ShopSite Quickstart Guide

Internet Marketing

After building her store, Tina visits the ShopSite Help page and reads a document called Promoting Your Site. It's a to-do-list for new online merchants which guides her, step-by-step, through marketing her products online.

In it, she learns how to list her site with search engines and Internet directories for free, learns how to ask the owners of Web sites to make links to her site, and gets some tips on Internet advertising. Doing a little research, she discovers that there's a very popular Web site called Toy Town which highlights and reviews new toys. They have a links page that lists toy related Web sites, so Tina writes to the Webmaster there:

Hello, my name is Tina Tortellini and I absolutely love your Web site. I just discovered it today. I took your classic toys trivia quiz. I'm exploring the net today primarily because I just opened a new online store, Tina's Toys, and I'm trying to get the word out. Could you please add me to your links list? Also, I noticed you accept advertising. Please send me your rates, and give me an idea how many impressions per day my ad can expect. Thanks, Tina.

Later that day Tina receives e-mail telling her that she would be added to the links page and that she could advertise on the front page for $350 per month or on the "hot new toys" page for $150. The new toys page gets 6000 accesses per month while the front page gets 15,000. However, Tina decides that the people who visit the Hot New Toys page are more likely to buy her products anyway, so she calculates an approximate cost per thousand impressions for the ad space (also known as CPM, the standard measurement for Web advertising) and it comes out to $25 CPM, which is a reasonable rate.

Nevertheless, she decides to go for a month or so without paying for advertising, and she arranges for several more free links, spending two or three hours a day browsing the Web, e-mailing Webmasters, posting to the alt.toys.forsale newsgoup, and corresponding with her customers. Her traffic slowly climbs, but after she decides to pay for a trial month running the ad her traffic doubles overnight. At first, people mostly just look and don't buy, but then, as they return to the site later, which they bookmarked, the orders start coming in.

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