Need suggestions on how to promote my online store

[Cantaleta]

Hello:
I own and design a jewelry line that sells in several stores in my country (Colombia). My jewely is 100% handmade by my 13 metalworkers. Since I am going to school in Miami for design, I had the idea to set up a website to start selling my line here in the US. I set up my online store at http://www.earringsetc.com but so far only msn has picked me up (I am still working and following WPW's members advice on Y! and Google). My website is a 1 woman operation.

I also started an affiliate program thru Shareasale but I haven't seen any sells yet.

Can someone give me some advice on other ways to promote my online store? how to pass the word around? how to get exposure on fashion/women sites?

Thanks in advance...

[labeler2003]

In Google search for:

allinurl:earringsetc.com (or site:earringsetc.com)

It shows that your pages have been indexed by Google.

In Yahoo search for:

site:earringsetc.com

This shows only one page in Yahoo.

A search for your domain "earringsetc.com" shows quite a few sites linking to you, especially coupon sites. So it looks like you are out there promting your products.

I notice you have images for some of your links, but the alt text just says "arrow". Using ALT text that is more descriptive of the link will be helpful to both visitors and search engines.

I also notice you've put your company name and URL in the title tags. That is very valuable space and including the URL in the title on every page does not seem to be a good use of this space. Make the title tags more specific for each page, targeting the specific subject and key words of each page - instead of the name of your company and the URL.

[JKomp]

Write articles and submit to directories. They are the most cost effective methods of getting your name out there imo

[kevangogh]

This is an easy one. First, you made your home page and your shopping cart page one and the same. Your home page is prime real estate. "If it were me", I'd take that shopping cart and move it somewhere else. Then I would optimize the home page and get rid of the many, many outbound links you have on it. A shopping cart home page like this is not designed to rank.

You should make your index.html page simple, without tons of outbound links, written with keyword text, etc. From there, you lead the customer into the shopping cart. You'll never lead them there if the site doesn't rank, and it will never rank well in a competetive category like earrings or jewelry with this shopping cart as the home page.

[toyourhealth]

You definitely have some nice jewelry.

Here’s a very simple way to improve your ranking. Remember this is just a suggestion but I think it will help you a lot.

First focus your index page on a couple of important keywords, such as handmade silver filigree earrings and silver chandelier earrings.

Change your title from: <title>Chandelier Earrings - EarringsETC.com - Home</title>

To something like: <title>Unique Handmade Silver Filigree Earrings and Silver Chandelier Earrings</title>

Change your description tag from: <meta name="description" content="Chandelier Earrings handmade silver jewelry in 925 silver Mompox Filigree., EarringsETC.com - maker of unique chandelier earrings 100% handmade" />

To something like:
<meta name="description" content="Beautiful handmade silver chandelier earrings made from 925 silver Mompox Filigree. Our unique silver filigree earrings are made in Columbia." />

In addition you will need to incorporate the use of these key words in the text of your homepage.

Basically, you will need to focus on the key words that are important to you, or more importantly, what you think people will search for when buying your products. Perhaps it is “silver jewelry”. Whatever you decide, just carry the keywords throughout your title, your description and your homepage text. (Search engine optimization is actually a little more complicated than what I’ve described but these simple changes should help your rankings a little and possibly even a lot!)

[Andy SEO]

I have recently begun something of an experiment to see if I can help newcomers to the web. There is so much hype and misinformation regarding building a website I decided to try in my small way to tell it as it really is.

I am currently offering a free sign-up to what I call my restricted access membership. Members have access to one to one mentoring, my software and knowledge base and any help I can give. Of course this is limited by my own time and numbers will be limited by my time to support them.

If you are interested to see if I may be able to help you go to http://www.webpageaddons.com to read more about it.

[RickHendershot]

From my experience, the only way to get fast response and sales is to use PPC - Google Adwords. SEO usually takes months to make any serious impact.

I agree that publishing articles is probably the best way to get search engine exposure.

[incrediblehelp]

Catalenta,

Something weird happens to the website when I minimize the browser window. Something gets all messed up.

http://www.kbkmarketing.com/site.jpg

Nothing to do with your marketing efforts, just thought I would point it out.

[SnerdeyWebs]

We would be happy to list your site in our showcase. Since you built it yourself!

Just let us know. We would use a screen shot and link directly to your site.

Nice stuff!

[swirlsofcolor]

I am brand new to this forum and am finding this discussion very helpful. I have previously read that publishing articles and posting to forums such as this can increase one's visibility. Finding the time to do this however is difficult when you are the sole operator of the business. I continue to do a lot of promotion monthly and it has helped some. But the number of hits still has not gotten above 1500 per month of new visitors. My promotions have only been seriously active since January.

