What can you do to send online sales through the roof? That’s a question you might be asking if you’re in a sales slump. Despite your well-designed user-friendly web design, your proven product, your well-written blog, and your extensive social media presence, things just aren’t happening for your business.
Fortunately, there is quite a bit that you can do to remedy the situation. A carefully crafted platform and a top-shelf product alone that has done well with your beta testers are not always enough to run a successful business. You also need traffic—lots of it—and the only reason you’re not getting it is because not many people don’t know about your business.
You can fix the problem with pay per click, free traffic, print ads, or mobile ads.
Use Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns can be a powerful way to jumpstart your business. You might get traffic the same day you put up an ad. Sometimes you might even get it within an hour. If the ad has been well-written, it will be like turning on a faucet. On the other hand, if you have failed to craft compelling ad copy, the faucet might not be getting much water pressure from the main line and could be just a trickle, with many visitors only clicking through out of idle curiosity without a strong desire to buy. Consequently, PPC can be tricky.
If you just slap a campaign together with no clear idea of what you’re doing, then your cost to advertise may be higher than the revenue you earn. On the other hand, PPC management handled by professional analysts who know exactly how to turn things around for you could be the perfect solution.
Also Read
Try Free Traffic Methods
There are many ways that you can get traffic using free methods. For instance, you could do forum posting, write articles that show your expertise and post them on article sharing websites, or create your own YouTube videos.
However, there is a downside to this method.
First of all, it’s not really free. You are paying with your time. In fact, you might spend days creating your content and posting it in the right places. This is time that you could be using on other aspects of running your business.
Secondly, the traffic is slow and unpredictable. Just because you write a few high-quality articles does not mean that it will stir a large amount of interest. Unless you are already well-known and write something absolutely scintillating, chances are that you will have to write a lot of great articles to gain any traction from this method. The same applies to forum posting or videos.
Using free traffic methods often takes time to work. It’s almost as if your content has to reach a sort of critical mass before people begin to respond and click through the links to your website.
Venture into Print Advertising
Just because you have an online business that only sells digital products does not mean that you can’t access the benefits of offline media. Print advertising has been around for centuries and still works.
Choose the right media for your business. Advertising in a broad media like a daily newspaper hoping that your target audience will see it is likely to be disappointing. So choose a specialty media.
You can narrow your media down by the preferences of your target audience or by their location. If, for instance, you’re selling an MCAT tutorial course, you need to advertise in magazines that people who want to be doctors might read. If, on the other hand, you’re selling nutritional supplements for vegetarians, then you can advertise in newspapers that are sold in areas where there is a high density of vegetarians like Ojai Valley, California.
Finally, roll out your campaign in a tentative way. Even if you think you have found the right media for your target audience, you should test out the media with small ads before committing with larger ads. Sometimes what looks great in theory turns out to offer dismal results in reality.
Experiment with Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising often gets a lot of popular press. According to Business Insider: “Display and video will be the fastest-growing mobile ad formats as digital ad dollars quickly shift from desktop to mobile, and ad products improve. US mobile display and mobile video ad revenues will grow at an astonishing CAGR of 96% and 73%, respectively, between 2013 and 2018.”
However, whether it works for your business is something you can only decide from testing. You can experiment with banner ads or poster ads. Banner ads display your advertising at the top of a smartphone screen while a poster ads show up at the bottom of the screen.
How to Turn the Tide
If your business is not doing as well as you think it should, there are usually only three reasons:
One, your platform needs more work. You may have an outdated looking website or poor sales copy.
Two, your product does not stand out from the competition, or you may have a high quality product at the right price point but you are selling something that does not have much consumer appeal.
Three, you are not getting enough traffic.
Before you start sending traffic to your website, be sure to first prepare your platform and product to convert the traffic into a high volume of sales.