Making Money From Your Website
A website is seen as being mandatory for anyone running a business, but unless you take the right steps to ensure it is making you money, your site will be irrelevant. The harder you can make it work for you, the more you will get out of it; but do you know how to get the maximum return on your investment when it comes to your website? While it can be straightforward enough to set up a site using a website builder or a blog platform, bringing in visitors is the essential factor that will make your site profitable. As with most things, there is more to bringing traffic to your site than simply publishing it – if you build it, people won’t necessarily come just because it’s there.
Learning the ropes
Because it’s easy enough to set up a site, you might not have considered how important it is to learn as much as you can about how websites work, good design, how to write content, using search engine optimization techniques, running an e-commerce store, and all the other factors that go into a successful site. There is a wealth of knowledge on all these topics, and it’s highly advisable to make the most of every learning opportunity you can find. The more you know, the more you can get from your website, and therefore the more profitable it will be. There are numerous free resources you can access online that will give you plenty of help, but if you’re serious about getting to grips with optimizing your website, you should consider an online course. Most higher learning institutions offer qualifications and authoritative courses in these subjects, so have a look and see what’s available to you. You may be able to fund the course as a business expense, or if you are still contemplating going into business for yourself then a personal loan from a reputable broker like Bonsai Finance could be a worthwhile investment.
Bringing in visitors
Bringing visitors to the site is the first stage, and will involve having a sound search engine optimization strategy, as well as using advertising methods to boost your reach. Crucially, however, getting visitors to the site needs to translate into action on their part to be of any use to your business. You could have thousands of page hits per week, but if none of those people are staying around to explore the site, make inquiries, or purchase from you, you’re no better off than if you’d had no visitors at all. Examining your site metrics will soon tell you if you have a problem with your site. If you are getting visitors but they aren’t sticking around, there is something about your landing pages that is failing to engage people. If you aren’t getting the visitors in the first place then your advertising strategy could need adjusting, and your SEO tactics might need to be reviewed.
Functionality
To be effective, your site must have the information visitors require and be performing its functions quickly and easily. Timing out, slow loading, error messages, and not having the facilities to make inquiries or purchases easily and securely will all put clients off. Your first step therefore must be to ensure that your site is fully functional and has all the attributes customers will be expecting. You also need to keep a regular check on your site to make sure everything is functioning properly. Users are more likely to simply abandon the site and go elsewhere if they encounter technical difficulties, rather than telling you about them. Security is a primary consideration for most consumers, so using the securest payment systems and encryption protocols will be reassuring for the wary. You should also conduct periodic reviews of your site and either upgrade or use add-ons as technology develops.
Design
Having determined that functionality is crucial to your website’s effectiveness, it’s equally important to consider the design of your site. The first impression a visitor gets when viewing your landing pages is a critical moment, where you have the chance to entice them into the site, or they can click away without any further interaction. A page that has the information the viewer is expecting, well-laid out with a useful number of links and menus is the most likely to engage with viewers. Common design errors include having a front page which looks beautiful and stylish, but has no easy access to information and obscure navigation; on the other end of the scale, a page which is so cluttered with information, adverts, pop-ups, animations and links that a viewer doesn’t know where to begin can be equally off-putting.
Email lists
These are still one of your most powerful marketing tools, so you should be aiming to get visitors to sign up for regular emails from you, even if they haven’t purchased anything from the site. Once you have potential customers’ email addresses, you can contact them with useful and interesting information on a regular basis, and if you give them a great service this way, they will be more likely to come to you when they are ready to spend some money. One effective way of enticing visitors to sign up is to offer a freebie for which all they have to do is supply their email address and give their permission for you to contact them. Make whatever you are offering worth having, for example, a free PDF guide on a topic relevant to your business. People love freebies, but it will need to be something of value to your potential customers to keep them interested.
You will never know it all when it comes to operating a successful website, so give yourself a solid foundation by undertaking a quality training course, and keep up to date on the ever-changing world of the web on an ongoing basis. You have one chance to grab someone who has landed on your site, so use the optimum combination of design and functionality, and gear it towards appealing to your ideal customer.
