Looking for fresh ideas for a fresh start...
First let me give you some background on what I'm working with...
Recently a friend of mine asked me to help promote his web store. He went in for that Jeff Paul scheme you see at 5 am in infomercials... he had no idea what he was doing to start out and did minimal research. After he'd asked me to get involved I found a million holes in his plans and after some strategizing he decided to scrap the original site. His original plan was way too broad... the site name said it all... theoneplacetoshoponline.com. After seeing some feedback from other warriors he finally got what I was telling him. He needed a niche to market to. So now we're back to the drawing board. He's decided to go with the somewhat smaller catagory of Home Decor.
Now for my question... What can I do to make this site launch well and build relativily quickly? I know its a long process but knowlege is king and i love learning new ways to do things...
Here's what I'm planning as of now...
I can get a few hits from social sites like twitter and facebook, but I know that conversions from these will be few and far between until I get a respectable following... I'm going to get him indexed on some search engines and web rings. I know the basics of SEO but I'm not sure how to implement this other than maybe posting blogs about products on the site. Any tips on that would be helpful. I'd like to get a mailing list going for site deals and such, though I still have a lot of research ahead of me on how to implement it and exactly what kind of service to go with for it. I know I can probably get a few hits from posting in forums and such on the subject and either direct people to the general site or to specific products, or just through my signature... but that seems like the long way around.
Really I don't have a budget to work with until we get a couple of sales for it so paid adverts are out for the launch at least. I'm thinking maybe link swaps might help but this will probably serve us better when we're established and have some healthy traffic so we're attractive to another site so they might get some of our traffic in exchange for theirs.
So warriors, any advice, fresh ideas or ways I can improve what I already have ready for implementation?
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