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I run an online webstore in South Africa that sells a range of gadgets, electronics and accessories. We sell anything from iPads to BlackBerry phones to guitars, dj gear and software for designers like Adobe. Its been an exciting and difficult journey and we have been operational for just over a year. I am not in a situation where I need more exposure and yes you guessed it at a low cost.

We have used twitter and facebook with limited success to promote the brand and we use things like Google pay per click adds which i did setup so I presume they are not as effective as they could be and we list our products on several comparison shopping websites.

Is there anyone who can offer advice as to what I can do to take my love wwwDOTbuycoolDOTcoDOTza to the next level with limited funds?

I have considered google affiliate programs but have read they are not always effective for all types of businesses.

Any tips and advice talk to me please :-)

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3 Answers

Identify your ideal customer (find who needs your product). Get them to try it (offer incentives perhaps in exchange for feedback). Find where this groups is likely to hang-out online, spread the word about your product(s) there using the positive feedback.

Best of luck.

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First of all, you need to know where your existing customers are coming from, and when/why they come back. This means using an analytics package, as well as using a separate landing page (even if they all go to the same place, they just need unique URLs) for each ad campaign or other avenue of promotion and software that tracks hits to each so that you know how people are finding you, and know where to put your resources.

Once you hook someone, keep them coming back, and help them spread the word: make your Facebook link and newsletter sign-up more prominent on the web site. Offer a discount coupon for new newsletter sign-ups and advertise that fact. Offer short-duration discounts, contests, and other deals via your RSS feed, twitter, and Facebook so that people are motivated to subscribe and stay subscribed.

With regard to reeling new people in, you have to know your market. Who are you selling to? What do they spend their time doing? Put together a few coupon codes and email sites that are popular with your target audience and offer them the chance to offer an exclusive deal to their visitors. Some won't be interested, but some might be, and it only takes a few to get the ball rolling.

Finally, ad placement is a volume game, and it only really works if it's well targeted. Have an experienced web dev or marketing guru take a look at your terms, your ad design, etc. to make sure it's as effective as possible.

Hope that helps,

Susan

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All those are great ideas, but also i would recommend you to increase your SEO (search engine optimization) by optimizing correctly and effectively each of your product pages with targeted keywords within content, alt tags, title tags, etc. Since your site is an ecommerce website (which are harder to optimize), i would recommend checking on your analytics (hopefully you are using google analytics -its free!) and Google Webmaster Tool (also free) to see how is your website been crawled and indexed by search engines. If you have good navigation, your site is well optimized for SEO and then you start promoting it using Social Media (facebook and twitter) and doing some link building. You can increase your rankings and exposure at no cost, just more work. There are some ecommerce platforms that offer that service, not sure who is your ecommerce software platform, but you should check out the ones that offer the service to probably hire them or at least get an idea of what you need on your online store to make it more SEO friendly. The one I am familiar with is Volusion but there are plenty of others.

Good luck!

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