Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Website Profits Increased using Expert Marketing Tactics

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.

So how do you appeal to these visitors? The easy answer, "Give them what they want." The more important question you should ask is, "What do my visitors want?" To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives, 1)Who are your visitors? 2)What attracted them to your site originally? 3) What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.

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.

Attract More Visitors

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.

If you like free relevant traffic, your going to love SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is about optimizing your web pages to become more search engine friendly, adding valuable and unique content and providing trusted links from within and outside of your website. The better ranked you can get your website in the search engines, the more free and relevant traffic you will receive.

Influence Your Audience to a Profitable Action

As mentioned earlier, you want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to get what they want. On the other side of the coin, you need to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. For example, why make them click through endless pages to sign up for a membership or newsletter? The easier you make it for your visitors to do what you want, the more they will do it.

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.

Do it the Easy and More Profitable Way

Too often we look to do our web design and marketing ourselves, and sometimes as a result, we lose more money than we save. Unless you're dedicated and experienced in this area of specialties, you will find yourself beneath your competition when it comes to building an effective website. - 16463

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