In an online store, just like in real life, it's imperative that people come into your store so you can make sales: people passing through, actual visitors, and potential customers. If you open the greatest store ever and nobody knows you're open, that's bad for business. If you really want your online store to work, you need to make it known to the world.
How? There are thousands of ways. Here's a short list, to give you a few ideas:
Easy
1. Send a link for your online store to all your friends and contacts. You can do it manually by sending them your store's url link.
2. Attract visitors to your T-shirts and designs from your blog, personal website or social networking profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.) with with images and links to your products.
3. With the "share" button, share your shirts and designs on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, in just 2 clicks! See this link for details on how to do it.
4. Put the link to your store on your social networking profiles (eg, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... etc.). All these sites have places to enter a link to your website.
5. Post a link or banner to your store from your blog or personal website. If you do not have a blog yet, now might be a good time to start one. ;-)
6. Make a funny and original video and upload it to YouTube (preferably with some of the shirts you sell), and put in a link to your video store.
7. Put the link to your store as your Messenger tagline.
8. Put the link to your store in your email signature (right there at the bottom). It won't bring thousands of hits, but it will continue reminding people about the link and the possibilities of visits and sales may increase significantly.
9. Create your own domain like www.MyFullMotor.com (owning your own domain name can cost as little as £1 per month!) and redirect it to your store. This will give a more "professional" impression. With this, you can create stickers and brochures and flyers and take them wherever you go. ;-)
Advanced
10. Put paid ads in Google (Adwords). These are the ads that appear on top of your search results and sometimes on the right side of the browser. For more information, read this page or for advanced knowledge of Google Adwords, go to the Learning Center.
11. Create your own web store with your own domain and directly link only to items in your personal store (eg: https://www.tostadora.co.uk/fullmotor/king_of_the_road/13).
12. Optimise your personal Tostadora store and your own web store for popular search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. In this way, you will appear in unpaid search results. Unfortunately, this is quite complex and impossible to guarantee results within a reasonable time. Here's a tutorial on how to try it.
13. Create a blog(on blogger.com or similar) and go there regularly posting news of your store. This will not only get visitors, but it is a very good way to improve your ranking on search engines like Google.
Important: When you put a link to a t-shirt, always remember to put in ALT tags (alternative text) using "T-shirt + (whatever)". If your link is text, it is also important to include in it the keywords you want to promote through Google. For example, "men's hiking T-shirts".
Remember, the key is to create the maximum possible visits to your store and views for your items, whether visitors come from search engines, other websites or blogs you may have or from your contacts. Use all or most of the advice we've listed above and we assure you that your visitors and your sales will skyrocket!