Advice for a newbie?

[Apollowear]

Howdy!

I am ventured into e-commerce and started a site: apollowear.com - Underwear for today's man. (http://www.apollowear.com/)

I am looking for the most cost effective ways to advertise and drive relevant traffic our way - I would appreciate advice and will reward good ideas with free items from our catalog.

Cheers
Apollowear
contact@apollowear.com

[marcjacob]

You could do free sites and tgp galleries I guess. Ive never really sold underwear. You may want to try an affiliate program - pay a % of sales to people who advertise your site for you. Do you have a merchant account (in which case you will need a script to handle affiliate sales) or third party billing (in which case you biller should have a hosted solution for you).

You could also try pay per click with google etc

[Apollowear]

We have an affiliate program paying 10% of the sales generated - google ppc, and try to get Blogs to notice us.... Dumb question - what is a tgp gallery?

Thanks
Lee

[basschick]

obviously google and other search engine traffic is your best bet - people looking for underwear are the most likely to buy underwear. is this underwear your own exclusive designs? pay per click with google is one way to go, and the other is to build pages and have very relevant text - then submit your sitemap to google. if you opt to google's pay per click, expect to have to tweak your ads a bit before you get the best results.

there are also programs like http://www.cj.com/ and other mainstream programs that let you pay per click or month or whatever but you'd only want to buy men's clothing or men's underwear traffic. perhaps there are also underwear blogs or large mainstream men's sites or blogs.

a tgp is a thumbnail gallery post. Marcjacob is suggesting that you create a gallery of 15 - 20 pictures on a single page and submit it to a bunch of tgps which will list the gallery. i'm not sure that would be all that effective as tgp surfers are looking for porn - not underwear. the thing about galleries is they burn a fairly large amount of bandwidth, and also if you have no gallery experience, you're not that likely to make a gallery that will be accepted by the tgps and will sell.

[marcjacob]

Yeah I wasnt sure about the tgp gallery thing. I just threw it out there. Ive never sold underwear so not sure what youd do but Basschicks suggestions sound pretty solid. I would guess standard google searches will bring in the bucks.

[basschick]

well, it isn't a bad idea assuming he has the bandwidth and the content. and maybe he could create a male underwear blog.

Apollowear (http://www.gaydemon.biz/member.php?u=39), i sent you a pm, btw.

[abostonboy]

I know several sellers on ebay that have done a fantastic job by opening an ebay store. My friend in Boston really jump started his underwear business. The TRICK is you don't really make the big bucks with your ebay store, but you get customers to your regular store.

There are MANY ways of doing this.

[abostonboy]

I would also suggest that you start here http://usg-online.com/underblog/

He's a good guy that runs that blog, a jockstrap store, as well as some other underwear sites.

[deanb]

This post has been very useful to me :D

[abostonboy]

This post has been very useful to me :D

Glad you enjoyed it!

[AnthonyDeAngelo]

well, it isn't a bad idea assuming he has the bandwidth and the content. and maybe he could create a male underwear blog.

Apollowear (http://www.gaydemon.biz/member.php?u=39), i sent you a pm, btw.

I like the blog idea - we get great traffic to our blogs which in turn, sends traffic to the right places to generate money $$$ - the $$$ sales incentive is also a good thing and I'm liking the notion of galleries which we've also done - that works too