5 Strategies for a More Profitable Business Website

August 23, 2008

It’s an unfortunate fact that most business websites are grossly unprofitable…not nearly reaching their full potential as the excellent marketing and sales tools the could be. Here are a few tips for increasing the profitability of your business website.

1. Have Good Content

To have an effective website these days, you absolutely need to have good content. But don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be Pulitzer prize winning writing. Just focus on providing your website visitors, prospects or customers with informative articles that help them solve a problem, ideally one tied to the same problems your business helps solve. But keep it informative, not a sales pitch.

2. Build an EMail List for Automated Follow-Up

Nearly every business website I see gets this wrong to one degree or another. It’s important to realize that these days, your prospects are probably taking longer to make a decision on whether or not to do business with you. Therefore, it’s important to have a way to continue to follow up with your website visitors to stay “top of mind” and to continue to educate them about the benefits of your offer(s). Email is one solution.

But people are also increasingly skeptical about giving out their email address, so you need to offer some sort of enticing “freebie” to convince them to do so. Make sure they know you won’t SPAM them (and be sure you don’t!). And be sure to put the signup form on every page of your site. And not just a link to a signup page, but an actual form, right there on the page, that they can use to sign up. You can see how we implement this on our site. In fact, why not signup so you can see the whole process? (Shameless plug)

3. Consider Using Video

With the growing popularity of sites like YouTube, just about every business can benefit from creating short, informative videos to help educate their website visitors. Not only can you easily add these videos to your site, but you can also gain exposure to your business since YouTube is one of the sites with the highest amount of traffic on the entire Internet.

4. Use Good Web Copy

The web copy on most business websites is entirely too “me, us, our” focused with not enough emphasis on what;s in it for the customer. Take a look at your copy and see if you’re really talking about how the customer benefits from buying your product/service. For good examples, listen to how they pitch things on infomercials…not for the specifics of the offer, but how they present them. You’ll almost always hear lots of wording about “how fast you’ll see results”, “how easy it is to use” and so on.

5. Test and Track Everything

Even if you have a ton of traffic coming to your site, if those visitors aren’t turning into sales, your site still isn’t getting the job done. Another thing that most business owners are unwilling or unable to do is test elements of their website to improve its performance. That could include things like the number of sales, subscriptions, phone calls or whatever action you want people to take when they visit your site. Installing tools like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer can be good, free and easy ways to get this valuable info.

Bonus Tip - Consider Investing in Search Engine Optimization (Especially Local Search / Local SEO)

One thing that’s common about many businesses is that often times, their customers are local. These types of businesses are in a great position to take advantage of local search or local search engine optimization.

For example, website visitors searching for specific local terms like “Maryland massage therapist” are obviously looking for something specific and are much more likely to be buyers rather than tire kickers. Besides, that type of business wouldn’t see many benefits from ranking for the more generic term “massage therapist“. The good thing about doing this is that most of your competition won’t have a clue and those that do probably aren’t focused on the Internet as a primary marketing method.

Discover exactly how your website compares to those of your competitors by requesting a free Competitive Analysis today. You’ll learn exactly what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and how you can take advantage of those weaknesses to improve your traffic, conversions and sales.

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