Australia’s Internet usage ranks fourth in the world and the number of users is growing fast. Over the next two years, millions more Australians will get online.
In this article, five major steps required for building a successful website is explained.
1. Create a website which makes visitors want to stay and spend time
Learn how to keep visitors at your website by giving away good information, and by making your site attractive and easy to navigate. You don’t want a dog’s breakfast of confusing stuff. Your site should be attractive and it should focus on a specific topic and target group.
Your website needs to allow you to create credibility and rapport with the customer (as this is how you will get the sale), make the visitors feel comfortable, make him/her feel you are there to help them, make it easy to get the information they want and make it easy to order.
2. Get visitors to come back to the website once they’ve left
Not all visitors will buy the first time they see your product/service. Some want to do more research, some want to wait until they can afford it, some don’t need it until later, some don’t fully trust you and your claims yet, etc.
This is critical now there are so many websites. You cannot expect people to remember you when they are visiting tens, if not hundreds of websites in one session online. You need to capture their email address and remind them of who you are and how you can help.
One of my favourite ways to do this is by offering a free valuable newsletter at your site. Each month you can remind people to come and check out your newest issue. You can even offer things like a tip of the day, week or month. Whatever you do, make sure it is timely so that visitors will want to come back and check out your website all the time to get new information.
If you offer something like a tip of the day or month and you don’t deliver this through a newsletter (but just publish it on your site and expect people to remember to come back and visit you all the time), the dilemma you run into is that you can’t guarantee return visitors. Since you have no way of reminding them to come back to you, they may forget about you altogether.
Personally, I think it’s important that you have a newsletter to remind them to come back and get the tip of the month, or see the new article you have or whatever your most current information is.
3. Have a great sales process
What I mean by ‘sales process’ is to make sure that you give them the desire to buy without being pushy (usually through good sales copy) and make it easy for them to order. This is not an easy thing to accomplish – there are a lot of ‘tiny’ things that will make a difference… many people can get the traffic to their site but don’t turn those visitors into sales (which means you make no money). Note: Don’t forget to have great customer service before and after the sale, as that will make a big difference for point 5 below.
4. Work the backend
The backend (what you have available to sell customers after the initial sale) is very critical. The backend is where you make your money.
If you treat a customer right and you give them great value and great customer service, you are always going to be able to sell them something else. That’s where you make your real money. Once you have a customer, it costs you nothing more to sell to them again especially since you can email them for free. So everything you sell them afterwards is pure profit. There are no advertising costs, no getting a customer cost, no commissions or referral fees… everything after the first sale is pure profit… you keep the whole thing (other than the product hard cost). This is where you make your money.
Fifty percent of my net income comes from backend sales, so I know what I am talking about here!
No matter what product you are selling, no matter what business you are in, the backend is where your money is… so take this to heart!
This is your master plan of action for making your business successful. Your goal is to complete all five steps. Although I have broken the master plan down into five major steps, each step is made up of dozens and dozens of smaller, but important actions which have to happen along the way. For example take the next step…
5. Get traffic…
Get qualified visitors coming to your website. This sounds like a small thing, but in reality it is a very big job. You will need to learn the effective use of banner ads and search engines to generate traffic. Getting qualified visitors is a very hard thing to do and it requires taking a lot of individual actions… following through on a lot of promotional and marketing techniques – testing different methods and sales copy, etc.
So although I have listed it as one step, don’t underestimate it. It requires a lot of work to get just that one step done properly… and in reality, this job never ends. The good news is that it is very profitable and I have many clients that have quit their day jobs because their Internet business is making them more in two months than they were getting paid in an entire year.
