How to market a Canadian ecommerce website?

[superwoman]

Hi I started an e-store back in Aug 25 and is now getting about 400-500 unique visitors daily.

The biggest problem I have so far is targeted marketing. My site only serves Canada due to strategic and economic reasons. However, it's painfully difficult to pinpoint Canadian online audiences because they blend in with the American, and there are very few Canadian-only online communities.

My best bet is to get reputable Canadian bloggers to write about my site - my traffic surged to 1000 unique visitors, 70% new on August 28 when a blogger wrote (voluntarily) a column about my site. I also made $13 in google adsense that day.

My question is how to target market Canadian audiences when they are so similar to the American?

Thanks!

[BizGuy]

Hi there Superwoman,

Firstly, Welcome to YE! We are glad you are here and hope to learn more about your and your business ventures and of course assist you with all your questions!

With regards to your Geo-targeting marketing question, you are definitely on the right track by trying to approach the local Canadian blogger market.
You will also want to ensure you are using a .CA domain as it is my experience that they spider within Google Canada a lot stronger than the .COM TLD.

Let us know more about your site and it will be much easier to answer your question more specifically. At least tell us what industry or target market you are appealing to.

Looking forward to learning more.

Adam T.

[superwoman]

Hi Adam,

thanks for the warm welcoming.

Yes, I have .ca registered. In fact, I have .com .ca .org and .net under my belt. However, I'm reluctant to post my website link here because thanks to google, whatever we say is in record. I can PM you my website link if you want to.

My business model is similar to woot.com , except that I only sell to Canada. I sell one item (mainly consumer electronics) per day.

My target audience are males/females around the age of late 20s to early 40s because they have reasonable disposable income yet very adaptable to cybershopping. So far I average about 400-500 unique visitors per day; 74 registered users and 7 completed transactions.

I'm trying to make my store look as legitimate as possible but it's a challenge because I don't have an actual office address since I'm still in college 2nd year. I just registered a toll-free number so that would help.

I have trouble finding online canadian-only communities because the U.S. and Canada are integrated culturally; there is no language barrier etc. If I try to advertise on US sites, the general audiences will not find it appealing because I have no competitive advantage over Woot. It also doesn't help when I use Canadian dollar as the default currency so everything "appears" to be more expensive.

[Lambo]

do some web 2.0 marketing, write articles, make a video blog, create some squidoo lenses and post a few ads here and there. should drive traffic all for free.

[Doodyps]

I have zero experience dealing with marketing first hand or running a website, but if you want to get at pools of Canadians, why not seek out places where fans of Canadian sports teams congregate online. Also, Canadian news papers and magazines that are likely not read much outside of Canada. Sports should be a good target since sports are a big reason why people buy great entertainment systems. If you sell things like GPS systems, integrate with the Canadian tourism industry. Find small towns that have tourist attractions but that may be out of the way. They lead people to your website and your products lead them to the town with GPS. Is ebay Canada to obvious? I dont know, you may have thought of all this and maybe you're asking something completely different.