There is a very bright future for e-commerce websites. As long as there are needs that should be met, there will be customers. For e-commerce website owners, earning money online can be so easy. If people need your products and services, your website will stay alive as long as you want.

Online Competition For E-commerce Websites

Because of the increasing numbers of online shoppers, there is a need for more e-commerce websites. The problem, however, is that there seem to be several e-commerce websites now. A lot of business persons have answered the call to sell something online. This makes online competition very tough.

Just think about this, if you sell health and beauty products online, there are hundred more several websites like yours. They also offer the same products and services. If there is one customer looking for a health product, he has a hundred choices to choose from. So how can you increase your website’s chance of getting that customer?

Plan Ahead And Market Your E-commerce Website

This is one thing that most e-commerce website owners do not completely understand. Most of them think that once they have set up their websites, they don’t have to do anything anymore. They will just sit and wait for sales. This may be true ages ago, but with the tough competition now, if you don’t do anything, you won’t get any sales.

E-commerce websites need two things to consider. First is planning and the second is marketing. Before setting up the website, there must be a thorough planning first. In planning, you must consider the target market, budget, design and other factors that will affect the overall performance of the website.

Second is website marketing. After you have set up your website, you need to work on a marketing campaign. Through marketing, you can make your website more popular and visible to your target market. There are several web marketing options which you can use. The choice of the web marketing option depends on the need of your website.

Remember not to stop working on your website after the set up. If you stop working on it, the sales will also stop. Continually market your website for continuous sales.

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1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.

Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.

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