How your Online Store Can Compete Against the Big Guys

Let’s face it, you probably don’t have anywhere near the advertising budget of e-stores like Amazon, Buy and Zappos. So how can you carve out a piece of the billions of dollars spent every year online by consumers. The key to building a successful online store is finding a niche and offering the best possible information, products and prices. The bigger players in the e-commerce world win by simple brute force advertising and technology dollars. They can ensure that their site will be visible by pumping millions of dollars into pay per click advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing. Where they typically fail is in organic rankings. Due to the sheer volume of their product catalogs, companies like Amazon have a difficult time getting solid overall organic rankings. This is where you can slide in and grab a piece of consumer traffic. First find a niche market or product offering preferably one that is of interest to you. This is important due to the amount of online marketing that you will need to do the first year or so after your store launches. A niche offering also allows you to better focus and therefore dominate specific keyword phrases. Once you have found your niche market, use Google’s keyword tool to see how many searches are done each month of your desired keyword phrases. This will give you a good idea on the market size and what it will take to rank your site near the top of the rankings.