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Promoting your online shop

Promoting your shop is making it visible to everyone, increase the quantity and the quality of the visitors, meaning potential buyers.

Before starting, remember how you've known about comboutique.com ! Was it through a search engine, an email or a link from another website? That's because of that promotion that you know us.

Of course, your shop will be indexed in search engines as well as in the comboutique.com thematic index. (unless you own a private shop). Having your shop indexed will surely increase the visibility of your products, but it might not be enough, unless you do a bit of promotion yourself.

Check our guide below, and learn simple and easy steps to promote your website. Every minute you spend promoting your shop will be rewarded with increasing sales, sometimes beyond your expectations !

Search engine optimisation :

Nothing beats being well indexed by search engines. When you optimise your indexation in the main search engines, you can multiply your visits a hundredfold in a week.

We advise you to manually index your shop, and also your website (if you haven't done it yet) to the main search engines :

· GoogleGoogle (at least 80% of all internet search) http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ · Yahoo : http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add · MSN : http://search.msn.co.uk/docs/submit.aspx

To be really effective in indexing your website, you should follow the two following steps :

• Step 1 : Carefully prepare the HTML pages of your website (META tags, TITLE tags and ALT tags). If you don't know what that means, don't worry : comboutique optimally fills in those fields by default for a standard and Premium shop. What is left for you to do, is fill in the « keywords », « HTML title » and « Meta-tags » in the « Shop Info » section, and submit the URL of your shop (http://www.comboutique.com/myshop) to the three search engines.  
• Step 2 : You also have to work on the external back links, meaning the number of links leading to your website. The most common way of doing it is to exchange links with websites having similar contents. That way you will obtain more links, and your popularity to the search engines will grow exponentially.

If you don't have a large promotional budget, or when earning your first commissions, you can hire the services of a web marketing specialist to have your website indexed to a large number of search engines and thematic indexes. The cost of such services start at just a few dozens pounds.

Sending emails

That's the promotional tool you have to put your priorities on, since it is, along with search engines, what works the best ! With comboutique, you have all tools needed for sending emails at your disposal in the « my account » section :

• The newsletter : allows you to communicate with your clients who subscribed to it. Thanks to your newsletters, you can communicate about the release of your new products or your promotional operations. This is a very effective way to animate your community (see below), and will surely make your clients visit your shop again, meaning more prospective sales.  
• Referral program : thanks to that tool, you will be able to let your friends and contacts know about your shop on the comboutique service. Not only does it allow you to communicate about your shop and products, it is also the best way to increase your income : as a referrer, when your referrals open an online shop, you get a commission out of every sales that those shops make.  
• Alerts / let your friends know : on each product file, you can activate an alert function that will allow you to let your friends and contacts know that you released a new product … Another high impact tool to boost your sales !

However, you should be careful not to send spam. Not only is it against the law, but it will upset your target audience, that won't be liable to turn into prospective clients. Spam is an unsolicited message anonymously sent to individuals, without letting them any option to opt out.

Organize events and animate your community of buyers.

When a community will be created around your online shop, keep it alive by organizing some events to animate it and let it know about your new products, releasing a new T-shirt is a good example to keep in touch with your clients.

The comboutique team regularly organizes promotional operations to give you the opportunity and tools needed to animate your clients' community.

Offline promotion and advertising

The promotion through media others than the web (buying advertising space in magazines, TV, radio, billboards, …) is excessively expensive and is generally reserved to much larger websites.

But what you can easily do, is to have your online shop URL appear on your business card, mails, and other documents you communicate to third parties. That is also a very good way to increase your sales.

For instance, if you have a music label or a rock band, have your T-shirt shop URL appear on your flyers, CDs, concert tickets, … That can only help your website dragging more audience.

Sponsored links

You can bid on keywords in order to appear at the top of the search engines. When a web surfer clicks on your link, you'll pay the amount of the bid you made for that click. Google offers this system under the name "AdWords", Yahoo outsources management of its sponsored links to "Overture", other search engines use "MIVA" and MSN gets its own sponred links engine "MSN Advertising".

If you have a promotional budget, this type of service can generate a high ROI if your keywords are carefully chosen and not too requested by users. Moreover, you pay only when someone really views your website.  

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