Online marketing is affordable and effective method of increasing sales in ecommerce business. No single marketing techniques can be applied for different ventures that used to be unique in some sense. Sometimes you might have to invent a very new marketing strategy; in-fact the online business that succeeded without large backing of advertisement money has done special tricks to reach their customer base.
SEO & its limitation
SEO has become common tactics for free search traffic that can be converted into sales. Before you beef up for SEO campaign always make sure that your business niche has enough search volume. In case the search volume for a niche is very less SEO may not return your efforts. An example is; if searcher does not know that what you are offering exists and they usually end-up search something more conventional or generic. This type of cases becomes a big questions to entrepreneurs how they reach potential buyers.
Facebook & twitter
Today's marketing is taking a big shift for example Facebook has become most trafficked site after Google. It would be good if you start exploiting the traffic from this world top social networking sites before it becomes too competitive, one need to do research what Facebook or twitter user mentality is when they surf these sites, do they want the solution to problems or solely for fun purpose. Popular companies tend to create Facebook or twitter profile & link them into website so that peoples can easily find them and follow. This creates a feeling of community and popularity amongst end user.
Email viral marketing
Email viral marketing is very effective and fast method of gaining visibility and popularity. You create a useful page or may be a series of pictures and send it to several friends in your network, some of them will forward it to more address and some of them will read the headers message that says " This message is sent at the courty of xyz.com, visit us for more useful information ". This marketing trick would be useful for the audience who are proactive internet and email user.
Getting most out of PPC
PPC is a guaranteed means of getting traffic to your site but it does not guarantee those traffic will convert into sales. When you start a PPC campaign like Google AdWords with the fixed budget and time, better to go for image banners than text ads because it creates business branding and peoples will remember your site for longer even after PPC campaign has been stopped. I have seen a web hosting company that did very aggressive PPC marketing and they got number one position in niche hosting in a very short span of time
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is very important before marketing process starts or even before the start of business plan. I have seen sites who have submitted their sites to more than 2000 directories and got only PR3, some peoples write articles. Here one should have very good clarity about why he is writing article. I mean you are writing for PR boosting or promoting your products by word of mouth. Links placed on article body can definitely add to the Page rank but may not increase the traffic if overall search volume is low. In this case you can write highly focused articles that are useful to the customers in your niche.