There is nothing worse than hitting that wall. Just when you thought that you have perfected your marketing funnel and you have everything working, you see that your sales are not increasing any longer. Sure, you are still making money. But it is devastating to see that you have reached your limit.
When you reach this wall, it is important to regroup. You need to take a step back from your business and consider doing things that you have not done before. Instead of just investing more money or driving more traffic, think about employing some unconventional hacks. It just might change your business for the better.
Today, you’ll learn 3 eCommerce hacks that are designed to get you out of that rut. Each hack will be discussed in detail so be sure to take some notes if you need it.
If you are still marketing your products by yourself, you will surely hit that wall. That is because every person has their limit. There is a limit to how many emails you can send, how many links you can build and how many people you can call in a day. So it is not surprising that there is also a limit on how many products you can sell.
But here’s a secret. You can actually break through those limits if you know how to let other people market your product for you.
You can do this in two ways.
First, you can use the power of referral marketing.
This is where you set up a referral program in your website by rewarding prospects who bring traffic. The concept is quite simple. You reward your visitors for every person they refer to your site.
Now the concept may seem simple on the surface, but it is actually quite powerful.
Truth be told, it is the concept that built a website like PayPal from the ground. It started small by paying their visitors for every new user that signs up to their website. Now, PayPal is now the leading payment processor online.
Here’s how you can use the power of referral marketing.
It all starts with your market. If you don’t know your market, you will not know the kind of incentive that they are interested in. It may help to observe or interview some of your prospects to see the products that they are interested in. This will give you some ideas on the type of reward that you should give away.
There are many types of incentives in a referral program. It can be a simple discount code or it can be cash or an item. There is also the question on who will receive the reward. After all, there are two parties at play in a referral program: the referrer and the friend. While some eCommerce website owners only reward the referrer, others cannot help but reward both.
A referral program that no one knows about is pretty useless. For this reason, you need to use all of your marketing skills to promote your program. You don’t need to be afraid to promote. If you already have a list of customers and your reward is valuable to them, they will take the bait. Everyone has at least one friend that they can refer. You should take advantage of that by implementing a referral program in your website.
Now, referral marketing is just one way to get people to promote your website. There is another way and it can be done by having an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is where you give marketers the permission to sell your products for you with the agreement that you’ll pay them a percentage of every sale. This can be done through unique cookies assigned to sellers. These cookies are then able to discern where the traffic comes from and reward the right affiliate.
However, you cannot create your own affiliate program from scratch. You will need affiliate software to help you. OsiAffiliate is one of those tools. It can help you set up an affiliate program in your own website even if you have zero knowledge on coding or affiliate marketing. It is like an all-in-one ready-to-launch affiliate program software and it is very easy to learn.
48% of the market start surfing the Internet through the search engines. And it is mostly in those moment where they are looking for something they need.
This is the habit that has been ingrained in an online surfer’s lifestyle. They need to visit the search engines before they find what they are looking for.
It is with this reason that keywords are very important. It is sad to see eCommerce website owners forego keywords or search engine optimization just because they are selling quite well through social media marketing or other forms of marketing. You should never forego keywords as it can give you thousands of traffic once you get some of your pages ranking.
Now that we know how important keywords are, let’s go into the keyword research process. For this, I love to use SEMRush for it gives you plenty of options to uncover for that easy-to-rank keyword.
The easiest way to use SEMRush is to use their tool directly. This is where you can simply input your keywords and you’ll immediately uncover its basic stats. This gives you the trend as well as a list of phrase match and related keywords. Trends are great for it will give you an average search for each keyword. This will prevent you from targeting keywords that are only popular for some time. More important than what has been mentioned is the volume and number of results for these will give you an idea on the difficulty of the keyword.
The other areas will give you some interesting ideas. Take related keywords for example. This section will give you more than just ideas. It will give you the metrics for each related keyword.
As you can see, you’ll see how related the keyword is in terms of LSI as well as its search volume and KD or keyword difficulty. KD in SEMRush is based on the competitors. If there are tons of competing websites for that keyword, then the KD will be higher.
Then, there is also the competition percentage and total number of results. You’ll want to look at these along with the other metrics as it will paint a more accurate picture of the keyword’s difficulty. The rule here is the lower, the better.
SEMRush has just released a new tool called the Keyword Magic Tool. In this tool, you can just find and analyze your keywords in one tool. Now, that’s neat!
Unlike the old keyword tool where there is a separate tool for keyword ideas (related keywords and phrase match keywords), the keyword magic tool will just generate the keywords and metrics in one convenient location.
You can use it by plugging in a seed keyword.
PRO TIP: The Keyword Magic Tool is an amazing tool for uncovering some easy-to-rank longtail keywords. If you will look at the top, you’ll see the word count blank. In here, you can put 4 to 6 or more. This can be an easy way to uncover some longtails. This is powerful. I think that Google Keyword Planner doesn’t have anything like this.
Did you know that you can also use SEMRush to steal keywords from your competitors? SEMRush is not just a keyword tool. It is an all-in-one tool that is designed to analyze everything so that you can strategize your marketing efforts.
You can do this by just plugging your competitor’s URL in the Domain Overview section.
This may be the part that you are familiar with. You’ll often see these reports when people talk about SEMRush. It contains the domain and the organic search, paid search, backlinks and display advertising.
But you should not get lost in all of that. You should try to look at their keywords instead.
When you click 'View Full Report', you’ll instantly see all of their keywords and their rankings.
From here, you can refine it to only include longtails. This will help you uncover the keywords that they are ranking for but are pretty easy to steal.
Once you have your keywords, you can now optimize your website and backlinks for better search engine rankings. Search engine rankings give you more traffic. And with more traffic comes more sales.
When you are marketing online, you are not only trying to prove the value of your product to your customers. You also need to prove that you are the better choice compared to the millions of competitors vying for their attention.
This is where competitor analysis comes in. This is where you will use some tools to look at what your competitor is doing so that you can break their strategy.
For this, I am going to use a tool called Ahrefs. This will help you look at all the facets of your competitor so that you can hit them where it hurts.
Ahrefs is known as the only tool that can have an accurate harvest of a website’s backlinks. This means that once you plug in a domain, it will show you all of its past and future backlinks in one go. It is that powerful.
However, there is a part of Ahrefs that is even more powerful than that. And it is the Alerts section. This is where you can set up Alerts when a website gets a new backlink. Pretty neat, if you’ll ask me.
Doing it is simple. Just go the Alerts section on top and set up a new alert. Then, input your desired URL and choose the mode, scope and the recipients.
From here, all you need to do is wait until the website gets a new backlinks and snag the backlink just when it is fresh.
It goes the same way with brand mentions. If your product is in direct competition with another website’s product, you can set up an alert for that but through mentions. This way, you can alter the search query.
From here, you’ll immediately get a heads up whenever someone mentions their product or brand.
Here’s what you can do with this strategy. You can do two things. First, you can steal the backlink. However, not all backlinks can be stolen. Some backlinks can be elusive. Next, you can steal their strategy. Now that you know how a website is getting backlinks, you now have an idea on how you can build yours.
What does breaking the competitor’s strategy has to do with you? It helps you leverage what they have - their traffic and search engine position. Once you have access to these, it is easier to catapult to greater sales.
Often people think that marketing online is some systematic method of setting up a website and then marketing to get sales. But if it was that easy, then everyone should be making money. Here’s the thing. You need to go beyond what everyone else is doing if you want to be successful. If you are just doing the same amount of work as the next man, you’ll never be able to win. So go out there. Break through your routine. Strive to be more than normal and employ some strategies that are designed to gain you more sales.