I found this morning that my ranking on google more or less disappeared when doing a search for "decoupage" which is one of the major items I sell.

Any advise would be appreciated.

[JKomp]

If you cant write articles yourself, then you may consider paying someone else to. Personally i charge anything from $15 up per article, depending on the topic. This is because i research each article. However, there are some people that provide you with articles for as little as $5 if you are not too concerned about quality.

[CreditFN]

Hi,
Nice jewelry, you can use many avenues to further promote your product. Some include but are not limited to opening online stores through Yahoo!, Ebay, and Froogle. Be sure to stress that your jewelry is handmade because it is tough to find handmade products at affordable prices in today's world. You really need to identify the strengths and uniqueness of your product to standout in today's online market place.

As for your site structure DO NOT change your title tag to what the above poster told you. Sit down and brain storm how to really identify your product. One title tag you can check out that I did is at www.smilestylers.com and we get great rankings for miami, aventura, and florida.

Be sure your site description triggers keywords in your title tag.
Hope this helps.

[bugmenot]

Originally Posted by Cantaleta

Hello:
I own and design a jewelry line that sells in several stores in my country (Colombia). My jewely is 100% handmade by my 13 metalworkers. Since I am going to school in Miami for design, I had the idea to set up a website to start selling my line here in the US. I set up my online store at http://www.earringsetc.com but so far only msn has picked me up (I am still working and following WPW's members advice on Y! and Google). My website is a 1 woman operation.

I also started an affiliate program thru Shareasale but I haven't seen any sells yet.

Can someone give me some advice on other ways to promote my online store? how to pass the word around? how to get exposure on fashion/women sites?

Thanks in advance...

It's called a sandbox.

Both Google and Yahoo do it to keep new sites from ranking. You should be out in about 6 to 12 months.

[kevangogh]

The poster who suggested you change your title tag was right on the money - I'd do that asap. About the only thing I'm not so sure about is their suggestion to use the word "earrings" twice in the title, but you may be able to get away with it.

The poster from Florida who told you not to change them hasn't a clue. I went and checked all three terms he mentioned, and he doesn't rank in the top 10 of Google on any of those. Plus, if you go to his site it's flash without any content on the homepage. This page will never rank.

Home page is prime real estate. Make in clean, with about 2 paragraphs of descriptive, usefull text using your keywords. Make a link for a site map, and make a site map. Make a link on it to your shopping cart, but don't make the shopping cart your home page.

Spoken by one who knows, ranks in top 5 on all the major engines, and uses a similar shopping cart.

[MrLeN]

It is always easier to make money hen you have heaps of affiliates. So joining Shareasale was a good move.

I recommend that you create a complete affiliate section, with keywords for absolutely everything you can think of that's related to your product - but also with the words "Affiliate Program" everywhere too., so people who want to join such an affiliate program can find you.

You need to be trying to attract affiliates - not sales. How many sales can your site make alone? But how many sales can 1000 affiliates make?

If I were you I'd spend 90% of my online marketing effort attracting affiliates.

MrLeN

[philip5]

Hi Catalenta,

Further to some earlier comments:

Your home page could be designed better, both from a selling and a search engine listing (and, more importantly ranking) viewpoint;

1. Words sell products, not pictures.

By all means include small images further down the page (with ALT tags as already mentioned), or even a couple small ones near the top if you feel they're essential to convey what your product is all about, but use a headline at the top of the page to convey what is unique about your product offering. That is, answer your visitor's "what's in it for me?" question in the headline.

2. Target the general subject that your site is about (i.e. earrings or silver earrings, not jewellery as this is too broad) as the keyword for this home page and include it in the title tag, the description tag, the headline and in the first paragraph of text. Don't make the page about you or your business - that should be on the 'About Us' page - make it about the benefits of your products to your potential customer.

Include your next most general keyword as the second KW in the keywords tag for this page and include it once or twice in the body text of the page. Don't use any more than one main and one secondary keyword per page.

Having 9 keywords in the KW tag as you have at the moment, is a complete waste of time and can actually be counter-productive. (If you were designing a search engine algorithm, would you think the page that states one/two KWs as its focus would be more relevant to a searcher's requirements for this keyword, or one that lists 5-500?)

Whilst the keyword tag is less important now than in the past, it costs nothing to get it right for the S/Es that still give it some significance, and identifying it precisely can help you stay focused on the theme of the page.

3. Identify other keywords for your products and devote a page to each of them. Make each page customer-focused, but use the above tips about tags and headlines etc. for each keyword for each page. Provide a small image of your products that relate to each of your keyword-rich pages with a link to more info on a different page. This additional page should also include the 'Buy' link and as much info about the product as possible. When visitors get as far as this page, they are serious prospects and there's no such thing as too much info to convince them to purchase.

