When someone decides to sell their products or services on the internet, the first thing they usually do is set up a website. After that first step many people feel lost as to what to do next. There’s pay per click, affiliate programs, social networking, search engine optimization, blogging and so much more.
How do you decide what to do first?
It might seem like the first thing to do is start bringing a steady stream of traffic to your website so you can start making those sales. Before you do that, the best thing to do is make sure your site is really ready to get traffic coming through the door.
If your website isn’t ready to sell, there’s no point in bringing a single visitor to it because they’ll just come and go without doing a thing for your business.
Here are four things you must make sure you have taken care of before you send anyone to your website:
1. Market Research
If you don’t understand your market then you are blindly guessing what people want. You need to find out what people are looking for and give it to them.
This is a very important step and it’s often overlooked. I can tell you for the longest time I thought that research my market and competition was boring and not that important, so I ignored it. I spent a lot of time building websites that very few people came to visit because I built what I wanted, not what people were actually looking for!
2. Copywriting
You don’t have to be a copywriting wizard to have great copy on your website. The words you use on your site help determine what happens when those visitors stop by. Make sure you KNOW what you want them to do so you can tell them to do it.
Every page on your website should have a purpose.
There are really only two basic actions you want your visitors to take when they come to your product or service website:
- They can buy from you.
- They can look for more information.
- They can go away – this is the one you DON’T want.
If you keep these two actions in mind then everything you write can have a purpose. Of course you want to keep a good balance and not try to sell all the time, or not give away free information all the time.
3. Tracking
Once you start getting visitors, you’re going to want to know where they came from. If you know where your visitors are coming from then you can go ahead and do the same things to bring more traffic to your site.
Some hosting programs come with a statistics program, but not all of them give you the information you need.
Google offers a great program called Google Analytics that you can use to create very detailed reports and track details of where people come from and what they do on your site.
Here are some things you’ll want to track:
- What sites people visit from
- What pages they visit
- How long they stay
- What keywords they search to find you
4. Newsletter or Mailing List
The majority of people that come to your site won’t buy at first. So, you want them to take that second action of looking for more information.
You don’t have to do a big newsletter each week if you don’t have the time. Another option is to have a quick tips list each week. It’s just a quick way to keep in touch, give people some valuable information, and make an offer every now and then. You can also use autoresponders to have this working for you automatically.
If you make sure you have these four things in place before you start looking for website traffic then you’ll be setting your website up for success!
If you’d like more information on this topic then I’d like to invite you to join me in a very unique website design coaching and training program. You’ll get support from every angle so you never get stuck, you’ll learn practical steps and you’ll get personal attention every step of the way. It’s the kind of program that can propel your business further. Get details and sign up here.
All the best,
Angela Wills, Founder of Marketers Mojo