How to Drive FREE Traffic to Your Shopify Store in 2021

Once you have launched your Shopify store you really want to start driving traffic to your store so you can start getting your first sales. In this video we are talking about how to get free traffic for your Shopify store as well as how to drive paid traffic to your store.

It is important to have a mix of different traffic sources to drive traffic to your store so you are not so reliant on just one traffic source. That is why we will be covering three different free Shopify traffic sources as well as two different paid Shopify traffic sources in this video.

Links Mentioned in the Video:

• Our Traffic Blueprint Online Course: https://www.curiousthemes.com/traffic
• How to Find Instagram Influencers YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/P78kGIOlYOw
• Facebook Ads vs New Apple iOS Update Video: https://youtu.be/ypaekPV5lfU

View the Full Video Transcript Below

So everyone always wants to know how do I get more traffic and sales to my Shopify store? It's a pretty good question and one I get all the time! So in this video, I want to go over a five different ways, both with free and paid traffic of how to get traffic to your Shopify store so you can convert it into more sales.

So a lot of times with e-commerce you really fall into two camps. You either have money that you can spend on paid advertising, but you don't have time so you want to grow your store fast. Or you have time and you can do other organic ways of building traffic to your store, but you don't have a lot of money to spend on paid advertising.

In this video, I am going to cover both free traffic sources and paid traffic sources. So let's get started. So first off, let's start with the free traffic sources.

Free Traffic Source #1- Search Engine Optimization

My first tip is to do search engine optimization or SEO for your Shopify store. So this is what happens anytime you go to Google or any of the other search engines and you type in a keyword of some kind of product that you're looking for, and then you get the search results there and you click into someone's site.

So let's be honest. You really need to be on the first page of Google because no one is going to page two, three and so on. So it is going to take some time to build up your ranking so that you are listed on that first page of Google search results.

However, if you're setting up your site now to be optimized with the right keywords and phrases for what people are searching for, you are really going to set yourself up for success. So I recommend really making sure as you are correctly adding in new products and optimizing your store right the first time around.

You want to make sure that your site is overall optimized for SEO. So this means having a keyword strategy. So you want to think about what keywords are people looking for when they're looking for your products and you want to be really specific.

So an example that I like to give a lot of times is you want to use long tail keywords, which means if you're looking for boots, no one is going to type into Google "black boots".

You would get so many search results, and you're going to spend so much time looking through that. Instead your consumer would type in something like "black knee-high boots" or something more specific and targeted to exactly what it is that they're looking for.

So if you have a black knee-high boot product, you want to make sure that you're adding that keyword into a couple of different areas on your product page.

You would want to have that in the product title, in the description, a few different areas in the handle and all of these you can do in the back-end of your product page, inside of Shopify.

So you want to make sure that whatever the keyword is that you're targeting for each product, that you have that in all of these different areas, so that as people are searching, that hopefully your product actually shows up here.

It's going to take a lot of time to build all this out, especially if you have a lot of different products or you're in a very competitive niche. However, setting this up from the beginning and really getting into the mind of how customers are looking for your products online, what questions they're asking or what they're searching for is a great way to figure out what exact keywords to use on your site.

Free Traffic Source #2- Content Marketing

My next free traffic tip goes actually a little bit hand in hand with SEO and that's content marketing. So once you know what your potential customers are actually searching for, you want to then create content that is going to be helpful for them as well.

So not just focusing on optimizing your product content, but creating other content for them as well. So let's give an example of you are selling dog products. Let's say you're selling dog leashes. You would want to then create some blog post content on your site. Maybe along the terms of "how to properly leash train a dog" or different behavior techniques of "how to curb different behaviors" or even "the best type of collar or leash for a different breed of dog".

All of these different content pieces are great articles that you can put on your site and you can put your keyword in those articles. So that way when people are looking for it they obviously have a problem.

