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Online Shopping Mall Listing for Your Small Online Store? Using Online Malls and Shopping Directories To Market Your Store Advertising and marketing your online shop these days can mean doing a lot of different things and trying many different methods. Some work better than others. Using online directories that relate to your product or store is a good way to attract targeted traffic. There are a number of good shopping directory websites, product comparison shopping websites or online shopping malls that you can list your website in for free or a small fee. What You Should Know: » Online sales are up around 28% for most online retailers this year. Why? Because it's faster, easier to compare pricing, more convenient, more timely deals and people are getting more comfortable with online buying every year. Additionally, the average item to be purchased online many years ago was a book or coffee mug. Today people are purchasing furniture, computers, big televisions and lots of clothing. » The problem for the small business websites is unless you are Sears, Target or REI with name brand products; you will have to get creative with marketing in order to sell anything. Having a name brand is great but small shops can get around this by researching their nitch and knowing their vertical. What need does your product fill in your customer’s life? » A pay for listing in an online shopping mall for example could be a great way for the small business person trying to attract quality targeted shoppers into their small shop website. Not all online malls are created equally or even attract enough traffic to make their fees worthwhile. Many online shopping malls can have confusing navigation or list out so many pages of shops that if your shop name starts with an “R” you may end up on page 30 of women’s clothing for example. » There are some other things to consider when you are looking at a place to list your online shop. Be sure to find out the directories’ pricing and billing plan, how fast will your listing be posted, do you have the ability to update your listing, how easy it will be for a shopper to find your listing and how much traffic the shopping mall or directory gets on a monthly basis. Get Listed! » First, try searching for "online shopping", or “online shopping mall” or a similar directory type term, in a search engine. Some of the top websites that come up will be online shopping malls or shopping sites like Yahoo or MSN. Many of these directories or online malls will be strictly affiliate driven websites that only list those big name brands or products so these may not even list your shop. (If your product is already popular and well recognized setting up your own affiliate program and soliciting this type of mall could work perfectly for you.) Many of the directories you will find will list your website for free, as part of a link exchange or for a small fee per month or year. » As you can see there are a number of things to look at when doing online advertising and marketing for your online store. By placing your link on a popular online shopping mall website or online directory you can attract more traffic to your website from the major search engines. Using an online shopping mall or directory as an advertising method is also a great way of targeting people looking to purchase your product. Overtime these listings will also increase your websites link popularity with the search engines, this is always good. For more information check these out: First Stop Shops Online Shopping Mall our very own online shopping mall created from the above research. Online Advertising at About.com. Yahoo Virtual Mall listings. All Business small business resources. |
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