Online shopping is growing very fast. Because it does not cost anything to open a new online shop that will be accessible by any user from any part of the Earth. It doesn't require thousands of dollars. Any internet user that has some good idea and some internet experience can open the shop. It needs only several days to buy domain name, hosting and setup shopping cart software. The main problem is to find customers on the market. The advertising and promotion become more important in the web era.
The first step of promotion is to submit your website to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN and list in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Business.com .
The first key to success in attracting the customers is PPC advertisings like Google Adsense and Overture. You need to spend $30..$50/month at least to receive some good promotion.
But more relevant users you will get by using Product Search Engines. This means that you will not get a lot of rubbernecks, and you will not need to buy expensive servers to serve a lot of non-effective visits. The major Product Search Engines are: Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, BizRate, Price Grabber, and Shopping.com . Only Froogle is free, all other requires deposits based on PPC. You will need to spend some time to prepare product listings in special format and submit them to Product Search Engines. If you using common shopping cart software, in most cases you will need only to setup new module for this software, in other case you will need help of the programmer. Also I like WillyFogg.com Product Search Engine, it is free and it doesn't require creating any special product feeds. You need only to submit your site URL at http://willyfogg.com/submitshop.php and your products will be added in several days to products catalog and search engine index. This is the fastest and the easiest way to promote your online store. The other key of WillyFogg.com is that it is have the multilanguage support.
