Anyone with an ecommerce dropship business needs to use good marketing techniques, so it might help you to get some pointers on what NOT to do.
Marketing is important.
It drives traffic to your dropship website or listings and without that oh so important traffic and a steady stream of potential customers, your dropship business would wither on the vine….and eventually die.
In ecommerce, you can’t simply adopt a policy of “if you build, it they will come” because it isn’t true.
You can build the best website to be found anywhere on the World Wide Web or create the most fantastic listings on Amazon or eBay; but without marketing, your dropship product sales will suffer.
While it’s vital to have a good understanding of which marketing tactics to use for effectively driving traffic to your dropship products, it is probably equally important to have a fundamental grasp of what not to do.
What NOT to Do in Ecommerce Marketing
While there are a number of things that shouldn’t be done in ecommerce marketing, let’s look at three of the very worst:
I. Black Hat SEO: Unfortunately, Black Hat SEO and article farming are still alive and kicking, although with not quite the same strength and energy as before the Google Penguin and Panda updates to the search algorithm. There are ecommerce entrepreneurs still using these marketing tactics, but we’ll see less and less of them as time goes on because Google is methodically weeding them out. What this means is that you should not, under any circumstances, stuff and cram your content with keywords for the sole purpose of boosting your rankings in search results.
Actually, doing this will have the opposite effect---you’ll not only get sent to the bottom of the pile in SERPs, you’ll probably be blacklisted for good by Google. If this happens, you are done for in ecommerce. Period. Don’t do this. The same holds true for article farming, which is the practice of hiring usually third world writers to churn out tons of ungrammatical, nonsensical and very poorly written articles crammed with keywords to get a boost in search results. Same results as Black Hat SEO and basically, part and parcel of the same. Don’t do this, either.
II. Link Farming: No, no, a thousand times no! If you are unfamiliar with link farming, that’s a good thing since it means you probably aren’t guilty of it. But, just in case you may run across this tactic someday and think it seems like a perfectly splendid idea; here’s what it means:
Link farming is the practice of setting up scads, even hundreds, of little blogs or websites for the sole purpose of linking back to your dropship website. Why would anyone do this? Because in theory, Google rewards sites with lots of back links with a boost in search engine results. In practice, however, this is true only if the links are high quality sites. If they’re nothing but ghost sites---dummies, if you will---whose only reason for living is to provide links to your reshipping website, Google will catch on PDQ and instead of rewarding you; will penalize you severely. Ouch. Don’t do this.
III. Cherry Blossoming: If you haven’t heard of this term, what it means is buying fans and followers on face book and Twitter, along with whatever other social sites you frequent for marketing purposes. This term originated in Japan, where little know celebrities, businesses and even sports teams paid people to like or follow them in order to accrue real friends and followers and thus, score points with the search engines such as Google. These professional fans are called Cherry Blossoms. Some Cherry Blossoms are bot generated accounts created for the one and only purpose of giving a company or person more social media clout. Honestly, it usually doesn’t work that way because there will be little or no interaction with Cherry Blossoms and the search engines have an uncanny knack of figuring this out. Don’t do this.
There you have three of the things NOT to do in ecommerce marketing for your dropship business! Now get busy and do the things that really will help you!
Start your own online dropship business today!