Help Promoting a Web Store

I was curious if anyone here had experience promoting a web store. There are a couple of areas that I'm working on, but I'm not seeing very big results just yet.

-Google merchant:
--Submitted here, but not getting many clicks. It seems like optimization consists of product title relevancy and good reviews.

-SEO for certain products:
--I'm seeing a gradual rise in the SERPS for the products I'm promoting/backlinking.

*What I don't know are other ways to promote the store:
-What are some paid and non-paid directories to submit the store to?
-Any good methods to promote individual products in a white hat manner?

Thanks in advance for any advice

Nothing in particular... I use roughly same way to promote any web store the way i promote my normal sites... Apart from yahoo directory i don't use any paid services... Yahoo directory not only gives you link or recognition but also some times traffic...

do some keyword research and find a few good keywords that everyone else is missing out on

i did it with a new store and got good results

you could use twitter or make a facebook page about it

just make some campaign ppc, it will be good to make a jumpstart

I agree that in general your backlinking campaign should be fairly similar to that of any other site. When backlinking I would focus on contextual links with "category" type keywords that are doable for ranking.

When marketing on blogs and commenting I would focus on long-tail product keywords, descriptions, model numbers, versions, etc. of whatever the main sellers are.

If doing article marketing, think "presell" and not "informative" when writing articles. Remember, this is not an adsense site that is content heavy and where visitors will go to learn....you want them to buy.

Depending on the products/services you are selling, you may have some good luck with personal selling and/or offline marketing. This would be an area where you could get creative in your efforts.

As for PPC...unless you have a good deal of experience and a large budget to "play" with I would highly advise against it, at least untill you know what converts and what your ROI will be.

If you give some more insight into what type of products you are selling maybe we can give you some more tangilbe ideas to try out.

Hope this helps. Wishing you the best of luck!