Make sure your Ecommerce Marketing is Diversified and You Have a Plan B

Recent outages at major social media sites reminded me how important it is not to put all your eggs in one basket with your internet marketing efforts.You need traffic and sales from many sources to help insure the stability of your business and protect it from changes in the internet landscape.

Change can Be Bad if You Don't Have Plan B

You never know when a traffic source will change in cost, change the rules of the game, or just not want to play with you any more.

For example, say your SEO efforts have really paid off and you get 70% of your ecommerce sales as a result of Google organic (non-paid) listings.  Sounds great doesn't it?  But it's not necessarily a good thing. That could change significantly at any time due to changes in ranking algorithms, your site, or perhaps a "misunderstanding" that causes you to get penalized or banned.  I'm aware of sites that are afraid to make the slightest change on the main pages of their site, even allowing their site to become stale  because so many of their visitors come from key google rankings and they are afraid a change could alter their rankings.

The same applies to paid listings in search engines or comparison shopping engines.  You might get great ROI (return on investment) from a given source one day, and then find in the future that it has become cost prohibitive, perhaps due to new competition, click fraud, or even changes in how listings are displayed on the service.

Paid listings are also harder to sustain in an economic downturn because shoppers may shop more, going to more sites, causing lots of clicks, looking for bargains and window shopping more than in the past, making some paid listings hard to turn a profit on.

You will sleep much easier at night and have the confidence to plan for the future of your ecommerce business if your traffic and sales comes from a robust combination of the following sources:

Ten Ecommerce Traffic Sources to Include in Your Diversified Marketing Plan:

1. Pay per click programs such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Microsoft).  Google is the heavyweight here, but better to use several, which will also allow you to compare ROI between engines.
2. Search engine optimization.  Working to get good incoming links and intelligently designing your site and creating great content that will naturally draw traffic.
3. Blog marketing - Search engines like blogs because content tends to be fresh.  Have your own blog and also encourage other blogs to link to you.  Offer them products for reviews or send them press releases about interesting things going on at your site.  Post comments on related blogs and include your url in your signature.  You never know who will see it, check it out and post about your site.
4. Friends and Family programs.  Offer customers and their friends a bonus, discount or freebie for referrals. 
5. Bookmarking -- encourage others to bookmark and share your content by signing up with a service like AddThis  This also creates links to your site which are good for search engine optimization.
6. Email Marketing - customers who have purchased from you or signed up for emails voluntarily on your site can be one of the lowest cost, effective marketing channels. 
7. Shopping comparison engines, both paid and free.  Paid include Shopzilla, Shop.com, Become.com and Free include Froogle.com (Google product search)
8. Contests can create a lot of buzz about your site.  The best contests are ones where users have to take some action other than just submitting a form, such as creating a video, tweeting about you on Twitter, or writing "why I want to win this product in 25 words or less"
9. Social media marketing.  Make use of Twitter and Facebook and encourage your customer to "follow" and "friend" you.  They are then a ready source of traffic when you post about what's new, interesting, or a great deal.
10. If you market in a niche, be sure to explore all the related sites in your niche to see which will allow you to be listed in a directory, buy inexpensive advertising, or publish articles with a link to your site.

The above is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but a starting point and reminder to think about how many traffic and revenue sources you have.  Even if you are relatively diversified now, you can always expand your marketing so that you are further cushioned from changes in the ecommerce marketing landscape.

A final reminder is to spend time keeping up with trends in ecommerce marketing so that you can take advantage of opportunities as they arise, especially low cost and free ones like Froogle, Twitter and Facebook, all of which are relatively new on the scene.