Two mega-tips that cost nothing but your time:
- befriend Google – optimize your site (topic relevant and keyword rich content – focus on product categories and products including variants / atributes, mobile-ready, page load times) and do some content marketing on-site and off-site to create valuable inbound links as well as drive traffic from search results
- do some growth hacking on your site – set up serious analytics tools (funnels, targets) and start grinding data, identify bottlenecks and traffic sources, optimize those, start building email database of your visitors and social media followers, then use promotions (per product, per user or user category and per user action like ‘add to cart’) to stimulate repeat business, gather user feedback and social media recommendations in exchange for even more promotions, play with gamification and user contributed content (unique content goldmine)
Bottom line – before you start spending money on marketing use your head. It costs only your time and brainsmarts. And some minimal site customization (paste some code here, put a widget there, setup a custom promotion somewhere else).
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