If you are truly serious about your Internet business, designing a website specifically intended to sell your products and services is an essential part of your success. Your website should have one specific purpose:
Influencing your visitors to decide whether or not they are going to benefit from the products and services you have to offer.
Your website is the most important sales tool you will ever have. A professional website should be pleasing to the eyes, well organized, easy to navigate, load quickly and be optimized for the Search Engines.
There are countless websites on the Internet today with more and more being added each and every day. The rivalry is fierce between sites that offer the same products and services and in order to be successful, you must stay one step ahead of the game.
Although the overall design of a website should be a key part of your strategic plan, it is only the first step. Before you begin the actual design process, you need to first determine your overall strategy and design your website accordingly.
Internet vendors have essentially two choices:
1 - Design a MINI SITE that simply focuses on just one product or service alone, with no other content whatsoever.
2 - Design a FULL CONTENT SITE that includes not only your products and services, but also information and resources that will catch the interest to your target market.
Even though both types of sites can be extremely effective, your overall success eventually will depend on your site design and marketing strategies. Both will play a very important role.
Full content sites are simply sites that provide visitors with actual content, such as articles, tutorials, free e-books and resources. This type of site attracts their target audience with incentives. The products and services are mentioned on the main page of the site with a link to further information within its sub-pages.
Full content sites typically profit by enlightening their visitors on different services they provide. One example is a content site focusing on grooming products for pets might provide a basic tutorial to assist their visitors in learning how to groom a dog. They make available this tutorial that is completely free; yet, one of the main purposes for this tutorial is to educate their visitors while at the same time promoting their products and services.
When you provide your visitors with valuable information that instructs and informs, you are not only gaining their trust in you and your company by sharing obvious expertise, you are also building up reliable credibility, which has become imperative on the Internet. One thing to always remember is that the key to using this technique effectively is to provide content that targets your prospective clients.
If you are developing a full content site for this purpose, your main goal for every page of your site will then need to be leading your visitors to your sales page. You can accomplish this in a number of ways, including:
No matter what type of response you are looking for, your website must be specifically designed to achieve your goal at all times, and regardless of which type of site you plan to design, keep in mind that your website is a direct reflection of you and your business.
The first impression of your website is the most important factor in determining the value of your website. If your site does not appear professional or even pleasing to the eyes at first glance, its perceived value will be low and that perceived value of your website will have a great impact on your success or lack of it.
On the other hand, you could very well have a great website, well designed and a quality product or service, but if it takes too long to load, the perceived value will still be just as low.
Why is this?
Well, simply put, your potential clients will not wait for that which ultimately costs you business.