There are many ways a beginner can start an ecommerce business. You could get your own inventory and sell that, or you use methods such as affiliate marketing, drop shipping or arbitrage, where you need not hold your own inventory.

So you got your storefront up. What next?

You could sit at home and wait for sales to trickle in, although you are probably not going to get life-changing income just by waiting. You could either wait for things to happen, or you could make things happen for yourself.

Want to make things happen for yourself? Good. Keep reading.

Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. It is no different for an ecommerce or online retail business. So if you are a newbie, you may be wondering how you can get that traffic to your storefront.

Let us think about what a modern day offline business would do to promote themselves. Have you noticed that a lot of brick and mortar stores these days have some sort of presence on social media? You should do the same.

Build A Presence On Social Media

At the very least, I recommend that you create a Facebook fan page, since that’s where majority of your buyers will be found. Put a link on the Facebook fan page to your online store. If you have a budget, you can buy Facebook ads, although I suggest that you only run an ad if you have some sort of special offer going on, such as a discount on your products. If you don’t want to run Facebook ads, be sure to post on your Facebook fan page frequently, and use hashtags. That’s where a lot of your traffic will be coming from. Examples of hashtags you can use include #throwbackthursday or #tbt, #caturday (this would work if you’re selling cat related products) or #sundayfunday.

Besides that, you could also get a huge surge in traffic by talking about trending topics. For example, as of this writing, a video of a woman laughing while wearing a Chewbacca mask just went viral. Posting content about it on your fan page can bring you lots of traffic, and if you are selling or promoting products similar to the Chewbacca mask (or even the masks themselves) then you can certainly benefit a lot!

Besides Facebook, you can also create an Instagram account. Instagram is on the rise these days, and after lots of research, we’ve found that you can also get a lot of traffic by using hashtags. Twitter is fine too, although you’d have to limit your Tweets to 140 characters.

Remember, the only way for you to make money on Shopify, Etsy, Teespring or wherever your storefront is, is by sending traffic to it. Social media is an effective strategy to get traffic to your storefront. If you’re not on social media, you are really missing out!