The most effective way to advertise an online store

I’ve long been puz­zling over how to tell whether online adver­tis­ing works.

Which kind of adver­tis­ing should you start with? What should you choose on a very tight budget? Where should a begin­ner in online busi­ness turn?

I’ve noticed that the people who build online stores often know prac­ti­cally noth­ing about adver­tis­ing online. They either come from offline busi­ness or have no busi­ness expe­ri­ence at all. Part of the blame may lie with how under­de­vel­oped con­tex­tual adver­tis­ing still is here, and how little “the gen­eral public” there­fore knows about it.

For exam­ple, I came across a pro­mo­tion plan for an inter­net project that had 7 items, 6 of them tra­di­tional offline adver­tis­ing, includ­ing hand­ing out leaflets and flyers. The one remain­ing item (the first, which at least is right) was about “pro­mo­tion in search engines”.

In my very humble opin­ion, tra­di­tional offline adver­tis­ing is of highly ques­tion­able use for pro­mot­ing an online project.

(Go on, prove me wrong with numbers!)

So here’s some advice for people start­ing out online, and not only for them. It’s based on my own (not that exten­sive) experience (!).

Try adver­tis­ing in prod­uct cat­a­logs and price aggregators. So far it’s the most effec­tive way I know to adver­tise prod­ucts online.1

Here are the sys­tems of this kind I know. The first 5 are the most pop­u­lar gen­eral prod­uct cat­a­logs, each part of a big parent portal:

And the spe­cial­ist aggre­ga­tors (mostly electronics):

Yevgeny Shevchenko, aka Ace, describes how they work clearly enough:

One of the most effec­tive chan­nels for pro­mot­ing an online store is, with­out doubt, plac­ing your price lists on price-comparison sites. This is usu­ally done by export­ing data on your prod­ucts and prices in an XML file, or some other way. The prod­ucts land in the match­ing cat­e­gories of the price-comparison sites, where thou­sands of users can see them and, if the price suits them, follow the link to your online store to buy.

Further read­ing, by the same Yevgeny: Effective ways to promote an online store.

Footnotes

  1. I’m leav­ing SEO out, because it isn’t quite advertising. I may be wrong about that. ↩