They're looking for a leash training tip or a specific type of leash and they've then stumbled across your blog content that is providing a lot of helpful content. Plus also has your products linked there.

So it's a great way of still promoting your products, but not just being super product focused you're instead helping the audience first and giving them the information that they're looking for and then providing the solution.

You can provide this kind of content on your site, through the Shopify blog or by doing Shopify pages. And I really recommend thinking again, of exactly what your ideal customer is looking for when they're looking online, what problems that they're having, what solutions that they're looking for and how can you create content specifically around that that still incorporates your products.

You want to make sure that it's a good fit and it's not just a long shot, random piece of content, but that it is still a good tie in for your product as well. And again, you're able to then boost up your SEO rankings because you're using a different keywords that you've already targeted to them before.

Now, I'm not going too much more into SEO and content marketing, but if you're interested, I do have an online class called The Traffic Blueprint where we cover these topics as well as so many more in terms of to get more traffic and sales to your Shopify store. So if you're interested in that you can learn more about the class here: https://www.curiousthemes.com/traffic

Free Traffic Source #3- Social Media

My third free traffic source is social media and I feel like this is kind of a given, and everyone's going to say, you know, you need to post consistently.

While that's super important, you want to make sure that you're posting consistently your products but not just only posting about your products, but also doing it in unique ways.

You want to make sure that you're highlighting your products, your brand overall, maybe your founders, any kind of unique stories that are going to be relevant for your audience.

However, I want you to think about social media a little bit differently as well. Don't just think about, you know, just what kind of photos you could post on Instagram. Think about where your audience is hanging out online.

And don't feel like you have to have all of the social media platforms because that's honestly a lot to keep up with and you're not going to be consistent if you've got 10 different social media networks that you're trying to post on every single day, that's a lot.

So you want to think through of where your audience is hanging out online and start actually posting there. Also, I love to do things like gift guides for social media.

This is something that you can create a gift guide using a software like Canva.com, which is a free tool, and you can then create a gift guide that features some of your products in it, as well as some additional products in the same industry.

So it's the same niche of products and it's things that people were going to be interested in all together. So for example, let's go back to that dog leash example. You could do a gift guide for the top products that every new dog mom needs, and you could have your leash. Maybe if you sell bowls or collars, you could put those in there as well as maybe some cute bandanas or some dog treats, things that you don't sell on your site, but you have found online that other people might be interested in.

You can include all of that in a gift guide that you create, and you can then post that on your site and share it on the different social media networks and as well as Pinterest.

Pinterest loves gift guides!

So I definitely recommend if you create a gift guide to post it on Pinterest as well, but what's cool is once you do a gift guide, you can then reach out to any other brand or store that you have featured in that gift guide and let them know that you featured their product because they're going to be a lot more likely to then share that post more, especially if you're tagging them in the post as well.

So you can get a little bit extra visibility and hopefully reach their audiences as well.

Also for social media, think about any kind of groups that you could join. So this would be more on like Facebook, things like that, where you can join a group and it's going to be a similar group audience.

So for example, again, with dogs, you could do an elderly dog group, for people that have elderly dogs and they're facing certain problems and they're talking about their dogs there.

You just want to make sure that anytime you're joining a group, that you're going to follow the rules of the group, a lot of them have pretty strict no self promotion rules. So you want to make sure that you're actually then sharing more of your articles that you've done in content marketing or your gift guides and you're not just blasting them with the products that you sell.

You want to make sure you're following the rules of the group so you don't get kicked out and you don't just annoy people. So that's a great way to grow your audience. Just be a little bit more mindful as well.

Paid Traffic Source #1- Influencer Marketing

So the last two different traffic sources are both going to be paid traffic sources now, and the first one is going to be influencer marketing.

So I just did a big video specifically about "How to Find Instagram Influencers for Your eCommerce store". So I highly recommend you check that out because in that video, I actually show you step-by-step how to find influencers for your Shopify store.

