How to succeed online
Whether or not you are using your website to provide online information, build memberships, or sell products or services, you want your readers to do something when they visit your site. Maybe you want them to:
- Visit your shop
- Make an appointment
- Read what you write
- Return to your site often
- Buy a product or hire your service
- Do something else
What makes one site more successful than others? In today’s online savvy world, it’s not enough to just build it and expect them to come. You need an intelligent, stylish design that includes rich content. Your site gives you an online opportunity to build a loyal group of followers who will not only come back for future visits but also invite others through social shares. A website, when done correctly—focusing on the visitor, can become a great marketing tool!
Show me how:
- Eye-catching Design. It is important that your site looks good and polished. It should be well-organized, professional and user‐friendly. You have approximately 2‐3 seconds for a visitor to scan your website and decide if they are in the right place. What would your perfect client do if they saw your site? Would it invite them in? Studies have shown that consumers assess credibility in large part based on the appeal of the overall visual design, including layout, typography, font size, color schemes, and correct grammer.
- Focus on Your Visitors. A strategy of focusing on your visitors—talking about them and how you can help them is much better than telling them how great you are. Give your visitors something to do. Give them something free to download. Offer a free report or whitepaper. Ask for feedback on a blog entry. People want to know what can you do for them—they want to be informed and entertained. If you do both, you might just hook them.
- Build Trust. Get permission from your visitors to email them. Salespeople will tell you that it takes a minimum of seven interactions with a client before they will buy from you. The same is true online. You must focus first on building a relationship of trust. How? One thing is to give them a reason to come back to your site. Offer people something that they really want a video and/or an e‐book, or even a great article. Something that they want right now in order to sign up for your list. Build your relationship with visitors that will spread your word, buy your products and recommend others to you.
- Tell Them How to Hire You. What are you selling? Make it obvious what you are offering and easy for people to hire you or buy your products. Some people are so conflicted about money that they are sometimes embarrassed to admit they are in it to make a living. There is totally nothing wrong with charging for products and services. It is good to offer several price points. Maybe someone first buys an informational product from you. Then they might hire you for an hour consulting session. Then they might just engage you for your full service.
- Get Social. Include share icons at the end of your articles to make it easy for visitors to share posts and articles with friends and communities. You might also add Follow Me icons on the various social media sites, so that visitors can follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and anywhere else you have an active online presence. If you do not have an active online presence, you are missing a great opportunity to connect with your prospects. You may also learn something about your visitors that helps you build a better product or improve your services.
- Keep In Touch. Make it easy for people to contact you. These days, simple contact forms are easy to create. Make sure it works and then get back with people that contact you.
- Stay Fresh and Relevant. Nothing is worse than a site with the holiday special still up in March or an event calendar with past events. New content should be added or updated to maintain credibility, as well as to rank in the search engines.
In today’s market, a website is a necessity for every business. But just having a site is not always enough. Website visitors expect and demand credible, memorable and easy to navigate websites. A business or organization without a website, or a website with no credibility, is less likely to succeed than one with a powerful online presence. With these tips, you can begin to use your website as a primary marketing tool.
Whitaker Web Design provides website design and development using the WordPress web development platform. By partnering with Whitaker Web Design, your business is provided a level of website expertise, service, and support that will allow you to focus on your core competencies.
We partner with our clients to help them create an effective web presence. From designing and launching your new or redesigned website, creating content-rich articles, and helping with a plan to get visitors and traffic with Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategies, Whitaker Web Design can help you succeed online.
Our Promise
We differentiate ourselves from other web designers by offering website design and development at a fair price. We focus our development using WordPress as the website platform—used by nearly 75 million websites. Whitaker Web Design partners with you to plan your site as well as helping to develop a strategy o how to get it seen online.
Contact us today and let’s see how we can work together to get the results you’re looking for!