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- Your Wholesale Business & Angry Customers
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Traffic Generating Tips for the Online Wholesaler
By Sarah Pearson Published: 04/02/2009
Whether you have a fully functional online store to sell your wares, or an online catalog where customers must call you to place an order, or anything in between, you need traffic to your website in order to make those sales. One great way of bringing in visitors is by adding some useful content to your website other than product descriptions, shipping information, and other strictly business or ordering related information. Adding informational articles to your site not only provides the opportunity for the search engine spiders to crawl your website more often, but it also helps establish you as an expert in your field or area of service, and inspires confidence in your potential customers.
So what kind of content should you add? The easiest and most effective types of content are how-to guides. For example, if you sell kitchen cabinet hardware or lighting fixtures, including some how-to guides that illustrate how to install these things, or how to choose the right kind of hardware to fit the customer's needs are two articles that are both useful to the potential customer and useful to you. Anyone searching for information on how to install kitchen cabinet hardware will find your article in the search engines and come see what you have to say about it. The more useful the article was to them, the more likely they are to stay and make a purchase – and keep coming back.
Brainstorm some ideas for articles – in addition to the how-to guide ideas, you could also do histories of certain types of products, explain how some of your products work, or provide reviews of products. Once you have a good list of topics worked up, then you can get down to writing them. You can do this yourself (a technique known in Internet marketing circles as “bum marketing,” because it's marketing that does not cost you anything but time) or you can hire a writer to write them up for you.
Either way, there are a few things to keep in mind in order to make the most of your article efforts. First, the articles must be easy to read. Keep them short and to the point. If it's a how-to guide, then using bullet points and as much white space on the page as possible is paramount. Second, make sure that the article contains your keywords in it several times – but do not overdo it. Those keywords are what the search engines are looking for, so you need them in there, but if you use them too many times, the article becomes difficult to read or doesn't make much sense, and that defeats your purpose. Keep your articles relevant, to the point, and helpful, and you will soon see a surge in both traffic and sales on your website!
