I’ve been part of the ecommerce website design space for a few years and back when I started things were certainly a lot easier than they are now. These days there is so much competition, all of the traditional ways of getting traffic (SEO, pay per click etc) have become incredibly expensive.
But that just means you need to be a bit more creative about how you go about getting traffic.
In this article, I will introduce a method I have used to great effect in generating tens of thousands of visitors to my deals website.
Deals websites
When I launched my deals site I managed to get just under 10,000 people visit the site in the first couple of days. the vast majority of this traffic came from putting a list on an Australian deals website. It was the number 1 deals site in the country and I managed to get to the front -age (the deal was a give-away).
Here are some of the statistics from the opening of the site.
- 9,500 visits (only 1,000 weren’t unique)
- Over 300 email subscribers
- About $1,000 in sales
- Over 65 Facebook and Twitter likes / follows
How much did this cost?
Our launch costs were about $400, our giveaway was a very cheap item. Most of the giveaway costs were to do with postage.
The steps we took
- The site was built to be relevant for people who love a good deal. We had only a handful of items, great prices, obvious discounts and lots of yellow!
- The giveaway was listed on the deals website as a launch special.
- The deal was good enough to get a lot of votes on the site and it raced to the top. Once it had enough to get off the ‘latest deals’ page and onto the homepage, the visits took off.
Inside 1 hour of the deal going up, we had received 150 orders for the item. We continued the same process a few times, giving away more and more so the deal stayed on the bargain site. We ended up giving away about 300.
The paid orders mainly came in throughout the next day or 2 not so much while the freebie deal was running. .
Conclusion
Traffic techniques like search engine optimisation and Adwords have always worked well but because of competition they are increasingly expensive. In this article I’ve presented a simple technique for getting huge amounts of traffic without anywhere near as much of an outlay. All it requires is a bit of thinking outside the square.
