“When you don’t have money you get creative”, Sabir Semerkant told me while explaining how The Vitamin Creek drives traffic to its e-commerce Web site. Sometimes, when building a business, not having money is a blessing in disguise. It forces a company to be smart in both product development and marketing. Having too much money allows a company to get a little lazy and pick up bad habits that can be hidden by money.
A successful professional quarterback or pitcher learns and fine tunes proper mechanics throughout high school and college. Similarly, an aspiring start-up needs to start by building a solid marketing foundation on top of which it can run various pay and free marketing initiatives. Build a weak foundation, and the money you spend will not deliver as efficient a return on investment than if you have a solid foundation in place.
The Vitamin Creek focuses on making marketing initiatives that take internal time and resources as efficient as possible. For example, the company has thousands of product detail pages. The company is focused on making sure each page, starting with the most trafficked pages, has plenty of high resolution product photos, product descriptions, and other page level details that make it easy for a customer to quickly decide that yes, indeed, this is the right product for me, and put the product in his shopping cart.
If your goal is to drive traffic to a Web site, it’s easy to get enamored by quick fix solutions such as buying key words on Google. Start-ups should analyze the acquisition cost to acquire each new customer as key words become more competitive.
About 60% of traffic to Web sites comes from Google organic search. The time a Web site owner puts into optimizing the site so that it is easily found through search can provide huge returns. Search traffic is free. But optimizing a Web site through search engine optimization tactics and seeing the results of the effort takes time. It’s not a quick fix like buying keywords on Google Ad Words, but rather a sustained effort.
Spyfu is a tool to measure the velocity of keywords – who is bidding on it, what the bid price is. A good key word that has a high price might make a good word or phrase to focus organic efforts around. Develop content on your site that includes those key words. Let others pay for the side of site ads when people search those terms. Discover the hidden gems – keywords that aren’t expensive but still get a fair amount of searches and pay for them instead.
Sabir plans to engage bloggers that focus on his industry vertical next. These are people who blog regularly about nutrition, health and vitamins.
Twitter is a platform that allows you to keep track of keywords related to your products so that you know who is talking about products you carry. You can then engage consumers who are shopping for these products. Just make sure you engage them in an authentic, helpful way, rather than immediately trying to sell them something. Help someone out and start a conversation with them about what they are researching. People generally appreciate getting a helpful response to their questions. Make a connection, person by person.
TwapperKeeper allows you to save searches for specific keywords on Twitter, such as the brands you carry. You can see who tweeted those keywords and engage that person in a dialogue.
Sabir uses TweetDeck as his Twitter platform. I do too.
