How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Whether you are just starting your own print-on-demand store or you’ve been around for a while, updating your marketing methods is super important to keep bringing traffic to your store. Refreshing your techniques to get even better results is just good business practice to sell more t-shirts! So let’s go over a few methods that are 100% proven to increase website traffic.
What You’ll Find:
- 1. Paid Ads
- 2. Engage with Social Media
- 3. Get Your Friends & Family to Help Out!
- 4. Improve Your SEO for Better Discoverability
- 6. Contest & Giveaways
- 7. Offer Special Deals
- 8. Reach Out to Bloggers
- 9. Create Blog Posts on Popular Products
A Few Things to Consider Before
Finding new ways to encourage your audience to go to your shop is challenging. But before you go ahead and read all about how to bring traffic to your website, there are a few things to consider.
- First, you need to ask yourself, is your product good?
- What does the cost-benefit look like?
- Do you understand who your target market is?
Figuring out what your audience looks for in you is golden to driving more traffic to your website. Before you go all crazy and start sending tons of traffic to your site, make sure it is optimized for sales!
- Is the buying process easy and clear? Do you have a clear call to action?
Also, remember that photography is key!
- Is your store displaying stunning images in high-resolution to show the best face of your products?
✨ Don’t miss out: The Ultimate Guide to Inclusive Web Design + Tips on How to Do It
1. Paid Ads
Paid
A great way to drive traffic to your website is to pay for it. With paid ads, you are ensuring you get your shop in front of your target audience. Google allows you to advertise directly to people who are actually looking for a business like yours. It allows you to identify where your audience is coming from and geo-target them to get better results.
Paid Ads work great by making small investments. It is a pay-per-click strategy where you can target particular niches. This means you only pay for traffic that actually falls into your ad.
You can display your ads in Google’s search results, on other websites, on apps, on YouTube, and so on.
By running campaigns on Google Ads, you will be advertising in both the largest search engines, Google and YouTube.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are great to run a retargeting campaign to get the most out of the traffic you are already getting.
Instagram Ads
Instagram is an incredibly popular social media site. Creating Instagram ads can really help you bring targeted traffic to your website. Make sure you sign up for a business account. As a brand, you can add links from the start to your stories, vs. a personal account, you should have at least 10k followers.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest is the modern search engine for the female audience. So showcasing your shop and other merch on very well-targeted Pinterest ads is a great idea if your audience includes or is majorly women. Pinterest ads blend seamlessly with all the content, so people don’t really notice it’s an ad when they add it to their boards.
2. Engage with Social Media
Free
Social media allows you to get near your audience with casual conversations. You can share stories, videos, images, live streams, and more unique content for your following. Encourage conversations with the right audience. Allowing them to see who you are and what’s behind the scenes.
Social media channels allow brands and stores like yours to get really close and personal with their target. You can also build communities around the same interests, for example, Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, and so on.
You should give your followers special deals to show them it’s worth it to follow you on social media.
Influencer Marketing
Now, this is super important; there is quite a hype going around about contacting influencers and getting them to promote your shop. Stepping out of your network is a great move! But first, you really need to think if that specific influencer you have in mind shares your brand’s values and if their audience can be your audience. So before contacting an influencer, you need to make sure they are a good brand fit.
It’s also important that you review what their engagement rate is. They might have thousands of followers, but if their publications have very little engagement, you will not be dealing with an enthusiastic audience.
The beautiful thing about influencer marketing is that it is a promotion that is very natural; you can leave your brand to your influencer’s creativity, generating referral traffic to your store. Maybe you will learn a thing or two from them.
You can send free samples to land an influencer. Ask for reviews of your products. You could even write a blog post featuring various influencers and their review of your product!
Use sites like TRIBE, Awario, or others to find influencers that may be relevant to your shop.
- Update your Instagram bio, including a link to your store, contact info, and an awesome description.
- Use stories to show your store’s human side, the behind-the-scenes. Show your newest designs and always link back to your store.
- Sync your store to your Instagram profile so that customers can buy your products directly from your shop.
Pinterest acts as a search engine more than a social media.
- Before joining a board, make sure you read the board’s rules.
- You can also create your own boards. Each board should reflect all your relevant keywords.
- Set your Facebook pixel on your shop so that you can collect data from that site.
- You can integrate Facebook shops and direct them to your website.
3. Get Your Friends & Family to Help Out!
Free
This might sound silly, but it is not! Getting your social circles to share your products, shop, and social media is the first step to getting people interested. This is especially important if you are just starting out.
