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Step 9:

Open for business, attract new customers

Once you've built your site, selected your payment processing methods, and published your backend order settings, you're ready to launch your business! This is the easiest step yet.

To open for business, simply go to your Store Control Panel and click the Open for Business link. This activates your store and turns on your order processing system.

Attract customers to your new store
Now that you've invested time and effort to build a great online store, you need to develop and execute a marketing strategy to ensure that people can find it. We recommend that you follow a very targeted strategy that will allow you to increase customers and sales at a low cost of acquisition.

Launch strategy for marketing success:

• List and advertise your store on popular search engines and shopping portals. These are the places web shoppers go to find products and vendors - so the potential for reaching qualified leads may be very high. In terms of return on investment, this is one of the most effective means of marketing your business. We offer the following optional services, many at a special discount, to help you get listed and attract customers:
  
  
  
  • Yahoo! Product Submit - Access millions of targeted leads by getting included in Yahoo! Shopping, one of the Web's top shopping portals. As a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customer, you get a 20% discount across all categories.
  • DealTime and BizRate - Yahoo! Merchants receive discounts on cost-per-click fees and the store export feature makes it fast and easy to get your items listed on these shopping destinations.
  • Yahoo! Search Submit Express - Offers a single point of submission into the search engine that powers algorithmic search results on Yahoo!, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and other major portals.
  • Yahoo! Directory Submit - Expedite your submissions to the Yahoo! Directory, a popular index of sites put together by Yahoo!'s editors.
  • Yahoo! Sponsored Search and Google AdWords - Yahoo! Merchants receive a credit toward search keyword purchases with these advertising services.
  
  To learn more about optimizing your site so you can get the best search engine rankings, visit searchenginewatch.com.
  
  
• Run direct mail marketing campaigns online and offline.
  • GOT - A powerful set of Web-based tools enables you to easily create and manage email marketing campaigns. GOT provides a special introductory offer to Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customers.
  • infoUSA - Offers discounts to Yahoo! Merchants to purchase mailing lists and sales leads, and set up direct mail campaigns.
  
  
• Set up affiliate relationships with other sites that have customers who would be interested in your products. With our track links functionality, available in the Store Control Panel, you can easily account for how much traffic these sites have sent your way. If you prefer not to set up and manage this type of program on your own, you can always outsource it to our partner, Commission Junction.
  
  
• Don't forget offline marketing for your online business. If you already have a brick and mortar store with a mailing list, you're ahead of the game. Consider creating a postcard campaign to announce your new online presence to existing customers.
  
  You should also consider a press campaign. Remember: If your company can appear in a news article, this is a free way to get placement in a publication that likely charges thousands for advertising positions on the same page. While there's more to learn about press relations than we can cover in this brief Getting Started tutorial, you can start by paying attention to local and national publications that cover businesses like yours. Make note of the names of journalists who report on topics related to your business and think about ways to "spin" a story that could include references to your company.