Improving Your Business Website Marketing
Most business website marketing fails to do two things...
- Bring traffic to the website, and
- Convert visitors into buyers
Unfortunately these are the two critical things that a business website must do otherwise it just ends up flushing away your hard earned cash. So today I'm going to share some thoughts about making your website more effective.
The Purpose Of Your Business Website
First you need to decide what you website actually exists for. Is it to make sales online or do you want people to contact you after visiting the website? From this we can broadly define your website's purpose is either to make sales or generate leads.
This may seem simple but most business owners don't actually decide what they want their website to do. This makes it very hard for your website to achieve its goals... because there are none. This often leads to frustration when your website doesn't create any return on investment.
Converting Visitors To Buyers Or Leads
Most business website marketing advice you'll see concerns traffic and getting visitors to your website. However I believe this is the wrong approach as attracting visitors who take no action is just the same as having no visitors. But if you set up a good conversion process first then you'll see much better results from your traffic generation efforts.
So once you have your website's purpose you need to ensure your website guides the visitor towards the action you want to take. It's also important to make the action you desire very clear to your visitor. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure out your website so you want to make the next step as easy as possible.
The 6 Components Of Selling
To get people to take action I use a 6 component formula that you can easily apply to your website. It consists of:
- Getting attention
- Explaining benefits
- Making an irresistible offer
- Providing proof
- Risk reversal
- Call to action
The purpose of this article is not to explain all of these components. You'll find plenty of talk about them on the Web Marketing Outlaw blog (just do a search) or they're fully explained in my 7 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales Right Now... Without Increasing Your Traffic Audio that is my bribe to you for joining my email list. Wow... I wonder what action I want you to take when visiting my website?
Getting Website Traffic
When you have a website that gets your visitors to take action then you need to add traffic. As you've probably heard a million times a website can't be successful without traffic. This is another major area where most website owners fall down.
The truth is attracting traffic isn't that difficult if you simply choose a few website marketing strategies and then execute them consistently. The biggest failing of most business owners trying to attract traffic is not they choose an ineffective strategy... just that they don't stick at it long enough to see results. Sure some strategies are faster than others but you have to start somewhere.
Some Free Traffic Generation Strategies
While no traffic is really free as it will still cost you time... the following strategies will cost you nothing up front. They're also good as you do the work once and profit from it continuously. As you do more work with each strategy your traffic will grow with a compound effect.
Article Marketing
I personally like article marketing as a good way to drive traffic to websites. All it means is you write articles and place them on various website called article directories. The biggest and best place to start is Ezine Articles.
At the end of the article you're allowed to place an author blurb where you link back to your website. These websites attract a lot of website traffic already, rank well in the search engines and other website owners can take your article and put it on their website. When they do this they have to keep the author blurb so you get even more links to your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a much acclaimed way of getting traffic to your website. The effects are amazing once you're ranking at the top of the search engines for good keywords but getting there is another story. While the benefits of SEO are huge it's a long term project and your results won't be instant.
Websites rank well in the search engines for two main reasons:
- They have valuable content talking about the specific keywords
- Lots of other websites link to that page or website
The technical skill required to be successful in SEO is vast and while it's something I recommend you learn something about... you're better off hiring professionals. A few thousand dollars to experts is much better than a few years or learning and pitiful results. You just have to ensure your experts are getting you real results that make your business sales.
Getting Paid Traffic
A good way to market your business website is using Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers. This means you get to put little ads on websites including the Google search results pages. When someone clicks on your ad you pay a few cents (or dollars in some markets) but get a targeted visitor.
This is why it's important to have a website that converts visitors into buyers. It's no good buying traffic that you don't do anything with. You need to know for every dollar you spend on PPC advertising your getting more money in return.
Other Traffic Strategies
There are literally hundreds of ways to get visitors to your website. However there's no point overwhelming you with selection right now. These strategies give you a nice taste of some of the most popular methods used right now.
Most business website marketing efforts suffer from two major problems. The owner either does too little... or they try to do too much and end up getting overwhelmed. I believe you're better off to pick a few strategies and just be consistent.
Want To Learn More About Business Website Marketing?
My focus is teaching business owners like you how to make more money from their website. This involves improving conversion and also traffic strategies like we've talked about above. I offer a variety of options from working with me personally to courses you can implement yourself.
But the best way to start is absorb the wealth of information I give away for free. That way you know what I'm saying works and can take me for a bit of a test drive. You can get a sample of this by subscribing to the Web Marketing Outlaw Band here.
I hope you found this article helpful and I wish you luck with your business website marketing efforts.