In Part 1 of How to make a website to sell online, we explored various methods to make a website with or without knowing how to code. The reality is that it’s fairly easy to get your website up and running as long as you are clear on your objectives.

Now, that’s the easy part. The reality of success in selling online is the ability to drive traffic from the right target market to your site. There is no point drawing visitors who are not interested in the product you are promoting online.

In general, people get to your site either by typing your site URL on the address bar, or through links from other sites. This means that you’ll need to have links on other websites so that your customers can get to your site.

How to build incoming links

To get the right target visitors, you’ll need incoming links from other sites related to your products. This can be done through link exchanges with other websites. Alternatively, building links through social book-marking, website contributions, article marketing and forum participation are some of the other ways you can use to generate traffic.

Social bookmarking lets you share your website bookmarks with others online. Popular social bookmark sites include - www.digg.com, www.reddit.com, del.icio.us, links.hubspot.com and www.mister-wong.com. Each time you bookmark a site, you are in fact, adding a link to your website from these social bookmarking sites. If you are selling online through a blog, you are then able to create an incoming link each time you write a new blog post.

Writing value-added articles related to your product and incorporating links to your website within your article are also helpful in promoting your website. www.ezinearticles.com, www.isnare.com, www.articlemarketer.com and www.goarticles.com are some of the more popular article submission sites.

If you are comfortable exchanging links, you may want to do so with other websites which may be targeting the same target market as you. For instance, if you are selling women’s shoes, you may want to try exchanging links with sites that are selling women’s bags.

Forum participation in Google Groups and answering questions in Yahoo! Answers are also other great ways to help increase incoming links to your website.

Search Engine Optimize the right way

Customers may also locate you through Search Engines. Unfortunately, there are usually thousands or even millions of search results whenever you search with a keyword. For example, there are literally 42 million websites in Google’s search results list for the keyword “women’s shoes” alone.

Thus, if you are launching a new website, it would be next to impossible to get your site listed on the first or second page. How then, can you get your site listed?

The key here is to identify a list of niche keywords related to your product, but are generally less competitive in terms of search results. Typically, good niche keywords average of between 50 - 300 searches a day, with less than 30000 sites listed for unique keyword searches.

This is explained in detail in my previous posts on How to Identify Niche Items to Sell Online () and How to Generate Ideas on What to Sell Online.

Online advertising

Building links and getting your site listed on search engines may take some time to take effect. Therefore, if you are willing to spend some marketing dollars to get traffic to your site, online advertising could be a viable option.

Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, Kontera Ads and Chitika are amongst the more popular online keyword advertising, or contextual advertising, available. Search engine ads appear on ad sections within search engine results page, while content ads appear on websites or blogs publishing these ads on their web pages.

Google Adwords is amongst the most widely used and popular advertising tools used online today. However, this also means that many advertisers are competing for the same keywords, subsequently driving up the price per-click.

With many businesses realizing the beauty of Google Adwords, heavy competition has driven the per-click costs up. On specific circumstances, Google even raises the per-click price to US$5 per click, a hefty sum that only large corporations can afford. Google also uses specific methods to determine the quality score of your landing page. In fact, a recent post on Google’s blog reveals that the loading time of your webpage will soon be used to determine the ranking of your ad.

Other variables utilized to determine ad ranking include the combination of keywords you pick for your ad, as well as the use of these keywords in the ad content.

With all these constraints, using Google Adwords the wrong way may mean spending a whole lot of advertising dollars in vain. This occurs when ads are clicked by the wrong target market, especially when content ads appear on unrelated websites.

On the flip side however, if you know the right strategies to beat Google Adwords, you have in your hands a powerful tool to channel traffic to your website. Many experienced internet marketers depend on Google Adwords as their core web traffic source, and are skilled at creating text ads that are able to stand out from competing ads.

One of the resources I’ve found truly useful on conquering Google Adwords would be the Adwords System Exposed by Mindvalley. Read my Review on Adwords System Exposed to get an idea on the content of this book.

In conclusion, making a website to sell online is an easy thing to do. However, the success of your website really depends on your ability to drive traffic to your site. The sheer volume of targeted traffic will help increase the probability of you making a sale.