15 Ecommerce Traffic Generation Strategies for Your Online Store

E-commerce traffic generation strategies are the fire you need to blow up your online store sales.

• You have studied your target audience thoroughly
• You have manufactured or sourced great products that your target audience will love
• You have built a great site that’s easy to navigate and offers a great user experience
• You have written website copy that speaks to the deep inner desires of your store visitors
• You have spent countless hours, time, energy and money getting your e-commerce store set up

Now the rubber meets the road. The next step you need to take in order to start realizing a return on investment is to generate traffic to convert visitors into paying customers.

Good Strategy = More Traffic

As is with any business in any industry, the guys to get in front of the most prospects earn the biggest paychecks. In simple terms, the more targeted visitors you drive to your store the more sales you’ll make.

Yes, there are many optimization techniques that you can apply to increase conversion rates. However, you can only optimize once you start generating traffic in the first place. After all, you can’t optimize zero. That’s why, to kick start your sales and the growth of your business, you have to implement brute force e-commerce traffic generation strategies to get things moving.

Invest in it

This effort will be well worth it. According to the latest research by Wordstream, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. So, let’s do some fun calculations. If you generate 20,000 unique visitors a month to your online store and convert 2.35%, that’s 470 sales a month, right? Now all you need to do is plug in an estimated average order per transaction and multiply that by 470 to get projected sales once you hit 20,000 unique visitors a month. This is the motivation you need to do the hard work of traffic generation.

Let’s take a look at 15 different e-commerce traffic generation strategies you can start using today to drive massive, targeted traffic to your store.

Kick Your E-commerce Traffic Generation Into High Gear

1 – SEO content creation

Writing search engine optimized, highly engaging and valuable content for your website is probably the most fundamental method of generating traffic and engaging with website visitors. Write down 15 different categories of topics you can talk about that your target audience be interested in and that would help convert them into customers of your products. Do keyword research to guide the topic finding process and match up keywords with blog topics.

2 – Guest articles

One of the fastest ways to kick-start traffic generation on your own website is to be a contributing blogger to websites that are already highly trafficked with your target audience. So it makes sense that if you sell neckties in your e-commerce store that one of the e-commerce traffic generation strategies you use is writing guest articles on sites like GQ.com, and other sites that affluent professional men already hang out on.

3 – Podcast interviews

Podcasting is one of the fastest growing forms of media today. You can exclusively drive tons of traffic to your site by podcasting. So, when you combine doing your own show with podcast interviews with popular podcasters, you know you’re going to generate traffic from their established audience base and also build your own.

4 – Referral program

The best new customers have always been and will always be word-of-mouth customers. So, starting a referral program incentivizes customers to tell their friends and family about your business. A cool app like ReferralCandy – a popular e-commerce store app for referral marketing – makes this process easy.

5 – Backlinks from relevant sites

Backlinking is critical for increasing the search engine ranking of your website, and thus, increasing traffic. Most people think it’s hard, but it’s easier than you think to get backlinks coming from high authority, relevant sites.

Many of the top sites have so many visitors that demand an ever-increasing waterfall of content – which means it’s getting easier and easier to contribute quality blog content. There are popular forums in just about every niche that you can post in and even share a back link to your site.

6 – Facebook ads

Facebook ads can be a big winner or a loser depending on your strategy. If you’re just getting started with generating traffic to your site and you don’t have a big budget, such as a couple thousand dollars a month you can afford to lose, I wouldn’t start with paid advertising, and definitely not Facebook ads.

However, if you’re already have established sales and can afford to play with a few thousand dollars a month, you still may want to hire a professional Facebook ad agency or an experienced freelancer to help you implement the campaign using this platform.

7 – Google ads

In my opinion, Google ads are a little bit easier to implement than Facebook ads. So when you do get started with paid ads, Google ads are a good start. Of course, with any sort of advertising, as is the case with everything you do online, you need good copywriting and marketing strategy to really resonate with your target audience. You can hire freelance copywriters and marketers, or go with a marketing copy agency.

8 – Banner ads

Banner ads have been an age-old method of advertising on relevant sites to drive traffic to your site. Make sure that you get quality banners designed, and that you have a solid marketing strategy behind them. Otherwise, they will cost you a ton and not produce good results.

9 – Affiliate program

There are probably hundreds of people, if not thousands, who would love to earn commissions for selling your products. That’s why you should consider launching an affiliate program. Getting 100 affiliates selling your products is a surefire way to building a highly successful e-commerce store.

10 – Native ads

These are becoming more and more popular and are proven to drive tons of traffic to your site. It’s a seamless way to integrate paid advertising into organic content so it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and raise suspicion.

11 – YouTube channel

Sharing videos on Youtube is a great way to get found, demonstrate your product, show people how to use your product, and drive more traffic to your site. It’s also a great home for your podcasts so you have all your content in one place, and easy to share.

12 – Blog ads

Another great way to get on popular sites in your niche is to just pay them for ad space. Many top blogs get paid by selling ad space. Many times, you can get this space on the cheap.

13 – Email list building

One of the most important things you should be doing to stabilize e-commerce traffic generation is to build an email list. It has been said for decades that the only real asset you have online is your email list. Think about it – you can send out a great promotion and extract cash from that list without paying a fee to advertise. You can do this any time you want.

You do need a good reason to email your subscribers, however, and also deliver high quality emails. If you don’t, your list will grow cold. If you nurture it properly, email marketing will be the key to increasing your sales conversion rates.

14 – Coupons

You can list coupons on popular sites like RetailMeNot.com and more. This is a powerful way to get a backlink from a top ranked site as well generate a ton of traffic to your site by offering open discounts.

15 – Social posting

All the content you create on your site should be syndicated and shared on the popular social media platforms. Social media sites are also great ways to communicate with your target audience, build rapport, and drive warm traffic to your site.

Conclusion

What I especially love about this list is there is an e-commerce traffic generation strategy for everybody.

If you have more money and less time on your hands, you can start with paid advertising options such as native ads, Google ads, and banner ads. If you have more time on your hands than money, you can start your e-commerce traffic generation campaign with SEO blog content, social posting, an affiliate program and e-mail list building.

As you start to generate more sales from the traffic that you are driving, you can hire an SEO blog content writer. If that works well for you, you can then dabble in Google ads or other paid traffic sources.