You can view that full video here: https://youtu.be/P78kGIOlYOw

So overall though, you want to make sure that you partnering with the right influencers, because otherwise it's just going to cost you a lot of money and you're not going to get the type of sales that you're looking for. You want to find someone who is in your niche as well as is going to be a good engaged audience.

In that Instagram influencer marketing video, I talk about the importance of really partnering with smaller influencers. So people that have, you know, around 5,000 to 10,000, even maybe upwards of 50,000 fans or subscribers, and it's a smaller audience, but because of that, they're more engaged.

They're clicking on their content a lot more. They're liking their posts or commenting on it more so they're more engaged with their audience. And it's not going to be just an account with a million different followers that are not really that engaged because maybe they bought those and you're not going to get the kind of engagement or the traffic and sales once you're actually partnering with them, if they're not getting engagement on their posts.

So you want to make sure that you're finding the right influencers to partner with. Also, you can try out a variety of different influencers. So again, with the dog example, you could try partnering with a individual dog account like Doug The Pug, or you could partner with a brand account like another eCommerce store that sells dog products.

Or you could even do an individual like a dog trainer and focus on how to sell your leashes through the dog trainer. Maybe they recommend your products.

Think about different ways that you can be creative and try out different types of influencers to see what works best for your store.

Just keep in mind that they're all gonna have different rates. Some may want just free gifts. Others may want a flat fee upfront plus a free gift and others may want an ongoing commission based on the sales that they bring. It's really going to depend based on the type of influencer that you go with. So you just want to make sure that you're staying on top of that and organized with all the different people that you've reached out to.

Again, I recommend you check out the full video for more tips there. So don't forget to check out the link to that video here: https://youtu.be/P78kGIOlYOw

Paid Traffic Source #2- Paid Advertising

The last paid traffic source is going to be at paid advertising and I feel like this is kind of an obvious one of doing paid advertising for your store.

However, if you have some additional capital that you can use upfront, this is a great way to send a lot more traffic to your site really quickly to test out your products.

So a few key things that I want you to keep in mind with paid advertising is to first know which kind of platform your audience is on. Are they on Facebook? Or Instagram? Or YouTube? Or Tik Tok?

Know where your audience is so that you can spend your advertising dollars there. You want to make sure that you're creating the best type of content, but also go in knowing that it's going to take some trial and error.

You're probably going to lose some money up front as you're testing out which products get the most traction as well as what images or videos work best.

So just know that it's not going to be you instantly spend 20 bucks and you get a hundred dollars back. It's going to take some time just to figure out what works. So knowing that, make sure to go in testing out different products, different images, and different copy, just to spend a little time and money testing things out.

That way, you know, what works best moving forward. And then you can dump more time and money into those ads.

Also, I feel like people are not using retargeting ads enough.

So this would be targeting people who have already been to your store, using the Facebook pixel and reserving them an ad. So that way, you know, they may have liked your product before and seen the ad, but they got really distracted and they clicked away from your site or from your product page itself.

Anything can happen. So just serving them the ad again, or a different type of ad is a great way to potentially still get that sale.

So I will say that retargeting ads are going to be a little bit different moving forward because of the Apple iOS change that's coming out here soon and how that affects the Facebook pixel.

I did a entire video all about what to expect with your Facebook ads and some changes that you can make to your ads account. So if you're interested in that, make sure to click the link here and watch that full video: https://youtu.be/ypaekPV5lfU

Overall, though, there are a lot of different ways to promote your Shopify store, whether that be free traffic or paid traffic sources.

And again, I would love to have you join me in our Traffic Blueprint course, if you feel like it's a good fit for you.

We cover all these different topics and more about how to actually get more traffic and sales for your Shopify store.

So we talk about SEO, email marketing, how to increase your conversions on your site, how to run paid ads, social media, and influencer marketing as well.

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, make sure to click the link here so that you can check out the course: https://www.curiousthemes.com/traffic