After identifying your market, the next crucial step in your attempts to make money online is to set up your shop in cyber space and announce your presence to the internet community. This is known as setting up and registering your website. You need to gather some important data, as explained below, before attempting to design your website. Not doing this can result in your business going dead even before it getting started. Go back to your earlier steps and figure out convincing answers for the following questions:
1.Who is your target audience?
2.What should you do to enable your target audience to find you?
3.Why should your visitors choose to buy from you vis-a-vis your competitors?
4.How will you convert your visitors into paid customers?
Let me explain these 4 points in detail now.
Who is your target audience?
Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps. Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential.
How to pull your target audience to your websites?
Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.
Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links. Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your
market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site.
The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text.
Why your target audience should choose to buy from you?
What is your USP [Unique selling proposition]? It is not absolutely necessary for your products/services to be radically different from your competitors. You should offer better value for the same price or disproportionately larger benefits for a slightly higher price. Compare the products in the market and highlight where your products/ services score over others. Then select your USP and ensure this aspect is projected aggressively in your websites.
List your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. They should be enabled to understand this pretty much instantly so that they are more inclined to be your customers.
How will you convert your visitors into sales?
Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started. Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your USP clearly visible on your home page - and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages.
Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell skin care lotions, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “Skin Care Lotions”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “Skin Care Lotions”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.
