Three Simple Steps To Make Your Site Sell More

People often ask me to review their web sites and advise them on how to generate more sales. The mistakes made most often can be divided into three main categories and by fixing these you can dramatically change the success pattern of your web site.

While these step are simple they do involve a bit of work.

1. Lack of targeted web pages:

People tend to regard their web sites as a unit instead of looking at each web page seperately as a mini web site. Many of the web sites I visit may have a semblance of search engine optimisation on their front page and nothing on the rest.

By targeting each of your web pages to specific keywords or phrases you are creating a net that will generate traffic from all over the place.

Each page should be optimised seperately for search engines using generally accepted search engine optimisation techniques:

focussing each page on up to three keywords or phrases a targeted tag using META keyword and description tags in the section using headline tags ( to ) to highlight your headlines and sub headlines using the image alt tag to add more keyword density using descriptive text links to name a few.

Treat each page as a mini web site.

2. Funnel your traffic to your sales pages:

Whether you want people to buy online, to request a quote, to make an enquiry or to subscribe to your newsletter the process is essentially the same.

Decide what is the most wanted response (MWR) you want from your web site and then each web page must be designed to achieve that response. Your most important web page is the web page where you will get your MWR, whether it is your shopping cart, your quote request form or subscription page.

Every page on your web site should channel visitors to this page - in effect you create a funnel with 5, 10 or 100 pages designed to funnel people to the pages where you get your MWR.

3. Build your mailing list:

When a vistor fulfills your MWR, i.e. buys your product, requests a quote, makes an enquiry, you have achieved your initial goal. However, what if they don't? You've lost them. Unless you have an second best MWR in place.

This will normally be to get their email address legally so that you can follow up with them and promote your products or services. So have an alternative ready. This could be a free ebook about your business, your products or services. If you are in, say tourism, it could be a guide to your area. Whatever is suitable to your audience.

But get their email addresses!

As I said the steps are simple but it will take some work to impliment it

Success in 2006

Jens

Jens du Plessis is an Internet marketing consultant and has been doing business on the Net since 1996. For free ebooks and to subscribe to his monthly newsletter at www.webmarketingsa.biz