Why you need more than one website to effectively sell online

Many people who sell online, get themselves a website, put up a few products and then sit back and wonder why they don’t receive any orders.

Unfortunately, obtaining a website and populating it with your products is the easy part – it’s the promotion of the website that will ultimately attract visitors. For this you will require very specific strategies, and this is where the creation of further websites (feeder-sites) come into their own. Your feeder sites don’t have to be full ecommerce sites, blog sites are ideal as long as you can keep the information updated fairly regularly.

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Two of the easiest blog sites to use are Blogger (https://www.blogger.com/start) and WordPress (http://wordpress.com/); both allow you to sign up for free accounts. Once you have your account set up, make sure you edit your profile and include a link to your main website or e-commerce site that you wish to promote. Then start posting informative content about your products and services. Be sure to include the occasional link you to your main site.

To obtain the most benefit from this, it is best to include an anchor link text and link specifically to the URL of the page of the specific product or service you are blogging about. This is known as deep linking and will help establish the authority of your main site.

When you are using this strategy to promote your website, do not include a link back from your main site to your blog. If you do this the link will be viewed as a reciprocal link, and will not carry any weight with search engines – the links effectively cancel each other out.

Other strategies to use to build quality links are to post information about your main site in your Facebook page or MySpace profile. In fact with Facebook there is even a facility to create a fan page about your business and promote it to your friends and family. Get your social network to help spread the word about your business. The value of social networking in this way cannot be underestimated.

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