By Catherine Parker on 2004/09/22
So your site is up and running. You've spent thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands on developing it and making it beautiful. In order to make a worthwhile return on your investment, you need to make your site work for you to increase traffic, sales and ultimately recoup the money you spent building it. Here are ten ways how:
1. Make sure it works
This might be obvious, but make sure that your site doesn't contain any broken links. If visitors can't reach the information you say you have on your site, they'll leave.
2. Track
Invest in a web statistics package to see who is visiting your site, where they're arriving and where they're leaving. This information can help you gauge what pages or products are most popular to your visitors. Stats also help you identify any problem areas, such as identifying a page from which a large number of visitors are leaving. Is the page broken? Is it ineffective and/or hard to navigate? These insights will become clear if you examine your site stats in depth.
3. Test
Remember, the beauty of a website as opposed to a brochure is that it can be changed quickly, easily and without much hassle. Use this feature to its fullest advantage! Test different styles of landing page copy (e.g. long vs. short, hard vs. soft sell) to see which one is most effective in converting your visitors to customers. If you have featured specials, change these regularly, and keep track of which ones are the most successful.
4. Qualify your Contact Form
Instead of simply providing an email address via which people can contact you, build in a contact form to your site and have people submit their query through it along with their name, company name and other relevant information. When you follow up the enquiry, your sales team will be better equipped to close the deal as they'll know more about their potential lead.
5. Optimise
Make sure your site is visible on organic search engine results. This will involve extra time and money at the outset, but if its done properly, the resulting increase in traffic will pay for it many times over.
6. Initiate a Call to Action
When visitors arrive at your site, is it easy for them to click through to the goal page, such as the product confirmation page or newsletter sign up confirmation page? Initiate a call to action in your site layout and copy to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to reach the goal page.
7. Add Valuable Content Regularly
Sites that are regularly updated with valuable content are likely to become popular with your target market as you're providing a current and useful resource. Other sites will also be more likely to link to you - and inbound links are an important factor in getting your site high rankings on search engines.
8. Advertise Online
Whether you opt for a pay per click campaign, banner adverts, affiliate marketing or a viral campaign, spread the word about your site. If you have a monthly newsletter, make it easy for people to click through to your site. Direct them to landing pages that form part of your site, and include your site menu on that landing page.
9. Advertise Offline
Not all site marketing has to be done via the internet. Make sure your web address is displayed on your brochures, business cards and print adverts. When you speak to people in person, give them the URL of your site.
10. Keep It Updated
Nothing looks shoddier than a site with old information, or with "upcoming events" that have already passed. Keep your information current. If you're selling or advertising products via your site, make sure your prices are up to date.
