Tips for attracting people to your commerce site

Creating an online site for selling on the Web is not enough on its own - that would be like getting a new telephone number and waiting for it to ring. To attract visitors to your web site and convert them to customers, you have to market the site. Here are some pointers on how you can persuade your prospects to visit and buy your products.

Start with your existing marketing

You should put your web address on your existing brochures, advertising and business cards. Wherever you promote your company name, you should also promote your web address.

Register with the major search engines by hand

Either research the most effective way to do the registration yourself, or employ a professional. If you use the free, automatic registrations without any thought or investigation, your company will be lost in the crowd. Search engines can provide considerable traffic, so it's worth investing time in learning about them.

Use newsgroups

There are lots of places where people hold online discussions. Some of these forums will be talking about your speciality. If you sell yachting gear, for instance, there are plenty of specialist boating forums. If you participate responsibly, you can get the chance to talk about your company, products and offerings. This has the added benefits that it can be enjoyable and is likely to provide lots of useful tips.

Target your customers

There are lots of opportunities to advertise online - banner advertisements, e-mailing lists, directories and so on. Before parting with your cash, you should use the same judgement that you'd use when deciding whether to advertise in conventional media. Who looks at this medium and are they in your target market? Getting your message out to large numbers isn't the issue -you need to target interested prospects and potential customers for your products.

Find out what works

Measure everything you do. That means finding out where your leads and customers come from. Use questions on your web site to ask buyers how they heard about your site.

Find sites that are complementary to yours, and offer mutual links

Look for specialist sites that cater for your particular niche and get them to either link or put you in their search results. In return, put a link back to them. This can offer added value to your visitors as well as boosting your traffic.

Use interest in the Internet for PR purposes

Stories about the novel ways companies use the Internet are interesting and can often win coverage in local, regional or national media. If you're in business-to-business, trade magazines may be interested too. If you can get the press interested, it's worth a fortune in marketing.

Get a web address that makes sense

It's worth spending some time thinking about your web site address (URL). Ideally, it should be easy to remember, stand out from the crowd and communicate your message. This will take some time and probably a lot of investigation, as many good URLs have already been taken.

Give extra value at your site

Can you come up with services that could attract visitors? If you sell accessories for musical instruments, for example, you could offer online guides to care and maintenance, or even a gig guide. Think about the extra services your target market is interested in. They may come to you for free information and leave as customers.