4. I'm confused by the amount of stuff on the home page.

i. If you're selling silver earrings and bracelets, do you really need a search box and even more strange, an 'advanced' search feature?

ii. People are becoming increasingly reluctant to divulge meaningful email addresses these days. I can't see any reason why I would need to register, by creating an account, to use your site. No benefit is stated, so if you must have this (although I wouldn't), something needs to explain the advantages it gives me. Same with your newsletter - make the benefit clearer to encourage more sign-ups e.g. "Join our 'Art You Can Wear' newsletter and Get a 20% Discount Voucher and we'll keep you up-to-date with our latest special offers and new products" or whatever....

iii. Do you need a best-sellers list? This is an interesting feature on Amazon where they sell millions of products, but does it add anything to a visitor's experience with your site? Be wary of adding things because you can, rather than only including things that sell...

5. Most ecommerce sites state a privacy policy these days, and the absence of one may make you look cheap and/or amateurish to some visitors. I'd put this at the bottom of every page, with a 'Terms of Use' or 'Terms and Conditions' link. The text for these can all be on the same page, which can also include the info about 'Returns/Exchanges', which can then be removed from the 'top of the page' links. There's something a bit negative about seeing this link so prominently - makes me wander if I'm going to like your stuff...

6. The source code for the page includes all sorts of non-standard HTML stuff, and this is probably why someone commented that it didn't display correctly when minimised. Although it loaded OK in my browser, it had the dreaded 'but with errors on page' suffix, which normally points to unrecognised HTML. This isn't urgent, but if you could tidy this up, also make the page a set number of pixels wide. This page is probably set to display 100% of the browser width, which isn't the best way to do it.

There are so many different size screens, monitors and resolution settings around these days, I'd suggest making the page width to fit the size of the 'smallest' resolution that's still in popular use i.e. 790 pixels for 800x600 pixels resolution. The advantage of this is that you know exactly what your page will look like, irrespective of the resolution it's being displayed at.


You may have heard this before, but 'keeping it simple' really does increase your chances of getting the response you want from each page of your web site.

As has already been commented, getting good ranking positions in the major search engines is not a 5 minute job! You're looking at 3/6/9 months, depending on your skill at search engine optimization and how competitive the keywords are that you're targeting, and even then, there's no guarantees!

You may want to consider Google AdWords as another option in the short term, at the very least to test the conversion rate of your web pages and tweak them until it's acceptable. You can get a free course on AdWords from the link in my resource box at the bottom of this post, which also includes some useful info on keyword selection.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to affiliates until your site is selling stuff. You may get people sign-up if you pay a lot of attention to it, but they'll soon lose interest if their referrals don't generate sales for them. Get your site selling first, then you've got something to shout about to affiliates!


Hope some of this helps!

Best Regards,

Phil

[toyourhealth]

I agree with Phil's thoughts on a keyword tag. However, do not confuse the keyword tag with the title tag or the description tag. You will still need those and you will need to put a lot of thought into those as I have stated in my thread above.

[chrisjewell]

Catalenta, the earings are beautiful.

This post is going to be different than most posts
here because I'm not going to suggest much about
search engines to build your buisness. That subject
has and will be covered by more knowledgable folks
on that subject.

I would mention one thing about key words: I would
add the following words:
affiliate,savings,gifts,custom,design,craftsmanshi p,
quality,artisans.

Next I would recommend building and maintaining
contact lists for prospective clients, prospective
affiliates, current clients, and current affiliates.
Find an online affiliate marketing and training
organization that will train your affiliates in
online marketing techniques and methods, using as
many techniques and methods as you can.

Using permission marketing methods, get an
autoresponder/mail broadcast system and start your
contacts on appropriate newsletters for their
connection to your business.

Learn about capture pages and how to use them and
how your affiliates can use them. Join a number of
traffic exchanges (upgrade to maximize benefits),
teaching affiliates how to use them as well.

These suggestions are general and I could go on
forever in details as there is much information on
these topics.

Use search engines and surf some traffic exchanges
to start your research on expanding your marketing
methods.

Contact me if you want any recommendations or if you
have any questions or comments about this post,
Cantaleta.

Sincerely,
Chris Jewell

[user555]

Hello,

I would recommend to check out http://oursuccessonline.com

They have a program there that delivers Your ad pretty much around the world. BUT! For a small fee. It is different than Google Adwords or former Overture but way more effective. They say that all Google PPC maybe a fraud.

[user555]

Hello,

I would recommend to check out http://oursuccessonline.com

They have a program there that delivers Your ad pretty much around the world. BUT! For a small fee. It is different than Google Adwords or former Overture but way more effective. They say that all Google PPC maybe a fraud.