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Cash for Clicks
Listed under: Retail Clinic
Published: Thursday, July 31, 2008
With economic reports continuing to cast a dark cloud over the rest of the year, Alison Waterworth of retail PR site http://www.albop.co.uk gives her top tips to online success
Setting up a website is crucial in the run up to Christmas; it will maximise your potential revenue and offer customers 24 hour access to the products you stock. Here are four tips to get your tills ringing this festive season.
Make it Easy on Yourself
There are currently a large selection of online programmes dedicated to setting up a website. Quick and easy to use, they can help you create a personal and professional online service without taking up too much time. What's more, most of them require no technical knowledge whatsoever and will give you full design control, allowing you to customise all aspects of the site yourself!
Perfect the Content
Make sure you have all the information for your site ready before making a start on building it! You need to have a clear idea of how you want the website to look beforehand as well as considering how you want people to navigate around it. The content is highly important as search engines will always return websites with the most relevant keywords entered.
Promote Your Shop Online
Remember, websites are an invaluable way of promoting shop events and offers. So don't be afraid to use your website to advertise any new products you have available and make sure you encourage customers to visit your store rather than just purchase the items over the internet.
Start A Newsletter
Produce your own newsletter and make sure you encourage as many people as possible to sign up to it. This is a cost effective way of telling people about any workshops or demonstrations you have on offer. A weekly newsletter will also ensure your customers don't forget you.”
Make it Easy on Yourself
There are currently a large selection of online programmes dedicated to setting up a website. Quick and easy to use, they can help you create a personal and professional online service without taking up too much time. What's more, most of them require no technical knowledge whatsoever and will give you full design control, allowing you to customise all aspects of the site yourself!
Perfect the Content
Make sure you have all the information for your site ready before making a start on building it! You need to have a clear idea of how you want the website to look beforehand as well as considering how you want people to navigate around it. The content is highly important as search engines will always return websites with the most relevant keywords entered.
Promote Your Shop Online
Remember, websites are an invaluable way of promoting shop events and offers. So don't be afraid to use your website to advertise any new products you have available and make sure you encourage customers to visit your store rather than just purchase the items over the internet.
Start A Newsletter
Produce your own newsletter and make sure you encourage as many people as possible to sign up to it. This is a cost effective way of telling people about any workshops or demonstrations you have on offer. A weekly newsletter will also ensure your customers don't forget you.”
A website IS crucial these days, but it’s not ‘just’ a matter of ‘putting up a website’...
Lots of businesses ‘do a site’, and yes it looks all very pretty but nobody visits - just because it’s ‘there’ doesn’t mean it will suddenly be found by people and make you a load of money.
Like the article says, you need to use the right keywords and promotional methods if you want to be ‘found’ by people using Search Engines - do a search in Google for ‘Google Keyword Tool’ to get some valuable data on which keywords to use.
Also, make use of the many free promotional methods like article writing, Squidoo, blogging connected to your site, social networking profiles, link exchanges with good quality sites - don’t link for the sake of it, bad links can harm your site.
There’s so much more to it than I can put here…but please, do NOT spend a fortune getting a site ‘up’ (it’s not necessary to spend a heap of money!) and then be discouraged when nobody comes.
If you ARE going to spend money, make sure your website designer also thinks about your ‘business’ growth when they design your store - in depth research on your craft niche, marketing efforts and proven search engine submission methods…
It’s no longer enough to just design a site, it needs to ‘work’ for you too.
Good luck
Adele