Internet. Business. Profit.
To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.
So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful dropshipping site. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty-gritty of things, generating traffic.
If your dropshipping site isn’t getting the level of traffic you’d hope, it’s time to step up your game. To compete, you should always be a step ahead of your competition—increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.
To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways in a nutshell to increase traffic to your dropshipping store.
Table of Contents
Paid Traffic Methods for Dropshipping Stores
There are thousands of strategies for driving traffic to a website. However, it’s important to invest in the methods that are most effective specifically for dropshipping stores. Here are the top traffic strategies we recommend.
Invest in Search Engine Ads
It’s a common business notion that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. One good way of spending money for business gain is through keyword search advertising. With the right type of advertising, you can see the spurt of traffic growth to your site. With a high volume of traffic, even if only a small portion or percentage turns out to be buying customers it is still a good average of profit generating income.
Google Ads provides great advertising schemes that are very truly and can drive high-intent traffic to your store. While some beginner dropshippers shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative to do so to grow your store.
With Google Ads, you pay a certain fee depending on a lot of different factors, and you can always set a max budget to keep costs in line. Each time a person does a search in Google, the keywords used generate ads in prime locations of the Google search results. Your chosen keywords will determine which content network shall feature your ad. The frequency of your ad shall also be determined by your allowed budget
This method laser targets the traffic you want to your dropshipping store. This also ensures that you are readily visible in the first page of a search result. Paying Google for this ad placement ensures that your target group of people sees your ads.
The best way to use Google Ads for a dropshipping store is to implement Google Shopping ads. Shopping ads show at the top of the Google search results page and lead buyers directly to your products. If you’re selling sunglasses, when someone searches for sunglasses, you want your product to show up.
If your dropshipping store is created in Shopify, you can easily create the required data feed by installing the Google Shopping app. You can then set up your feeds and campaigns in Google’s Merchant Center.
Affiliates & Influencers
One of the best ways to promote dropshipping products is through influencers and affiliates. You can find influencers in your niche on Instagram and other social networks, and connect with them to reach their audience. This method is generally not completely free, so you can set up the arrangement in several ways:
- Offer free products for reviews on their profiles
- Provide affiliate commissions for any sales they bring
- Pay for promotion on their channels
When you’re in a niche with a strong influencer presence, investing in this type of promotion can drive qualified traffic fast.
Video Marketing
When you’re selling physical products, videos go a long way in showing the value to the customer. Some US dropshipping suppliers provide product videos (which means other sellers may be using them). But you can get great product videos for a few bucks plus the cost of a product over on Fiverr.
Facebook Ads
Facebook’s ad targeting allows you to show ads to the exact type of people who would want your products. You can create product ads, general store ads, or video ads. In general, video ads work best when you don’t have a strong brand name built up.
You can also implement retargeting ads, which basically “follow” people around on Facebook after they visit your site and don’t make a purchase.
Free Traffic Methods
Starting a dropshipping store requires a lot of things and, to get straight to the point, you need to invest a bit to get strong and fast traffic growth. But of course, with the versatility of the Internet, there are many ways you an optimize the potential of your store to generate free traffic. All you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.
There are plenty of tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic to your dropshipping store using only free methods. Because it is possible, you technically don’t need to speed a single cent. But to set your expectations appropriately, paid ads and methods work faster and require less time than free traffic sources. But these free options are a great place to start driving store traffic.
Niche Forums & Communities
The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. For example, if you’re in the men’s shaving niche, you can join discussions on forums like Badger and Blade. Don’t just post your links with no context. Build relationships and add value to the conversations, with links to your site as a supplement to your posts.
With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your dropshipping store. Show them what you are made of and prove your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.
Email Marketing
You can also make use of newsletters to drive traffic to your dropshipping store. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.
In general, email marketing is kind of a “cart before horse” approach where you need traffic to build an email list to drive those email subscribers back to your site. It’s a cycle. That’s where using some paid ads or influencer marketing can help you build up email subscribers and then target them continually for little or no cost.
MailChimp is an example of a free email marketing platform (up to 2,000 subscribers). But once your store grows, you’ll want to invest in a more robust email marketing tool like ConvertKit.
Social Media
One of the most effective, but time-taking, ways of driving traffic to your store is by building active social media profiles. Depending on your niche, the top social networks for driving traffic are: Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Instagram is great for showing off your product, but is sometimes hard to convert posts into traffic.
When you’re active on social media, you can share links to promotions, offers, new products, your educational articles, and more. You remind your audience frequently that you’re out there and that they should come to your site to purchase your products.
Content Marketing
Writing articles that pique the attention of people that have interest in your product can bring free traffic to your site. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.
Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Make sure it’s something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.
Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO gets a category of its own because it’s THAT important to driving traffic to your dropshipping site. It can technically be free, but the cost is a big investment of time. you may also want to invest in tools or help for accelerating your SEO ranking success.
Why You Need SEO for Free Traffic
Search engines look for keywords and a lot of other factors on the pages they show in their results page. Having the right keyword and keyword phrases, building natural links to your site, and having a mobile-friendly site are all important requirements for ranking in search engine results.
For SEO, you must write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.
Generally, Internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs. All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. It does take is a ton of effort and extended man-hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.
E-commerce is a cutthroat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a term widely used for helping your website get found by consumers searching for the product or information you provide.
Most people who use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three, is a barometer of a sites success in SEO. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your dropshipping site, the more sales you can make.
But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites—not just those that dropship—to make them selves rank higher using SEO. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.
So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. Period.
With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.
So SEO is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, which could lead to potential income and business.
How to Optimize Your Store
Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get SEO. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.
You may also need to rewrite your site’s content so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to ranking in search engines.
You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.
Track Your Store’s Traffic
With all the time and potentially money you’ll invest in getting traffic to your dropshipping store, you’ll want to set up analytics to track what’s working. You’ll be able to see which methods are driving traffic, and which are actually turning into sales.
Shopify has built-in analytics, but it’s good practice to also install Google Analytics, which provides more advanced data analysis…all for free.