If you consider your web site a money pit, you are not alone. Quite a few business owners have told me that they have web sites because everyone else has a web site, but they havent gotten any business from their web site. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. Many of them have paid thousands of dollars to web designers to create the web sites for them, and than the web sites just sit there, gathering the proverbial Internet dust, and getting enormous traffic consisting of three to five unique visitors a month.
Your web site should not be languishing in one of the rarely visited corners of the Net. Instead, it should be working 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year getting leads and clients for your business. It should serve as marketing brochure and as your best salesperson (who incidentally never sleeps, and doesnt require either salary or commissions).
So how do you turn your dust collector into a lean, mean sales machine First, you need to lay down the infrastructure for your online business. Here are three guidelines your web site should adhere to before its initial debut:
- Your web site must be easy to navigate, understand and use. When a web surfer comes to a web site and doesnt understand what the web site is about in the first few minutes, the surfer moves on to the next web site (trust me, there lots of them out there. Approximately 2.7 billion at last count, give or take a few billion).
If the purpose and intent of your web site is not blatantly obvious, a surfer will move on. If your web site is difficult to navigate, a surfer will move on. If your web site is hard to use (for example, it is not obvious how to contact you or hire you) a surfer will move on.
- Your web site must discuss what you do AND how what you do will benefit your customers. Lets say Sue and Jane are both weight loss coaches. Sues web site says that Sue is a weight loss coach. Janes web site says that Jane is a weight loss coach who helps women look and feel better by losing 30 pounds in 3 months.Which coach sounds more appealing The one who not only states what she does, but also shows what is in it for the customer. The site must answer a fundamental question: Why should I hire you
- Have a newsletter sign up box on your web site. The majority of your web site visitors will not contact you about your services after visiting your web site, but they will subscribe for a free newsletter. By subscribing, they give you permission to send them your information-packed newsletter, which will also serve as a reminder about your business.
Without a newsletter, many people will visit your web site once and promptly forget about it 10 minutes after leaving it. By having a newsletter, you are able to capture these visitors, and tell them about your business again and again.
Take action today! Take a critical look at your web site and make sure that it conforms to the guidelines outlined above. A website that follows these forms a solid foundation for having a marketable web site for your business.
Biana Babinsky teaches business owners how to make more money online. Learn how to get your web site to make money by getting Bianas FREE special report, Top 5 Ways to Increase your Online Sales at
Internet marketing has been making some pretty dramatic changes over the last few years, like the growth and evolution of the search engine optimization industry, viral marketing, pay-per-click advertising and the mainstream adoption of blogging. Despite the recent changes I predict that even greater change is still yet to come, thanks in part to the growth of broadband internet access, advances in hardware and software technology, and marketers need to reach consumers through multiple mediums.
As peoples lives become more busy, fragmented media will result in more opportunities for both advertisers and web site owners. Standard advertising mediums such as television, radio and newspapers have been loosing effectiveness (partially because of new technologies like TiVo and XM Satalite Radio) while online advertising has become more effective. As an advertiser, there are more opportunities available than ever before to reach highly targeted prospects with a relatively small investment by advertising online. As a web site owner, there are more opportunities to generate additional revenue by providing advertising space on your web sites. As people spend more time online, this trend will continue to grow.
RSS will become a powerful, trackable marketing tool. In its current form, it is a great tool for reaching out to people who have the technical background to use it but it does have some limitations. Many customizable web portals My Yahoo let users display RSS feeds on their home page, but require users to sign in with cookies. Some email programs can display RSS feeds and several programs have even been specifically designed for displaying RSS feeds. However the user base is still fairly small. With the release of Microsofts Windows Vista, RSS will become mainstream and be adopted by soccer moms everywhere. Once that happens you can expect to see tools developed to manage and track the traffic from RSS feeds.
The search engine optimization industry is another area that will change considerably. All of the major search engine companies have taken considerable steps to reduce web site owners (or an SEO firms) ability to manipulate the ranking of their web sites. As the algorithms that determine the importance of a particular web page become more comprehensive and better able to filter out spam you will see two things happen. First, the search results will become more relevant. Second, the SEO firms that are using dishonest techniques in an attempt to rank higher will collapse one by one until only honest, ethical firms exist.
Jeremy L. Knauff is the founder of Wildfire Marketing Group, an that specializes in guerilla marketing techniques to help smaller companies compete with larger companies and win. Submitted by rcplinks.com article submission service