the best idea is the one you haven't had yet.

Keep in mind mileage may vary. There are so many variables to this that any one option may or may not be a good one for you. Is your business completely on the net or are you expanding to the web from an existing brick and mortar? Niche market or broad? Just these 2 questions can have a distinct impact on what could be your best choices. "Choices" is also an important part, this isn't just a list from which you can pick something with which to go "all in." No matter what you're doing, don't do just one thing. That is a fairly blanket rule that applies to any circumstance.

The List

1.) Banners - You've seen them, probably everywhere, so this one shouldn't be much of a surprise. Banners spring from a few sources.

A.) The most rudimentary might be some you come up with at home and offer to other sites to display in exchange for money. This "manual" banner arrangement isn't very common, though it could still be welcome if targeting very niche markets.
B.) Mostly banners are picked up from large ad networks, ad networks which you join, pay a fee (usually for a certain number of "impressions" or displays of the ad) and they go about pushing your banners out to their network of sites.
C.) Finally there's banners that spring from affiliate marketing programs, which work on a similar principle, only the people displaying your banners do so because they picked them from the group available from the affiliate program.

2.) PPC - "Pay Per Click" ads are also quite common these days, especially as the popularity of search engines expands. Though that is a common outlet for PPC ads, keep in mind some banner ads also work on this model as well. The most well known example of a PPC ad service is Google Adwords. It is by no means the only one, but it has the largest audience in that the ads you buy are displayed on the world's number one search engine.

PPC can be a boon for the particularly budget minded, since it works off budgets. Primarily you create a basic budget of how much you're willing to spend on a monthly basis. From $10 $to 10,000 or more, it's all about what you can afford. Next, and this is the slightly more complicated part, you "bid" on how much you're willing to pay for a particular keyword or phrase that a search engine user clicks on. The location of the ad is determined by your bid in relation to the competing bids. Bid the most, you come out on top. Bid low, and you could be buried a few pages back. That's how it works, the nuances of the biding process are fodder for other more complete volumes and I won't waste time here.

3.) SEO - What if you don't want to show up in the search engine as a "Sponsored Result"? That also requires a little work. The amount of work will be determined by what keywords for which you want to rank. This may also cost you money, either in terms of content development or the "acquisition" of backlinks. The bottom line about SEO is that it won't be a quick fix and it may not be cheap.

4.) Affiliates - Affiliate marketing is big business on the net these days. There are 2 ways to approach an affiliate marketing campaign. The first is a do-it-yourself option, where you create and host the program from your site. This is not as simple as the previous sentence may have made it out to be. Creating and managing an in-house affiliate program requires custom site development and some-one to run it.

That's why a number of 3rd part affiliate program management systems like Commission Junction have arisen. These kinds of programs reduce the coding and management to a single online interface from which you upload banners and keep track of your affiliates activities.

5.) Directories - Lots of sites exist as directories of other sites. "Old Timers" may recall Yahoo basically started out a such a directory, and you can still find it buried in that big ole "portal site" today. Other notable directories include DMOZ, but there are a lot of less well known, and perhaps far less reputable directories out there. The core thing to keep in mind with directory submission is the quality of the directory of the site to which you are submitting. Basically, if they let everyone in, then don't bother. Human edited, pay for review directories are generally the best bet, as there is actually some "editorial control" built in.

6.) Local - More a reminder than anything else, especially for brick and mortars, to consider locally targeted search ads that are becoming increasingly popular. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have local search systems in place. It's one to drive traffic both to your website and your front door.

7.) Social Media - I hesitated to include this, as, not only can it be tricky, it can backfire. Popular social media sites and news aggregators like digg.com and reddit.com can provide a rush of interest and traffic, but they are notoriously picky about their content and always on the lookout for unwary marketers trying to game their sacred systems.

With any luck you've had some ideas about where to look a little deeper into a few options here. This not meant to be an exhaustive list, either. Other options exist, these are just the very basic, common ones that might make for more "sure bets" than something a bit more "out of the box." These are quite surely "box" solutions, but they're popular boxes. Besides, it can be cold and lonely outside the box. All those motivational speakers never mention that part.