Is Your Website Really Working for You?
Three steps to make your Website work for you and start generating sales and enquiries.
(PRWEB) September 7, 2005 -- The telephone does not begin ringing as soon as
a website is operational. It is quite simple to identify how many enquiries flow
from a website; however, it’s impossible to calculate how many visitors have not
even reached your website, because it has not been marketed
effectively.
Three basic steps you must take to make your website work
for you are:
Step 1
Look critically at how easily and quickly visitors
on your website can find what they are looking for.
Web users are notoriously
impatient and move to an alternative site at the least excuse. Some of the most
important things you should ensure about your website
are:
• Your website should be easy to use, and information
should be easy to locate. Try to reduce the amount of effort people have to make
before they find the information they are looking for, i.e. minimize
click-through’s.
• Condense textual content to fit the time
and attention constraints of today's busy Web users.
• Your
web site should be quick to download. Studies have indicated that visitors will
quickly lose interest in your web site if the majority of a page does not
download within 15 seconds.
Step 2
Plan a marketing campaign to draw
the right kind of visitors into your site – and implement it.
Your marketing
plan must address the following points:
• Who will your
audience be? How will you use this information to make it the focus of your
website?
• Where do you want to be? Define your
goals.
• Up-to-date content. How will you keep your website
content up-to date?
• What online marketing methods will
you use? Many are available such as Search Engine Marketing, News groups,
Affiliate Marketing and Sponsored Listings.
Step 3
Monitor the results
of your campaign, recognizing failures and reinforcing successes.
If
you’re worried that half your marketing budget is being wasted on ineffective
campaigns, do you really know which half? If you're nodding in sympathy, then
you're probably not measuring and maximizing the return on your marketing
investment.
It is critical to understand whether or not you should keep,
quit or change your marketing campaigns.
Run your campaigns in a way that
they can be measured. By continually monitoring your campaigns you can decide
which ones are providing you with maximum returns on investment (ROI), and which
ones are not.
Example's of monitoring your campaigns are:
Email
campaign: You can measure how many people visited your website immediately after
the campaign, or how many people made an enquiry/bought items from the
website.
Search Engine campaign: Record the average number of unique
visitors to your website as well as information such as where they came from
(Easily done using tools such as www.VisitorLogs.com which we will discuss next
month).
Tradeshow brand awareness: Difficult to measure but you can
measure the number of people exposed to your message and compare the cost of the
tradeshow to a newsletter campaign which you may have previously carried
out.
What next?
Why not apply for a free website health check by
visiting www.KeywordMarketing.com where we will create a free report detailing
what changes, if any, need to be made to your website. We can also provide you
with a competitor analysis and ranking report, as well as specific information
on how we can help you. Alternatively, you may want to download our free Website
Traffic Guide by visiting www.KeywordMarketing.com - a popular guide on how to
make your website work.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/9/prweb281163.htm