How to get into e-commerce & promote your website effectively

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How to get into e-commerce & promote your website
Site promotion is really not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of thought, and a fair amount of patience. It is crucial to understand that site promotion is a long-term, low-intensity effort. It can take weeks or months to get into the search engines, and years to develop a site that gets top rankings. So don't be overwhelmed by all the tutorials and tips on this site; you don't have to do all of this overnight. The #1 mistake people make is rushing! Take your time, slow down, read the articles, think about how they apply to your website, and then proceed and practice.

Here's a summary of my "9 step" program:

1.

If you're selling something, make sure you're selling the right thing. The internet is a great tool for selling things, but there's a big gotcha. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition two ways; first, it's going to be a lot harder to get noticed on the search engines, and second, the competition is going to eat away at the profits.

The real secret to making money on the net is to sell something that nobody else is selling. Even if the market is tiny and obscure, if you're the only maker, the net will bring you and your customers together. If you sell cowboy boots, you might have problems getting noticed, but if you specialize in cowboy boots for people with six toes, you'll make money.

Furthermore, if you're trying to make money with an affiliate program@

2.

Get your site working properly. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if, once they get there, they immediately get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website. I assume you're already happy with how your site looks, you don't have to get too fancy; simple, straightforward sites work fine, you don't need to pay a web-designer to develop a site that's incredibly fancy (and whose main value is that it's a monument to his skills).

3.

Choose keywords and tweak your site for the search engines. Once your site looks good to humans, the next step is to try to make it look good to the search engines, so you get the coveted high ranking. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting your page title, meta tags and first paragraph to showcase them. This is where most webmasters screw up. They choose the wrong keywords because they don't spend enough time thinking about how people are going to try to find them.

4.

Submit to the major search engines. Now that your site is all ready, you next submit to all the major search engines. One of the key components of SelfPromotion.com is an extremely powerful and comprehensive automated submission tool that can properly promote your site to all the major search engines and indexes. The good news is that it'll only take you about 30 minutes to create an account and promote to the search engines. The bad news is that it can take anything from hours to months for the major search engines to list your site, and Google in particular is giving new sites reduced ranking for the first few months.

5.

Writing the site description you submit to Yahoo is the single most important step you will ever take during site promotion, so spending some extra time on this step is highly recommended. If you follow my advice, and your site is decent, you'll almost always get in without any problems. I get emails all the time saying things like "I've been trying to get into Yahoo for 6 months, but after following your instructions, I got listed in less than a week." It's great ego massage, so I want to get one from you too!

Next to Google, Yahoo is the most important place to have your site listed on the Internet, yet most Yahoo listings are awful. Once you understand how to craft a proper submission to Yahoo, you'll not only greatly increase your chances of getting in.

Send us your feedback and share with us!. If you like what you’d learned, you can contribute 1 day a week for more decent practice, till you are more skillful. That's right, practice & intern on the related field can make you more confident and professional.

6.

Submit to the general indexes. There are many "2nd-tier" indexes that are worth submitting to, though not worth crafting a specially optimized listing for (although the advice in the previous step is still valid). I've broken these down into a variety of categories (including general indexes, British and canadian-specific indexes and search engines, international indexes, indexes that accept adult sites, and special-purpose indexes) so that you can submit to them in small chunks as time permits. SelfPromotion.com can autosubmit to many of these, and provides manual links to hundreds more (mostly the special-purpose and international/foreign- language ones).

7.

Send us your feedback and share with us!. If you like what you’d learned, you can contribute 1 day a week for more decent practice, till you are more skillful. That's right, practice & intern on the related field can make you more confident and professional.

8.

Consider paying for hits. The good news about listing in the search engines and indexes is that it's free. The bad news is that you don't have much control. While it is certainly worthwhile to tweak your pages in search of high rankings, it's not always possible to get the ones you want. There are, however, several places that can provide you with well-targeted traffic for pennies a visitor.

9.

Learn more about sales and promotion. In the almost three years I've been running this site, I've written a number of articles that you may find of interest. You'll find the links on the right-hand side of the page under Tutorials and Articles. After all, if you're selling on the web, it's not how many hits you get, it's how many sales you make. If your wonderful widget website doesn't do a good job of selling widgets, then all the search engine traffic in the world isn't going to do you much good -- and it's much easier to double your site's effectiveness than it is to double its traffic (even better, of course, is to do both!). Next, since knowing who is visiting your site and how they got there is very useful, you should consider tracking your visitors.