A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, here are three things to consider:

a) Is your website optimized for converting prospects into paying Customers?

b) Do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your prospects value?

c) If you answered yes to both (a) and (b) above, Are you looking for more qualified traffic?

Most of our prospects ask us for help with conversions, traffic and process optimization or automation advice.  Here are a few things to get you started in the right direction:

a) Avoid the temptation to create the perfect ‘home page’. There simply is no such thing. In business, especially small and medium sized businesses… the only thing that counts is leveraging the media to generate more sales. It is really that simple.  Sure you can educate your Customers but the purpose of the ‘education’ is to increase the probability that the prospect buys from you. Thus, you may find it helpful to focus on building a landing page that converts prospects into Customers on autopilot. Our Clients test landing pages constantly to out perform their controls and improve conversions on their sites.

b) Every business has some special knowledge (well… almost every business). If you consider that most prospects are not ready to buy from you when you first meet them. They need some time to get to know you better, time to digest the information that they received, time to compare offers, time to decide that they are now ready to actually make a decision. When a person discovers your website, do your best to capture their contact details to be able to follow up with them in the future with information that is relevant to the problem that they are trying to solve. If the average consumer needs to see an ad seven times before acting on it, then think about distributing a newsletter to your prospects with tips, ideas, strategies etc that help them move forward in their decision to do business with you by demonstrating your expertise, your Customer service principles and the reason why they should be doing business with you. Have you got a newsletter already? Are you building a list of prospects and Customers? If not, setting up an auto-responder would be a very good first step in the right direction. Always remember to use criteria elicitation and tap into benefit’s based selling methods like WIIFM to get the most out of your efforts.

c) Traffic… the holy grail of a website owner. We love to help our Clients generate traffic BUT ONLY if they have reasonable conversions and the desire to build a list. Think about it for a moment, there are really only 2 important processes that you absolutely have to get right when you use the internet in your business and those are conversions and traffic. Hey, it’s not rocket science.. it’s basic maths. You need to track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get then rinse and repeat.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and let us know your objectives right now – perhaps we can put you on the right track – the fast track to success online. BoxOnline’s b6group has a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get more sales results via the internet for your business.

One small note on the core purpose of a website: Above we are referring to your main business website; there are other reasons for creating a website these days and one of these is to create a network of feeder sites that ‘feed’ your main website traffic, leads, subscribers etc. Often blogs are used for this purpose but they can also be used to create your own affiliate product network or PPC landing pages with high quality scores – just something to consider. If you want more information on the topic and would like to see how we can put your site on Google’s first page of results, just give us a shout using the link above.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 18:26 and is filed under Educational, Online Marketing, Sales, Suggestions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.