Re: Marketing Techniques
When developing your website, you should start to think of how you will market your site before the first HTML code is ever written.
You need to make sure your website will be search engine friendly and structured so it can be easily navigated (by both humans and search engine robots).
By "search engine friendly", I mean the URLs should be without special characters like ? ! &. While many search engines can spider URLs that have those characters, you will find that you will get much better search engine coverage by having "clean" urls.
Why is this even important? Because search engines are the #1 way people find things online. That can equal thousands of free targeted visitors for your t-shirt shop.
Getting established in the search engines can be a long process, so while you are promoting and waiting for that to happen, you'll want to think of other way to get traffic to your shop:
Advertising in websites/magazines/newsletters/newspapers/radiostations that reach your target market. That means, if you're selling "i like ice cream" t-shirts, you may not want to advertise in the "lactose intolerant digest". Narrow down who is "most likely" to buy your shirts and focus your marketing effort there.
Take advantage of the many t-shirt specific website directories that are out there. Many of them are free to get listed and you can get lots of good, free, targeted traffic by getting listed there.
Get a good, MEMORABLE domain name for your t-shirt line and talk about it all the time. To your friends, to your associates, while you're at your day job/or school.
Be creative. Think of something totally original to promote your unique designs. Sellings shirts about fishing? Go down to your local fishing supply store and see if they'll want to carry some of your designs to expand their existing product line.
This should get you going in the right direction
