Many people hunt for your sports shop on the Web every day. Are these people finding you? If not, then this introductory post is a great place to start the Web Marketing plan for your sports shop.
If you don’t yet have a website for your sports shop then that’s the top priority on the To Do list. It is possible to market yourself on the internet without having a web site – but why make things harder than necessary? You could employ a local firm to develop a site for you – (remember to contact other businesses they’ve done work for, to check they’re happy), or possibly build it yourself from scratch (all the information you require is readily available on the web). Alternatively, you could put up a task on an freelancing website like Elance – that can be a very good way to get a website designed.
The next step is to deploy Google Analytics. This will show you how many users your site is receiving, where they’re arriving from, and how long they’re staying on your website. You can even use it to keep track of your ad campaigns, and understand what people are doing on your site. Very important!
There are loads of directories available that you can submit your new website to. Some are free, and many others you have to fork out for. Best of the Web is one of the better paid directories, but you could also consider Joe Ant. There are so many free directories that it’s usually best to employ a reliable directory submission company to save time. Don’t worry about applying to hundreds and hundreds of directories – a hundred or so is generally more then enough.
Websites specialising in sports shop are few and far between – which is a shame, because that kind of specialist website is invariably a highly valuable place to advertise yourself. There is however one site that focuses on sports shop and will probably also allow you to publish your information free of charge – and that’s http://www.ClickSportsShops.co.uk/ – definitely worth looking into.
Consider signing up with Google Adwords or one of the alternative Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising providers on the market. PPC can start sending you customers within a few minutes of configuring your account and publishing your first advert – there’s no quicker way to begin getting people to visit your site. You only shell out when somebody visits – so it’s usually a great way to advertise on the internet. Just make certain you monitor your results with statistics software so you know whether or not your activities are cost-effective.
It’s terrific getting customers to your site – but one of the easiest ways to get visitors is to remind those people who have visited before to keep coming back and see what’s new. Email is a great way to accomplish this – and you’ll require peoples’ email addresses and their authorization to email them when you have something new for them to take a look at. Make use of a service like Constant Contact to set this up. You can actually automate the whole process by composing a sequence of emails ahead of time and setting them to be sent at pre-defined intervals – without you having to think about it again.
There’s a lot of effort involved in marketing your sports shop on the net – but the most important thing is to get started, and chip away at it, one project at a time. Before you know it, you’ll have a thriving site and plenty of new prospects. All the info you need is available on the internet – so get going and start marketing on the World wide web – it will be one of the best decisions you ever made.