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How it's done

If you want to turn your online 'struggle' into an online 'success', here are the six key steps you will need to take.

#1 Plan your digital strategy

It's critical that you know the most important thing you want your online presence to deliver for you. This could be:

  • Product sales
  • Lead generation
  • Market awareness
  • Product information

or any number of other goals.  The point is, if you don't know what you're trying to achieve by being online, there's little chance of it giving your business what you want.

The answer to this is to develop a plan that clearly defines:

  • What you want your online presence to deliver for you.
  • How much budget you're prepared to allocate for this.
  • How can you best achieve this
  • What time scales is this to be completed in.

Once you've got your plan, you're ready for the next step....

#2 Update your online properties

It's likely that your current online properties (website, social media etc) won't be designed to allow you to roll out your strategic plan without making some updates. Here it's important not to get caught up with the technology, but to focus on getting the right pieces in place so you can really focus on marketing your site. This may include:

  • Content creation / restructuring for search engine optimisation (SEO)
  • Adding a newsletter sign up option
  • Development of landing pages
  • Adding Google analytics
  • Integration with social networks / Facebook, Twitter

#3 Get more visitors

In the early days of the web, the main source of new visitors for many websites, was being found by the search engines. These days things have changed and the potential sources of visitors has exploded.

Broadly speaking visitors can now come from one of five places:

  1. Organic traffic from search engines
    1. Google
    2. Bing
    3. Yahoo
  2. Social media traffic
    1. YouTube
    2. Facebook
    3. Twitter
    4. Pinterest
  3. Paid traffic (you pay another website for visitors)
    1. Pay per click (Google ads, Facebook ads)
    2. Affiliate marketing
    3. Cost per acquisition
    4. Banner ads
  4. Links from other sites
  5. Your own email list

Whilst some of these visitor sources appear to be free, they do involve significant investment of time to be successful.

You should be looking to build a good mix of visitor sources, as an insurance policy against one or more of these sources changing the amount of visitors they send you.

#4 Build an audience

Just as in a real bricks & mortar shop, when people visit your website, it pays to get into a dialogue with them. Some of the most popular ways of doing this are:

  • Inviting them to join your email newsletter by offering a free giveaway as an incentive
  • Asking them to like your Facebook page
  • Encouraging comments on your site
  • Using interactive surveys

The ultimate goal of all these activities is to build a list of people that are interested in what is it is you do and then to keep in touch with these people on a regular basis by sending them genuinely useful information.

#5 Get your desired response

Now that you've built yourself a following of people interested in what you have to offer, it's time to ask them for the 'sale'.

When I say 'ask for the sale' I mean find a way to get your audience to do the action you identified in your strategy in step #1.  This could be actually making a purchase, or it could be making contact via a contact form, or simply phoning you up. 

So how should you 'ask for the sale'?  The best way to do this is via your email list, but be careful to only send your sales offer no more than once every five newsletters or so, as any more than this will probably cause a number of subscribers to unsubscribe (which you don't want).

You should also be careful not to be agressive with you offer, but rather describe the benefits of your offer to your audience and then let them come to you if they're interested.

#6 Measure and adapt

You're well on the way to a more succesful web presence. You've got extra sales coming in and your list is growing every week. Now it's time to optimise the process of attracting your audience, engaging with them, and then selling them your wares (also known as the sales funnel). The easiest way to begin with this is by implementing Google Analytics on your site and configuring it to measure your conversions (i.e. What percentage of your visitors actually do what you want them to do).

If you decide to buy traffic then more sophisticated techniques will be needed to help you monitor how much it costs you in advertising to get each sale. This will help to ensure this process is profitable for you.

Summary

And that's how you do it. Obviously there's much more detail behind each one of these steps, in fact you could easily write a book on each one of these.

But fundamentally, the process is:

  1. Work out what you're trying to sell
  2. Arrange your website to allow you to do this
  3. Get yourself some visitors
  4. Convince your visitors to subscribe to your email list
  5. Use the email list to promote / sell your wares
  6. Measure and improve the above process

I hope this has been useful. There are hundreds of other websites and books that cover this same subject, however I think many of these go into too much detail for the average business person which is why I've tried to write this using easy to understand, non technical language.

And finally.... If you'd like me to help you with improving the success of your own website please get in touch here.

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