Ask HN: How To Grow An E-Commerce Site With Zero/Low Budget? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How To Grow An E-Commerce Site With Zero/Low Budget?

6 pointsecommerceme7 comments

Hey Guys,

I have an e-commerce site which, i've been running for a while now and its struggling.

How do I grow it with limited financial resources - in terms of Search Engine Rankings & of course sales!

Cheers!

Our own patio11 has written quite a bit about SEO, especially SEO with little budget; start at http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ and go on to the greatest hits (key ideas: scalable content generation, long tail keywords). Also note Patrick's love of A/B testing. There are, of course, many more general SEO resources; I think seomoz.org is mentioned often.

Note that you're getting advice that people I trust trust, I'm not exactly an expert.

Have you tried joint ventures? Implemented any affiliate marketing programs?

Created content that you can optimize keywords for and good doorway pages? There are many free resources out there online, and I think you just need to read up on the subject that you're stuck on and go from there. Try a few things and test it and see what your results are and improve from there.

based on experience I can recommend developing content around your ecommerce business and the problems the products you sell are solving, and using that to bring traffic to your site.

of course you still have to spread your content so for that you have to work on twitter, facebook, ... connect with people and help them spread the word about your content.

It depends on your niche, but publishing data feeds to Google Base and Amazon were huge for us. Amazon can be a nightmare to work with, though.

You could migrate to Shopify http://www.shopify.com

switching ecommerce systems won't solve marketing problems ... :-)

We grew our e-commerce business with extremely limited resources, as well. You'll need to be more specific about what aspects of your business you're having a difficult time with for me to be able to comprehensively answer your question.

You can start by disclosing your URL so that HN can critique things that may be negatively impact conversion rates.

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