Marketing Your E-commerce Business Through Social Media Networks

A popular way to generate traffic to your e-commerce business is through social media networks. You can market your e-commerce website through places such as Digg.com, Twitter.com, Facebook and MySpace. The goal with social network marketing is twofold:

1. You are trying to enhance your site’s community by establishing outposts on social networking sites so people who share your interests, or are interested in your products and services, find you and your site.
2. Getting involved in social networking multiplies the number of places that your site and your products can be found by search engines, which is critically important to the success of your e-commerce business.

How To Leverage Social Media Networks To Our Advantage?

Simply, we are trying to spread the word about your e-commerce business. You can take your product reviews or blog posts and spread them as far as possible online enlisting the help of these sites. It’s important to make sure the content you’re promoting is interesting and helpful to the audience you’re trying to reach. Remember, people like to do business with their friends if they’ve never met you offline. By being reasonable and participating in social networking, you’ll expand your credibility and potential customer base in many important and helpful ways.

It’s also important to recognize that these social media outlets were designed to serve as conversation platforms, and not as overt marketing channels. Sending messages that are overly promotional or commercial is often compared to shouting at a party where everyone else is chatting quietly, and the backlash can overwhelm the benefits of participation. As an ecommerce business owner I recommend taking a couple of weeks to monitor the various sites to get a sense of the patterns and informal rules before posting anything.

Read more

Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads

In Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic, I discussed about the different ways of driving more traffic to your Internet business using social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have an increased amount of traffic to your website, what do you do next? In today’s post I will be talking about how to convert this traffic into leads which will be part one of a three part series of Converting Traffic Into Sales.

For reference, I will be using the term “sales funnel” instead of “converting traffic into sales” for simplicity.

To understand how the sales funnel works we look will look at it from a systematic process, starting at where your prospects come from, to how we will pro-actively guide them through the sales process and become a long-term client. Before any of this can happen, we need to look at how to capture these prospects into a database using some creative flair.

Generating Leads From Traffic
Generating Leads is the most challenging, though fun aspect of the sales funnel. It requires constant testing and monitoring using endless proven methods, which are only limited by your resources and imagination. Where we capture all of this information is from the front-end, or the face of your business on the Internet. As soon as a prospect is interested in a product or service you may offer, we want to qualify and encourage them to opt-in on your website. When this occurs, it starts the first step of the sales funnel and begins to transform an everyday web surfer into a lead showing their interest in receiving more information.

There are many ways for a person to opt-in on your website and it’s crucial to have these mechanisms set up to begin generating leads. Here are some examples of how other Internet businesses capture leads:

• Subscribing to a blog via RSS subscription
• Signing up for a Free Report such as my Internet Business Blueprint located in the column on the right
• Registering for a free online service, for example MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr.
• Ticking a box to receive further information when purchasing an product or service from another site. For example, telephone companies such as Telstra always has a little tick box allowing you to opt-in to receive further marketing material whenever you complete a transaction with them.

When a potential prospect opts-in to your website, then they are agreeing to receive information from you. This is called permission marketing and it was first coined by Seth Godin. If you haven’t read his book Permission Marketing, you can get grab a copy of it on his website or buy it at any book store.

Now I must point out, some Internet marketers have been very successful in selling their products straight off the front-end and have made a lot of money doing so. Though you have to see what type of authority they have in the market and the systems they have in place to do this. I can assure you it has taken them many years and lots of resources to set this up and it’s not an overnight get rich story. Rich Schefren is a classic example of this and has extremely refined front-end and back-end systems that help him continue to generate profits even if his not working. My point here is, not to start selling any products to your new leads but to offer them value through content and building strong rapport with them first. The front-end is a mechanism to generate and qualify leads for your Internet business and is probably the least profitable.

In the next Converting Traffic Into Sales article I’ll go into more detail about how the back-end process works together with front-end and you will realise that the front-end are mostly ways to generate leads and are not necessarily profit centers. You will also learn why the back-end process will be the most important aspect for the long term growth of your Internet business and how it will outlast your competition.

Continue to Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End

Tyrone Shum
Lead Generator