It's been said before but it bears repeating. If you want to have a profitable business online, you need a website that will turn your visitors into your customers. What do you need to make this type of profitable website?
First, you need to answer some basic questions.
1) What is the purpose of your site? Is it to give information about your business, products or services? Is it an online store whose main purpose is to sell as many products as possible? Is your site's chief function to build your company's mailing list and contact network? Is it to sell affiliate products or services?
2) Who is your target market? In any business, online or off, that is the basic question. If you don't know who you are selling to, how are you going to know what products will appeal to them and what type of marketing approach to use. If you have a product or service, you need to define your target market.
3) How are you going to appeal to your target market? This question is key when it comes to product selection and website design.
4) Who will be making your website? Do you have the time and expertise to do the work in house? Will you hire a web designer, use a template, purchase or lease a website package or do all the work from scratch in HTML? Even if you have the skill set to design and produce a website in house, is that the best use of your time and other resources?
One of the basic tenets of business is that it's far more cost effective to keep a customer than to get a new customer for every sale. Customer acquisition costs are huge. It's far better to have repeat business from a loyal customer base. It's the same online. One way to accomplish this is to make your website "sticky". Keep people coming back for more. Have people visit your site over and over, and add to those visitors every month. One of the key elements of website design is that stickiness.
As with many things online, the key to stickiness is content, lots of content. It needs to be fresh and updated regularly. The bonus is that not only does new, fresh website content keep people coming back to your site, but search engines love content. It is one of the primary things that will get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. Get as much content on your website as you can that you think will be beneficial to your visitors. Examples of good quality content are "how to" articles, product reviews, interviews of people in your industry, and so on. Other things that keep people coming back to your site are forums, surveys and inside industry news, especially if it is exclusive to your site.
Keeping visitors coming back to your site is great, but how do you get them there in the first place? You have several options.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) PPC is one of the most popular ways to get targeted visitors to your site. That is very important. You need targeted traffic. Those people who are actively searching for the product, information or service you site is offering. PPC advertising lets you place ads on other websites with links to a page in your site. These ads are contextual, meaning they are shown on a page based upon certain keywords you define. If a web page has content based on the desired keyword you want to be found for, your ad will be shown.
You only pay for those ads when someone clicks on the link. This accounts for the rapid growth in popularity of PPC. Your ROI can be very high because you are only paying for traffic you actually receive. This traffic is highly targeted. There are many PPC providers but the two largest, by far, are Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google Adwords. PPC is great for testing various aspects of your website. For example, you can use it to judge weather or not a new headline is working or if some new ad copy id generating additional sales. PPC works very well for this purpose because it quickly sends targeted traffic to your website, allowing you to rapidly test changes and different programs.
Natural, or organic, search engine traffic - That is when your site comes up as a result to a query on a search engine. This is really great, because it is both targeted and free. That is a great combination, to be sure. The problem is getting pages on your website highly ranked enough to be found at all. Searches on some keywords will return millions of results. How do you make your site land near the top? This is the (sometimes black) art of search engine optimization (SEO). The are entire books written on the subject, websites dedicated to it, and software packages to help you achieve it.
One of the primary things the search engines look for is quality content. Search engines are trying to give the user a quality result for their search. If your site has high quality content relating to the keywords that the user is searching for, you stand a much better chance of being found for those keywords. Another huge factor is the number of links in to your site from contextually related web pages, especially if those pages are highly ranked themselves. According to Google, they view each of those links in to your site as a "vote" for your site. You need to get as many links in to your site from other quality sites as possible. You will also get indexed by the search engines much more quickly from these incoming links. The search engines spiders will follow the links to your site and it will get indexed in that search engine.
Links in to your site from other websites - Those links themselves can be another source of quality, targeted traffic. People who are already on a website they trust, that has quality content related to your site, are obviously targeted visitors. You can get significant traffic from quality links in as well as their use in increasing your search engine rankings. You should get as many inbound links to you website as possible. Make sure these inbound links are from quality sites. It is imperative you do not use "free for all links" (FFA) pages to get these links. These "FFA" pages will provide you with little or no targeted traffic and can dramatically hurt your search engine rankings.
OpportunitiesAplenty Website Information to Help Your Business Succeed - Weather It's Home Based or Not
