Sunday, March 25, 2007
Prepare your new website for marketing
Q. I’m just setting up my very first website for a new service. Should I pay for search engine optimization to attract traffic? A. Maybe. But first fine-tune your copy and estimate your conversion rate. There’s no point in driving traffic to a site that leaves visitors cold. Conversion rate just means the number of visitors who bought your product divided by the number visitors who came to your site in total. So if 1000 people visited your site and 10 bought, you have a 1 percent conversion rate. Not bad, especially if you’re new. Are you selling a big ticket item, such as a three-month consulting package or a complex information product? You may be happy to sell 2 or 3 a month. You’ll have a hard time evaluating the power of your copy because changes will be small and slow. So I would suggest creating a way for those visitors to get to know you. Create an ezine or e-course. These days, even if you don’t charge for your ezine, you need an irresistible gift to motivate subscribers. You can also develop low-cost information products. I find first-time visitors will buy my low-cost ebooks, even if they don’t know anything else about me. Often they sign up for my ezines after buying – a good sign, in my opinion. And now you have a reasonable way to test conversion rates. You can judge the number of visitors who sign up for your ezine or buy an ebook, as compared to the total who surf in. Eventually you’ve got copy that will motivate visitors to take even a small action. And now it’s time to think about driving traffic to your site. You can use SEO, article marketing, google adwords….lots of choices! Definitely worth the wait |
# posted by Cathy Goodwin @ 9:03 PM 
