How To Increase Website Profits
Giving Your Visitors What They Want
Far too often webmasters make websites that contain just fluff. Visitors don’t come looking for just any random stuff, but usually they have certain things they are looking for, and if they don’t find it, they are gone faster than you can say, “Thanks for visiting!”
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.
The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank. A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it. With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.
Bring in More 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.
Albeit a slow method, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a necessary tool for the traffic hungry enthusiast and to build your website profits. In a short definition, SEO is about bringing relevant traffic from search engines (Like Google) to your website. The more valuable, unique and search engine friendly your content on your website is the more traffic you’ll see from the search engines.
Influence Your Audience to a Profitable Action
Creating and retaining traffic alone will not make your site more profits. You also need to be able to influence your visitors to make a profitable action. To do this you must make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. If you make your potential customers jump through hoops to make you money, you’ll find that you are not realising your full profit making potential.
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.
The number of methods you can use to increase customer action seems endless. A few of the many worthy mentionables are branding, cross promotion, A/B testing and improving your call-to-action. Remember, the higher the rate of visitor to customer conversion the more revenue your website will receive.
Do it the Easy and More Profitable Way
Like trying to do your own plumbing, Trying to do web design and marketing by yourself can lead to more bad than good. Sure, if your dedicated and take time to get the proper experience you can do fine. But if your serious about turning a higher profit for your website right now, you’ll be better off hiring a professional.
Matthew Henage is an expert web producer and CEO of Superior Design Inc, a Utah website design and web marketing firm. By visiting his website, for a limited amount of time, you can get an expert website consultation.