When I first opened my own online store, I listed a few of my products and expected to immediately make sales. This is impossible because a brand new store has no traffic. People can’t buy from a store that they don’t even know exists. In order to become a successful online store owner, you must promote your store by getting the word out.

A good way to start is by having your products show up in the search engines. This unfortunately takes time but if you are serious about your new store, it is well worth the time. You can submit your store manually or wait for the search engines to find you. I will not go into detail about submitting your site to search engines because there are numerous articles online about this.

After submitting your store to the search engines, I recommend looking into free shopping comparison sites. These sites might bring in more targeted leads than search engines because the majority of people that use these sites are buyers. For example, someone that searches for a plant in a shopping comparison site is more likely looking to buy a plant. Meanwhile someone that is searching for a plant in a search engine, may just be looking for information about plants. Therefore, shopping comparison sites are well worth the time. Some of the more popular free shopping comparison sites are Google shopping, Bing shopping, TheFind and ShopWiki.

Another good way to attract targeted leads is through online forums. Forums are great because most of them focus on single topics. For instance, if you sell plants, it would be a good idea to look for a forum about plants. Once you’ve found the forum, you can contribute to the discussion and include your store’s link in the signature of your posts. Just remember to contribute valuable information to the forum because no one likes a spammer. If you go in there just to advertise your site, you may receive negative reactions from the community and it might even get you banned.

Blogs are also great if you know a lot about the products that you are selling. If you are selling plant seeds, a tutorial about growing specific plants would be a great way to attract gardeners. In the tutorial you would want to create a list of things that a gardener would need to grow this specific plant. In the list, include a link to the seeds that you are selling. Also try to keep the blog up to date for readers so that they come back for more information.

Videos are great because there is nothing better than being able to show people how to do things. As in our blog example, we can create a video about growing plants and in the video we can discuss some of the things we need to grow our plants and where to get them. If you plan to upload your video to Youtube, you may want to include a link in the description area to your blog. You can write something like, for more tips on growing plants, please visit ‘your URL’. This is a great way to promote your blog and ultimately get leads to your store.

While there are many ways to generate traffic to your store, social media is currently being used the most these days because it’s the easiest way to spread the word about your business. When a person follows you or likes your business page on these sites, it becomes known to that person’s followers, friends, family, co-workers etc. Then these followers, friends, family and co-workers may decide to check out your store and ultimately buy something from you.

Additionally, online selling does involve other skills besides building a presence. This article is aimed at people that have sold things before on an online marketplace or auction and just need assistance with selling products through their own online store. Just like any business, your store won’t succeed without dedication and building a reputation.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_J._Weiss
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6206735

We get the question “How do I add a Facebook link to my website?” quite often so we decided to put together a quick tutorial for Create A Shoppe users.
 

*This tutorial assumes you have already setup a Facebook Business Page

Step 1: Finding your Facebook page URL
You can find your facebook URL by logging to your facebook account and going to your business page (not the wall for your account). Once you’ve arrived at your Facebook page take your mouse up to your browser address bar highlight the address with your mouse, right click and copy the address.

Step 2: Setting up the button code
Go to: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ When the page loads you will see Step 1 and a form to complete (see example below). Click in the white box below “URL to Like”, right click and paste your business page URL you copied in Step 1. Fill out the additional settings as you like and click “GET CODE” to copy. Choose the IFrame code to copy.

 
Step 3: Adding the button code to your website
Login to your storeadmin (www.yourdomain.com/storeadmin) and click on Pages. Click the edit link for index.php (assuming you want to add the button to your homepage). Click in the white content box where you would like the button to display and click the icon above in the toolbar that looks like <> to switch to code view, now right click and choose paste to paste the code you just copied from Facebook. Click <> again to switch back to normal view and save your changes. It is now recommended you preview your website to and test the button to make sure everything went successfully.

 
 
 
 
 
Video demonstration