1st time building website ....how do you drive awareness/traffic?

[Raj]

My wife and I started a small business, thequirkylizard hand stamped jewelry, I have recently designed thequirkylizard.com .....it has only been live for about a week. But I am hardly getting any movement....how can I get people on here without spending money because I really do not have any extra to market with....thanks!

[Jamila]

Are you trying to optimize locally or globally? If you aim for local, get your business listed in Google Places for Business first. Then optimize your listing using this strategy:

http://www.webmarketingquote.com/google-...nk-on-top/

You could learn a lot handling small business internet marketing from here:

[Jake]

Realistically it takes money to make money most of the time.

Your alternative is to make a significant labor investment into SEO, Social Media, Bum marketing promotion. Or to list in establashed marketplaces that drive established traffic to your page, often a company site is still needed as well. Ebay, Amaon are general marketplaces that would get some exposure, Etsy.com and bigcartel.com are made for creative types (Etsy charges 40 cents per item listed + 6% of sales)

You can write a press release and submit it to a couple of free press release distribution sites, you would probably have to pay someone like prweb.com $89 to get it picked up by mainstream media.

You can send press kit info to jewelry related blogs, maybe sending samples to influential sites.

Many big successful sites spent years promoting the business before making profits.


You load speed is a bit slow, it causes a higher Bonce Rate (people who leave, sometimes before the home page has loaded) You need to pre-scale the slide show images to the on screen size, you can probably make those files 10x smaller.
(clear your browser cache to better get a feel for the first time visit delays)

[Carlos]

Nice clean site! I would suggest that you change the title tag for SEO purposes. Your keywords should be on the front of the title, NOT the back. Perhaps you can change it to:
Hand Stamped Jewelry: Stainless Steel Jewelry by The Quirky Lizard.
As well you need to put an ABOUT page. People like to know who and where they are buying from. I have no clue if you are in the US, India, or China! I could find out, but not needed here.
But, depending on where you live, you can start promoting it on local sites. Get a Facebook page and get LIKES. There are several other ways to increase traffic, as well. Good luck.

[Lonnie]

Paper.li allows users to create their own online newspaper through links shared on Facebook and Twitter. Once set up Paper.li automatically collects links from within Facebook or Twitter, organizes them into an easy-to-read newspaper format, complete with imagery, headlines, and article descriptions. Subscribers receive their online newspaper each day filled with top stories around the same content topic as your website. It’s a great way for you to automatically aggregate online content relevant to your website topic and push it out to your online community.

On a daily basis a new paper.li newspaper is created around your topic. If you’re on Twitter, you can configure the system to tweet your Paper.li newspaper automatically. You can also promote your newspaper manually by promoting the URL on your social networks. For full integration we recommend that you embed your online daily newspaper into your website.

[Neeta]

Hii

You can doh email marketing, you can set up a email marketing campaign and contact people about that, googled and found a product on ebay , may be it will hep. please have a look .

http://goo.gl/B1JFM
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Worldwide-Email-...257e7469f2

[mousumi]

First of all congratulations for your new expedition.

To build traffic what you have to do is to promote your site which you can do without investing a penny. Use social networking sites to promote your site. Post some relevant information based on your business and its products on websites or blogs that hold large number of online visitors. You can post unique and effective content on your site as well. Your content should be appealing enough to attrat web traffic. All these above mentioned vital points help you gain backlinks which will prove beneficial to your site resulting in having a better SEO rank and if you have a better rank in search engines then you will automatically gain huge number of web traffic. Lets sum up,

Your content must be strong enough as well as unique.
Do better work on keywords.
Building up natural links pointing to your site.
Promote your site on social networking sites.
Post guest articles on renowned blogs.