6 questions I should answer before getting a website

1. What is the purpose/goals of your website?
   Advertising, information, generating leads, or online shopping.  Is it for sales or marketing? Is it a tool for communication or an online brochure? Do you want to sell products through the site, or just educate consumers about them? Do you want to increase membership in your organization, or offer Web-based benefits to current members? Do you want visitors to email you, call you, or subscribe to a newsletter?

2. How will people find your site?
   There are 4 billion sites on the Internet and you are planning on making that 4 billion and 1.  What is the likelihood that a buyer will accidentally find your website?  If you calculated the cost per lead on that basis, you would never build such a site. Your business website exists only for one purpose, to gain you more sales and business. 
   

   Therefore, you must have a strategy to ensure people know your site exists and that there is a reason they should visit it. How can you do that? There are two basic strategies, offline and online advertising.

   An offline strategy is based on all your offline marketing- ie brochures, business cards, public relations, networking and cold calling, to name a few. In every case you would refer leads to your website where they can find out more about what you can do for them, and why they should choose you. Your website would be the arms and legs of your offline advertising and initiate the next step in your strategy - giving further details of your service, educating your customer and creating credibility for your business.

   An online strategy will be built around visibility. The key elements of this are:

   • Search Engine Optimisation

   • Email Newsletters
   • Increasing the number of places your website address is linked to
   • Pay Per Click and other Search Engine Marketing
   • eZines, the list goes on
     

3. What are you going to do to make visitors stay on your site?

   In Real Estate, the magical phrase is location, location, location.  The three secrets for making people stay on your website is CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.

   To get visitors to stay, you need to give them information that they want.  If your website is just sales hype, your visitors will be gone before they even read your name.  Your goal should be to educate your visitor in areas that they actually want to be educated in.  Give them information they will not get elsewhere on how to solve the problem that caused them to search for you in the first place. 

4. What do you want visitors to do once they are at your site?
   You need to give visitors a reason to give you a way to stay in contact.  This could be by way of a newsletter, or through a free download of information requiring their email details.  The point is that all good advertising has a call to action and your website should not be without.
   

5. How are you going to get people to come back to your site?
   On average, 80-90% of website visitors will never arrive on your website.  And if they don't stay, it's going to take you several lifetimes to become an Internet millionaire. To get people to come back you need to do several things:

   • Have sufficient quantity and quality of content, that the visitor will bookmark your site to come back for
   • Continually add to and change the content to make visitors want to come back and see "what's new"
   • Provide special offers to your subscribers that will encourage them to revisit your website. ie. Register now and receive 20% off your next 5 orders.

If your website never changes, why would anyone want to come back?

6. How are you going to monitor the results of your website?
   When you make an offer, make a change to your site, or undertake some marketing campaign, whether online or offline, check the response on your statistics, and the conversions that you have achieved on your site. Do controlled experiments. Don't change too many things at one time, because you will never know what caused the change and sometimes you'll get bumped out of well deserved spots on the Search Engines.  With a little bit of research there and a few minor tweaks you can give your website the Midas touch.