Each month we provide links to industry news articles about how online sales are continuing to grow. We’ve discussed all types of marketing initiatives from SEO (search engine optimization), email, blogs, eBay teasers, social networking, and coupons. Yet as a provider of shopping cart software and services, we hear all the time about how small store owners, especially gift shops, aren’t making any money with their website. I’m going to share with you exactly how you can start making money with your websites.
Notice in the last sentence I said websites (plural). That’s right, the best way to make money on the internet is to have multiple websites, each one specific to a single product. Not counting Amazon, the best performing websites are a single page site that is known in the industry as a “squeeze page”. Essentially, a squeeze page is one long page about a single item. It is written as if it is a letter to one person (your customer), explaining all the benefits of a single product. Nothing fancy, just straight talk, with you being the product expert. Of couse you can, and should, include multiple photos of the product you are selling, as well as videos that help you sell it. Lots of content about this single item is important as well.
Create a domain name for this single page site that contains the exact name of the product, as people will likely search for that term. For example, if you are selling a t-shirt with a photo of geraniums on it, call your site something like “HempGeraniumTshirts.com”. Be specific and descriptive, and include your keywords in your name. If possible, keep your name to 20 characters or less.
Now write your copy. Talk about the advantages of organic hemp as a fabric. Discuss geraniums and why you chose that particular flower to highlight. Ask for the order with a buy now button. As the reader gets closer to the bottom of the page, make them a free offer. Tell them that if they order this tshirt, you will give them a packet of geranium seeds included with their order absolutely free. Ask for the order again with another buy now button. But wait, there’s more! You’ll also include a free paper they can download that describes how they can care for their geraniums. Make it sound like if they don’t order this product from you, they are crazy. Ask for the order again with another buy now button. Finally, give them a reason for book-marking this site and/or for passing it on to their friends. If they still haven’t ordered from you, give them an incentive for provding you with their email.
Now for the technical part: Behind the scenes you own a webstore, which is called something like “MyGiftStore.com”. This site contains lots of different items that you carry in your shop. You go in to the administrative control panel for this site and create the “buy now” buttons that you copy into the one-page product-specific site. You register a domain and sign up for hosting the new one page site (since this is not a shopping cart site or a database-driven site, it will only cost you a few dollars per month per site). The “buy now” buttons that you copy into the one-page site will put the customer into the shopping cart of your main webstore. (You can actually do this with some programing code using name pointers to specific pages within your main website, but you might get better results actually having a new domain that is hosted as a separate website).
Now when you do all the other marketing we’ve talked about, you market your product-specific site, not your main store. Target your Google adword campaigns to your single-page product-specific site. Drive as much traffic to these individual one-page sites as you can. If you have a dozen such niche sites, all making a little money, it adds up to making a lot of money. And that is how successful internet marketers are growing their sales.
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