Sunday, December 21, 2008

How To Increase Website Profits

By Matthew Henage

Whatever Your Visitors Want, Give it to Them

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 get your visitors to stay and not running off to your competitors? The easy answer, "Give them what they want." To do this you need to answer the following question, "What do my visitors want?" This question can be answered by deviding it into three more specific questions: First, Who are your visitors? Second, What attracted them to your site originally? And Third, What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know the answers to these questions 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.

Build 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.

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.

Monetize Your Website

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'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.

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

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. - 15478

About the Author: