...But just like your “real world” business, your web site needs a plan for progress, and a schedule for ongoing improvement....
Making a Plan for Consistent Progress:
It’s easy to get caught up in building a web site. It is a rewarding and fun adventure, with quickly measurable results. It can even become addictive!
But just like your “real world” business, your web site needs a plan for progress, and a schedule for ongoing improvement.
If your web site supports an offline business, you will measure your site’s success by the number of sales leads or job quotes or orders you are taking. You will want to set some goals, set a budget, and keep improving your site to attract as much business as possible. The key to your site is to get people to CALL or ACT, and to create offline business.
The early stages of owning a web site to bring in business for a store or service can feel slow, but investing time and money in your web site guarantees a long-term edge over your competitors, and one of the least expensive means of advertising around.
Develop a good relationship with your webmaster, talk about your goals and concerns, and work together with your web designer to improve your income. If your web company does not seem to “get” your business, or seems disinterested in your success offline, you have the wrong company. EVERY business can generate more revenue by having a strong online presence.
If your web site is a business in itself; such as, an online store, an information site or blog, or a social network or forum, your job is to look carefully at every opportunity to monetize your pages and create visitor loyalty.
Keep in touch with your mailing list (more on this later), and get to know the wants and needs of your customers online. Take polls and have contests to get to know your visitors. Do your best to provide a great experience every time your customer visits your site. Even if you’re not selling an actual product, repeat visits mean more clicks on your ads, higher visitor rates to help you sell ads to others, and will add up to more affiliate sales.
There are many tools to help you create a loyal base of customers who refer others to your site, and your webmaster can help you implement them. Some of these are free email accounts, a personal calendar, and a community forum. On my free email accounts, I add a “tag-line” to the bottom of the email template, so that every email my customers send out contains an invitation to visit my site. A significant number of visitors come from my site members’ emails.
It is most crucial that you spend a little time each month creating new content or writing a newsletter to your site visitors. This keeps them coming back, and gives you more opportunities to make sales or increase ad revenues.
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