In order to begin to optimize your website with the baseline of traffic that you will need to attract the major search engines, you must get real people talking about your e-commerce store. This takes an imaginative and creative public relations campaign. Here are some of the tips that have worked for many successful companies in the past.
1 – Hold your own field events.
In order to get people talking about your online website, you need to generate original content. Most business owners do not realize that most of the Internet memes and viral content that spreads online is created off-line! A great event with plenty of action and a photographer to capture the best moments will give you PR material for years to come. The best part about this strategy is that you only pay once for material that you can use for a long time.
2 – Join groups and become known as an expert.
People will likely be very uninterested in a hard-sell of your product if they do not know who you are. When you join niche groups and message boards that pertain to your industry, you should become known as an expert who is willing to give away answers first. People will then become interested in looking at your paid services.
Do not be afraid of cannibalizing your paid services with free answers. Most people simply want to know that they are working with an expert – they will not take the information and actually perform any solution on their own.
3 – Guest blogging is one of the best ways to put yourself in front of a targeted and precise audience.
As an add on to tip two, you can become a guest blogger and place yourself in front of an audience as an expert that is verified by the blog owner. The secret here is to endear yourself to the blog owner. This is usually done in one of two ways. If you have an audience that you can bring to that site, the blogger will be interested in having you on as a guest in order to expand his own audience. If you do not have an audience of built-in social media fans or fans on some other platform, then you need to bring personality and expertise to the blog. Having firsthand information at top industry events is another way to get noticed by taste making blogs in your industry.
4 – Make viral material.
Short, comedic videos seem to be a great way to expand the message of a business today. This PR method is used by Fortune 100 companies on a daily basis. Creating viral materials is also a relatively low-cost way to bring people into your fold, as the promotion will be done by your audience rather than by your own marketing dollars.
Although there is no perfect way to ensure that your multimedia will become viral, there are some techniques that have been known to work. First of all, your video should be relatively short. Secondly, there should be a comedic element that brings entertainment value to the video. Lastly, there cannot be a direct hard-sell in the video. Rely on the promotion of your content to bring you your audience, not an explicit feature list. Be subtle.
