…Whatever that might be.
Welcome to my beginners guide to generating traffic to your website and then making them perform a desired action:
Making sales
Some of my clients are ecommerce clients – they sell stuff via their websites. For some of them them this is the only place they vend their wares and their website is the sole channel for their product. Some of my clients are service based and don’t sell tangible products on their website but rather the concept of their service.
Add to basket – again & again & again…
Ecommerce clients want visitors to their website to add a product, preferably several, to their shopping basket and pay for them via the online checkout. Ultimately they want the visitor (now a buyer) to enjoy this experience and come back regularly to do it again. Maybe to tell their friends about how good it was and get them to do it too. And they want this to happen over and over again every day including bank holidays.
Automatic sales people?
Service based clients don’t usually have an ecommerce solution attached to their website because they are more interested in leads than they are in online sales. Leads are the life-blood of a company who needs to talk to people in order to sell them something. They might sell holiday homes or legal advice and whilst it’s technically possible to allow people to purchase just about anything on a website, it’s not quite so easy to convince them that they want to. DVDs, CDs, books – easy. Houses? Our websites are not quite automatic sales people just yet. Although that ability is not as far away as you might think.
So regardless of the ultimate website goal of my client, they all have the one thing in common; they all want people to visit their website and then perform and action. Whether they want the visitor to buy something online, fill in a contact email form or pick up the telephone and call, the process is remarkably similar. So my job is two-fold; get people to your website and then make them do something.
This is not a sales pitch
Now before this starts to sound like an advert for me and my services, let’s get one thing straight – I’m not touting for business. With the work/family balance I’m currently booked to the hilt and the time it takes me to write this blog is about all the time I have left. So whilst I’m happy to engage in conversation and debate, I’m not available for any consultative work. If that changes, believe me, you’ll be the first to know…
Free, holistic search marketing & website conversion advice
This exercise is hopefully going to shape itself into a useful guide to the whole process of marketing your web presence effectively both in terms of visits to your website and the action you want visitors to perform when they get there. There is a wealth of information out there for folks looking for SEO (search engine optimisation) advice and there are many (often self appointed) conversion gurus and web design and development professionals. Not one of these areas, left to there own devices, will show you how to become an overnight success but a sound understanding of each will give you the best opportunity to succeed at whatever you online goals might be. Make money probably.
So over the coming weeks and months (And for as long as it takes to make sense) I will be sharing the stuff I know and the stuff I learn as we go. These are the 2 main areas I’ll be covering:
Search Marketing:
This is the stuff that makes you rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. It’s not brain surgery but it is an important part of your online marketing strategy and it does involve time, effort and sometimes a bit of money. It is not a black art and it is well within your grasp to do this yourself. We’ll look at the do’s & don’t’s, examine current theories on best practice and explore the art of link building, content development and search engine friendly site design.
Website Conversion
Once we have generated a stream of targeted traffic to your website we will develop strategies to retain them at your site and furthermore to ensure they perform the action that defines the purpose for which your site was built.
So – without further ado – lets push on and look at where we start…
November 23, 2008 at 2:48 pm |
You sure this stuff works? I tried it all in a travel site and discovered that there was obviously something that I was missing.
November 24, 2008 at 2:45 pm |
Sure enough to make a living out of it! However, the amount of work that you need to put in relates to how competitive your industry sector is. Travel is generally pretty competitive. It’s all completely possible though with a little time and patience. Just don’t expect overnight success – you need to do your research, make your changes, build your links, test, tweak, measure and repeat!