Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Simple Steps to Increase Web Profits

By Matthew Henage

Giving Your Visitors What They Want

Too many times a web master will create a site that has meaningless information about their business. The problem is, web traffic cares less about your business and more about the what they want. Don't appeal to their interests, and you've lost them.

Its simple in theory to keep your visitors on your site because all you have to do is, "Give them what they want." To do this though you must answer the following question, "What do my visitors want?" To answer this question, you'll need to research the following three sub-questions: Who are your visitors? What attracted them to your site originally? What do they want when they come to your site? Knowing more about your visitors, what attracted them to your site and what they are looking for on your site makes it easier to retain them and keep them coming back for more.

So now your wondering how you find this out about your visitors. luckily there are plenty of tactics to help you do this. First tactic, just ask them. Find a way to speak to them and ask them, you'll find that this is a very helpful tool. Another tactic is using analysis software like Google Analytics. This software is easy to set up, and can tell you mounds of valuable information about your visitors. These are very helpful ways to learn more about your visitors, and in turn, helps you to provide unique and very valuable content to them.

Build Traffic

Once you have created a reason for your visitors to stay on your site you need to learn how to attract more visitors to your unique content. You have many options to build a constant flow of traffic to your site. We discuss two of the most important tactics to build traffic in this section.

If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money. If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you'll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another must in traffic building for those who are serious about maximizing their profits. SEO is a way in which you can have your website ranked higher within search engines, thus creating more traffic to your website. SEO is done in two parts: First, your website must be search engine friendly. Second, there must be other websites linking to your site.

Influence Your Audience to a Profitable Action

While you want to provide your web traffic with the content that they want, you also need to make it easy for them to make you more money. Does your website make it difficult for your visitors to sign up for a membership or make a purchase? Why? Make it easy for them, and your visitors will respond appropriately.

You can make it difficult for your visitors to make you money in many ways. Give them too many options to nonprofitable actions, making your navigation confusing and cluttering your web pages with random text and graphics. Get your customers attention to a profitable action by using varying degrees of contrast, color and font choice. When in doubt use different approaches on different pages and measure the results.

There are other tactics and tools you can use to increase customer sales as well. Using call to action, branding, A/B or multivariate testing, design improvements and product/service cross promotion can improve your sales many times over.

Partner with an Expert

If a lot of the concepts discussed in this article seem relatively new to you, honestly, it will be easier and more profitable to turn to a professional to help you out. In choosing an expert partner, make sure they have a marketing background and are focused on building your profits.

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