question about promote new online store (one day one deal)

[lukelee]

Hi, guys:
my boss wants me to operate an online store which is simillar to catchoftheday, zazz, selling 1 item 1day for a special price. I am wondering how does a business make money if only sell one item a day, especially the price is low.
our website is deal1.com.au, it was started 1 month ago, i have done add items on ebay,oztion... open threads on forums, but visits are only arround 10 per day.
Does anyone have any idea how to promote a online store?

[Firefinch]

Hi Lukelee,

10 visits a day is very low. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help with getting more visits via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. A quick review of your website shows that there is so much you can do to optimise the website for targeted keywords. Have you looked into search engine optimisation in your research? The various shopping niches are very competitive, so doing proper research on what keywords you should target and the best ways of improving your rankings for those keywords is essential. I see you are using the newer version of Joomla, which is good. I suggest starting by looking into the following on-page and off-page factors:

1) Proper keyword research. Decide on exactly what keywords you should be targeting and which keywords you can realistically rank for. Look for relevant, long tail keywords and their search volumes.

2) SEO friendly URLs - also extremely important and also not something that's been implemented on your site yet.

3) Page titles. Page titles are very important. Your website's page titles aren't optimised at all at the moment.

These are the three major basics to start with. There are so many more things involved, but this will at least get you some traction when it comes to starting out with the site's SEO.

Good luck!

[lukelee]

Originally Posted by Firefinch

Hi Lukelee,

10 visits a day is very low. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help with getting more visits via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. A quick review of your website shows that there is so much you can do to optimise the website for targeted keywords. Have you looked into search engine optimisation in your research? The various shopping niches are very competitive, so doing proper research on what keywords you should target and the best ways of improving your rankings for those keywords is essential. I see you are using the newer version of Joomla, which is good. I suggest starting by looking into the following on-page and off-page factors:

1) Proper keyword research. Decide on exactly what keywords you should be targeting and which keywords you can realistically rank for. Look for relevant, long tail keywords and their search volumes.

2) SEO friendly URLs - also extremely important and also not something that's been implemented on your site yet.

3) Page titles. Page titles are very important. Your website's page titles aren't optimised at all at the moment.

These are the three major basics to start with. There are so many more things involved, but this will at least get you some traction when it comes to starting out with the site's SEO.

Good luck!

Thank you very must for your valuable answers, I have 1 more questions:
what is SEO friendly URLs?

[Firefinch]

SEO friendly URLs are basically 'clean' URLs. You have 'dirty' and 'clean' URLs. Clean URLs are by nature easy to read and look something like this: www.example.com/faq. "Dirty", non-seo-friendly URLs have seemingly random punctuation (usually coupled with numbers) in them and are URLs that often change depending on who visits them and when.

Ideally, you will have a static URL to each page with relevant keywords in the URL if appropriate.

For example, if you were selling Blue Widgets and linking to a "FAQ" page on your site, it would be better to have an URL like this:
www.bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets-faq

and not anything like this:
www.bluewidgets.com/bl?wis=0434q-1 (this looks like what you have now)

or this:
www.bluewidgets.com/03e45 (or some other seemingly random string of characters)

SEO friendly/clean URLs with keywords relevant to the page strategically positioned in them can help rankings and help crawlability and also improve usability (the user is able to see the general topic of a page via the URL, for example).

[mexham]

Hi Firefinch,

great response about the clean URL's. I have quite a few 'dirty' ones on my site. If I changed them over to clean is it likely to negatively affect my rankings in the short term and create problems with the old pages no longer being available?

Thanks,
Mike

[Firefinch]

Originally Posted by mexham

Hi Firefinch,

great response about the clean URL's. I have quite a few 'dirty' ones on my site. If I changed them over to clean is it likely to negatively affect my rankings in the short term and create problems with the old pages no longer being available?

Thanks,
Mike

Hi Mike, and thanks. I recommend adding permanent 301 redirects from the old URL to the new, so in case you have any links pointing to the old URL they will get redirected to the new automatically. This will also let search engine crawlers know that the web page has moved. Any old URLs that remain in the index will automatically redirect visitors to the new, clean-url pages. I do this via the .htaccess file. I've posted a blog post with instructions about how to implement 301 redirects on my seo blog.

Let me know if you have any problems and don't forget to back up your htaccess file!

Edit: If you're talking about your Mexican Hammock site: I glanced at your site quickly and noticed that your URLs (the ones I saw after a quick look, anyway) aren't actually "dirty" URLs. For example, you don't see query strings in them (?id=3434, etc.). They can be better optimised, yes, but they are structured in a more ideal way (from an SEO perspective) than the orignial poster's. I'm not sure if you've switched to SEO friendly URLs after your post here or if you're talking about other URLs on your site which I didn't see. Or maybe you aren't even talking about the same site! Hope this helps, anyway .

[designsmith]

get yourself an e mail list.
book yourself a permanent "stall" at all the local flea markets and put the weeks products up there for sale.
that would be just to cover your costs.
but the real reason for being there would be to build up you e mail subscriber list.
so you then offer something as a prize to get people to give you their e mail addresses
if you can collect 200 or 300 names every weekend you will build up a list quickly.
tell everybody that signs up that they really need to stay connected to your list as you will organize really great bargains for them.
run prizes online at the same time.
get other marketers that are on this forum to promote you to their list.

eventually when you have about 15000 people that you are e mailing daily you will have a very strong business, and you can have youe weekends back again.

rob anderson

[competitions]

Originally Posted by designsmith

get yourself an e mail list....

so you then offer something as a prize to get people to give you their e mail addresses...

get other marketers that are on this forum to promote you to their list...

run prizes online at the same time...

eventually when you have about 15000 people that you are e mailing daily you will have a very strong business, and you can have youe weekends back again.

rob anderson

I agree with Rob, most larger websites like dealsdirect and even COTD have regular competitions or giveaways because they know it's a cheap way to build their email lists.

[mcboom]

Originally Posted by Firefinch

Hi Mike, and thanks. I recommend adding permanent 301 redirects from the old URL to the new, so in case you have any links pointing to the old URL they will get redirected to the new automatically. This will also let search engine crawlers know that the web page has moved. Any old URLs that remain in the index will automatically redirect visitors to the new, clean-url pages. I do this via the .htaccess file. I've posted a blog post with instructions about how to implement 301 redirects on my seo blog.

Let me know if you have any problems and don't forget to back up your htaccess file!

Edit: If you're talking about your Mexican Hammock site: I glanced at your site quickly and noticed that your URLs (the ones I saw after a quick look, anyway) aren't actually "dirty" URLs. For example, you don't see query strings in them (?id=3434, etc.). They can be better optimised, yes, but they are structured in a more ideal way (from an SEO perspective) than the orignial poster's. I'm not sure if you've switched to SEO friendly URLs after your post here or if you're talking about other URLs on your site which I didn't see. Or maybe you aren't even talking about the same site! Hope this helps, anyway .

Mate what do you charge (on average) to SEO a site ?

[Firefinch]

Originally Posted by mcboom

Mate what do you charge (on average) to SEO a site ?

Hi Mcboom, my services are tailored toward small and startup businesses and my fees reflect this. You can find SEO package prices on my website (in my signature) and custom SEO solution prices vary. I'll send you a PM with more details.