4. Improve Your SEO for Better Discoverability
Free
Search engine optimizations make your website more reachable for people who are searching for specific products. Tune your website to rank high with different SEO tips.
What is SEO?
“Search engine optimization” is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility.
Keywords
Choosing the right keywords can make all the difference. Probably the most essential is the main keyword you are going for. You can identify your better ranking pages using tools like Moz Toolbar.
A keyword is a term by which your audience might search for your products. So when a search is done, there is a link between your titles, tags, descriptions, slugs, meta titles, and the keyword in search. Make a list of high-value pages you’d like to rank better and work on them.
To improve your shop’s SEO:
- Add internal links using anchor texts related to their keywords.
- Optimize your site structure for SEO.
- Find and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
- Add breadcrumbs to your product categories to instantly create internal links.
- Write titles that match search intent; for example, when choosing how to name your product between shirt, tee, or t-shirt, you would have to search each term’s volumes on your specific target market. Use keyword tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Ads, or others.
- Use your keywords on your meta titles, descriptions, and tags.
- Write irresistible descriptions. We recommend you try an SEO plug-in or site to help you out with this; Yoast is a great plugin for websites.
🔥 Check out our Top SEO Tips for POD sellers
Long-Tail Variations
You need a main keyword, we discussed that, but you also need other long-tail keyword variations that are very specific. For example long sleeve t-shirts for Halloween.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets can change the way Google’s search shows your shops in its results. When you add a proper description, images, price ranges, reviews, and more, your store traffic increases.
Considering tons of brands might be going for that very same term, you will probably find it really hard to jump to the first place. For example, you are ranking for “sports bra” can you imagine your competition? This is why it is super important to use your keyword variations. Seo is a constant practice that can always be improved.
This is, however, a long-term strategy to bring in more traffic. Properly optimizing your website will bring in results slowly; however, once it hits the right spot, it is the best! You can always hire an expert if this feels too overwhelming or find out more on this t-shirt SEO guide.
Take a Sneak Peek at Your Competition
Mainly you want to take a look at which keywords they are using for their own shops. Whatever topics they cover, you can also use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to look at your competition’s performance.
5. Post Your Store on Reddit
Free
Reddit is a collection of forums with a long-time community that is very proactive among themselves and thousands of niches called subreddits! You can find subreddits on nearly any subject. You can share your experience or ask other more experienced merch sellers about their own techniques.
So basically, you look for discussions that might be interesting to your brand and then simply join. Reddit is also a great place to build a community around your merch.
- To look attractive, create a catchy headline, add an image, and add a link to your shop.
- Pay close attention to their rules because you should know it’s pretty easy to get canceled on Reddit.
6. Contest & Giveaways
Free / Paid
Contests are a great way to increase social media engagement and drive traffic to your website.
Offer exciting prices and encourage participation. There are special tools to help you add your contest and giveaways to your landing pages and posts like Vyper, SweetWidget, and so on.
Contests and giveaways can bring instant traffic to your website and social media, which is also super helpful for your brand awareness and social engagement. You can also use this tactic to gather leads to increase your email list.
7. Offer Special Deals
Free / Paid
Offering time-sensitive deals gives your audience the urgency to act on your shop. Trigger the hype by offering 50% off, flash sales, free shipping, BOGO (buy one get one free), and more.
Use your social media and/or your email to promote these.
8. Reach Out to Bloggers
Free
- Offer real value for other bloggers to be interested in your store. Ask yourself what’s in it for them.
- You can guest post on blogs; a guest blog post typically links back to your shop on someone else’s website. These links on external websites are called backlinks, and as you have more of these, your store will rank higher on Google!
9. Create Blog Posts on Popular Products
Free
Content marketing is a bit complex, but you should know people want more than a product; they want to learn about, learn how to use it. They want to find value in what you sell. So give it to them!
Blogging is great when done correctly because you get to add links to all your relevant pages.
- Create content of interest for your audience; for example, if you sell sportswear for hikers, you can make a “10 products you must-have on every hike” post.
- People are continuously looking for how-to content.
- Share tutorials or descriptive content on your products.
10. Affiliate Program
Free
Offer commissions on every sale for your affiliates; these could also be social media influencers.
They could make money from every new referred customer that buys in your shop! This makes them feel more involved and motivated with your brand.
And that’s a wrap! What are your thoughts? Leave a comment for us!