I've been alerted to a new article by Niccolina (Gather) today, which outlines 9 simple yet effective marketing tips for eCommerce web sites.

1) Asking visitors to bookmark your Web site. This is a quick and low-cost strategy. Overall, site visitors who've bookmarked your site can find it a lot easier and are more likely to visit it repeatedly.

2) One of best ways to get repeat visitors to an eCommerce site is to make regular updates. If you upload fresh and relevant content all the time, and if you keep the site current, it will give them more reasons to visit more often, and it helps search engines to index your site regularly when you update it.

3) You may want to acquire banners or exchange similar banners or links with other complementary sites that are similar to your's, without being in direct competition with your site.

4) Boost your PageRank and site visibility by buying links that will point to your Web site.

5) Have you ever thought of a blog? A blog (or Web Log) offers you the opportunity to provide your visitors with newer and more personal content. Let your visitors know what's going on with your online store. Some blogging platforms can be more flexible than others, and can offer more features that are user-friendly. The key to this is staying on it, visitors will know that the last time you posted was 5 years ago!

6) Write a newsletter or make available a relevant mailing list for your existing customers as well as new prospects that come to your site. Visitors who sign up to receive eMails from you are already interested in what you have to offer. It's relatively easy to further entice them to come back and become customers with something valuable you send them regularly.

7) Press releases are a great way to achieve low-cost exposure on your Web site and build more links for search engine optimization reasons and again, to increase your traffic. Press releases can be posted online with a link to your site, included in your press kit and fowarded to the media.

8) Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising is also a great way to complement and further boost qualified traffic to any eCommerce Web site. Google, MSN and Yahoo offers such PPC ads. When you conduct a search using either of these search engines, take notice of the advertisements that come up to the right of the results pages. (The ones on the left are what is called the organic search results). PPC ads are usually geared towards the search query you entered. You can pay to have your link come up as an advertisement whenever someone searches for specific keywords that are relevant to your products or services.

9) Submit your site to some good pay-for-inclusion search directories, whether they are specialized or not.]]>