8-Step Action Guide to Gain Sales From Your Website
April 25, 2010 by: Shari
From Webify Your Business by Patrick Schwerdtfeger
Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed: Unfortunately the vast majority of websites do not do a good job converting visitors into paying customers. The key is to plan strategically BEFORE designing your website.
8-step Action Plan
1. Understand that your website is your Sales Department.
2. Generating website traffic is Marketing.
3. Think about first-time visitors to your site.
4. Identify exactly what you want them to do.
5. Answer the following three questions for your site visitors in five seconds.
6. Why am I here? Tell them what you do.
7. Where do I look? Offer a few clear choices.
8. What do I do? Tell them what to do next.
Think about all the steps BEFORE you start building your website. It’s a lot easier to build a new site than fix an old broken one.
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Good breakdown of basic website strategy.
I would add… Keep it flexible. Many people have to hire their web guy (or gal) every time they want to make a minor change. Yikes! These days it’s easier than ever to use a web platform that lets YOU edit content easily.
Whatever web strategy you develop using the intelligent steps outlined above, chances are very high that you’ll need to tweak it. More than once. Visitors rarely behave exactly the way you want on launch day. You’ll need to analyse and course correct along the way.
“It’s a lot easier to build a new site than fix an old broken one” doesn’t have to be true if you’ve built flexibility into your design.
Monitoring is definitely something required by every program, whether it’s a website or a campaign. The only thing we can be certain of is change — and our need to adapt.