The forecasts for ecommerce in 2010 look good. Projections indicate that ecommerce will continue to grow even if the economy hasn’t yet fully recovered from the downturn. This can be attributed to many factors but all of which point to the same conclusion: this is a good time to start a profitable online business. If you’ve got an income opportunity home based business idea, don’t just sit on it – start a profitable online business now.
We’ve presented quite a few viable home based business ideas in previous posts. This time around, we will take a look at what we can do to take full advantage of the expected growth in ecommerce.
It has been predicted that ecommerce sales in Europe will top 300 billion Euros by 2011 with the UK having the strongest growth rate. This is certainly good news to those thinking about starting a new business in the UK. Figures show that there will be more people looking to purchase online. That said, whether or not they can find your store and end up making a purchase depends on a few factors.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a crucial element in getting your store ranked for certain keywords. Be sure to check to see if the keywords you’ve used for the past year or so are still relevant. There is no point in ranking well for keywords that people hardly search for. Most merchants just optimize their main store page and main category pages. However, many merchants have reported success in targeting less competitive keywords for their product pages as well. Targeting less competitive keywords for your sub categories, info pages and product pages could result in more visitors to your site. The more pages your site ranks for, the more chances of drawing in visitors.
SMO
Social Media Optimization is also an important element in promoting your brand and products. There are tons of social media, micro blogging, video and image sharing sites out there with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube having the most potential for businesses. Many major brands have at least one account on these sites. Nike has 3 on Facebook alone. SMO affords a business a very cost-effective way to get word across in a relatively short period of time. Many companies have utilized sites like Facebook to launch viral marketing campaigns to good effect. Popular sites like Facebook have 250 million active users with half of them logging in every day. The potential is just too great for any business to ignore.
Conversion
Of course all the traffic in the world means nothing if visitors to your site remain just visitors. Traffic conversion is what it’s all about. In order to achieve as high a conversion rate as possible, all the elements on your site – images, content, layout – must be designed to convert visitors into buyers. In order to find out what works and what doesn’t, conduct an A/B split test (to determine the better of two variations) or a multivariate test (to test multiple combinations). You should carry out these test periodically as visitor trends tend to change. These tests also come in handy when you want to maximize your marketing efforts. You’ d be surprised to find that just tweaking the layout or changing certain colors can result in a conversion spike.
We hope that the advice we’ve given here will be useful to you should you decide to start a profitable online business soon. With an affordable and full-featured ecommerce solution and a rosy economic outlook for ecommerce in general this year, this could be the right time to find success online. With the right products, good research and well-targeted marketing, your very own successful web store beckons. Good luck!
Recent Posts:
- Get A Custom Designed Website + Branding Solution With InstanteStore – From Concept To Creation
- Why Aesthetic Visuals Matter on Your Website and Social Media.
- How InstanteStore Helped Sagiri Dayal Launched A Successful Online Store With Immediate Sales
- SCAM ALERT – Fake Company Asking People To Send Them Money For Tasks
- How To Setup Stripe Account For Ecommerce
