My Travels on the Net

Internet marketing is often overwhelming and confusing. As if designing your website to rank well and getting other websites to link to it weren’t hard enough, now you have to factor Web 2.0 and all that entails into your internet marketing mix.

I’ll be honest with you, it even drives me nuts. And I do this stuff for a living! But, I wrote a proposal for a new client today and found myself creating a brief summary of what’s involved with internet marketing.

The goal of internet marketing is to sell stuff. Whether that’s a physical product, an information product or a service, it doesn’t matter. The ultimate goal is to sell something.

There are two main components to internet sales; drive more traffic to your website and convert that traffic by giving the visitor what they want.

This sounds pretty basic but it’s easy to lose sight of the primary goal. We tend to focus on statistics like: how high my website ranks for certain key words, or how many unique visitors were there last month, or how many people signed up for my newsletter or blog feed. But you know what? Ultimately, none of that matters! What matters is how much money you made!

Selling stuff comes down to two things: driving traffic to your website and converting traffic into customers.

Driving traffic to the website can be done in two ways.
1. Your customer is looking for you. They have a problem and they are actively looking for a solution. They go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo, type in a key phrase and find your website in the search results.
2. Your customer may be aware that they have a problem but aren’t necessarily looking for a solution. They hear about your company in an article, blog, forum, podcast, video, social media or social networking website and because they like what they hear, they visit your website.

When people land on your website, it’s time to give them what they want. It’s a lot of work to get customers to your website and once they’re there, if you don’t give them what they want you’ve wasted your time and money. That’s why a customer centric website is crucial to converting visitors to customers. It’s also the most commonly overlooked piece of the sales process.

I’m not going to tell you what your website should say because I could write the most brilliant description and the vast majority of you are going to tell yourself, “My website says that.”

You know what? It doesn’t! I will straight up bet you $100 (donated to your favorite charity) that I can find 10 things on your website that are not turning visitors into customers.

Want to know why visitors are not customers? Have a friend (who doesn’t owe you anything and will tell you the truth) look over your website. Then shut your mouth, stop defending it and listen. Your bank account will thank you for it.

Labels: converting visitors, driving traffic, internet marketing, internet marketing best practices, turning visitors into customers