A lot of our ecommerce clients are expressing frustration with their current approaches to drive traffic to their sites. Nearly all are currently spreading their dollars across paid search, email and affiliates. The effectiveness of all 3 are generally declining and the cost per converted customer is going up. But most retailers are unaware of viable alternatives.

There are 3 new ecommerce funnels that have been proven to work. I will describe the first one here and as soon as I get a chance I will post the other 2. Please add your own new ecommerce funnels in the comments.

New Ecommerce Funnel #1: Search-Blog-Associated Product-Conversion
Write blogs with an attention to SEO to generate high search results rankings. Buyers would be great ones to write blogs about hot new products before they even come out to ensure high search results ranking (early bird often gets the worm). Unique insight into products, how they compare, recommendations, etc. would be great content. Once they land on the blog page, the trick is make it easy for visitors to go from the content of the blog to the referred to product detail page. Hyperlinks in the text of the blog is an easy place to start. More complex approaches that combine the blog and the product detail page can be done at a later time.

See an earlier blog Search+Blog=Traffic that tries to quantify the value of this approach versus paid search. Caveat – the Crutchfield content I refer to is not technically a blog, but they were one of the first to understand the power of content to drive free traffic to a retail site.