November 10, 2009 by Matthew Henage
Give Your Audience What It Wants
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.
You can learn more about your customer in two ways, by just asking them and by installing analytic software like Google Analytics. Both are highly recommended because both provide information that the other cannot. This information is like gold because it becomes a catalyst to providing quality content that keeps your visitors coming back for more.
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.
The quickest way to build traffic to your website is by using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This method of advertising can become expensive, but if done correctly, it can become a very lucrative method. To start, it is recommended to use a low budget with Google Adwords (a very popular PPC resource). The beauty about using Google Adwords is that it connects wonderfully with Google Analytics. If set up properly, you can discover if your advertising efforts are worth the money, and take the necessary steps to improve your ROI.
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
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’ll need to keep your site clean, but you also need to get their attention to key areas of your web page that encourage them to make a profitable action. You can do this by changing the contrast, color, style and/or font. Try different ways to draw attention to get your visitors to do what you want on different pages.
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 web design and web marketing firm. By visiting his website, for a limited amount of time, you can get an Internet marketing consultation.
