MAKING YOUR WEBSITE SELL

Optimizing your website to sell is a very important part of doing business on the Internet.

Promoting your site is the easy part, but once a visitor surfs onto your webpage, what then?

There are a couple things you have to understand.

1. You ultimately know your product better than your customer.

2. You might be on a DSL line or cable modem, but a lot of users are still on dial-ups

So what does this mean? It means that you need to create a ‘web friendly’ site.

Optimize it to ensure a quick download time over 56k and convey your message very clearly to your user.

Compressing your site’s file size is essential for any web business.

If your site takes more than 10 – 13 seconds to load over 56k, you are definitely losing customers.

Try taking away flashy graphics that are just taking up valuable space and that are not really needed.

Next, get an image optimizer and start crunching your graphics. This is where the major downfall is for almost any site. They look great, but some graphics are just too big.

After your site’s file size is optimized, you need to come up with a game plan for your message. Whatever you sell, you must be able to clearly spell it out for your customers. Remember, your site is your personal salesman and it only says what you want it to.

Therefore, imagine if you walked into a retail store and a sales representative came up to you and started pitching the latest and greatest product.

What would it take for you to buy?

What would it take for other people to buy?

What keywords or phrases ring in people’s ears?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself when writing the text on your website.

Every product/service is different, so there is no sell-all universal answer. This is something you will have to formulate on your own.

What ever text you decide to put on your site, make it flow properly. Avoid sentence fragments and grammatical errors that could in the end trip up your users and cause confusion.

Conclusively, don’t overlook the power of surveys and polls. If you don’t think your site is performing as well as it should be, ask your customers what they think. Nobody can give you better feedback than your target market.

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