Monday 3 September 2012

Giving Your Website A Professional Look

By Charles Jeanbaptiste


Creating a website is a lot of hard work and can be difficult at first. Once this is complete it's time for you to look for ways to drive visitors to your site. Here are some tips that will help get your site the traffic that it deserves.

Every business should have a website. A website is a great way to advertise your business, promote the benefits of your products or services, share feedback and reviews from other customers and offer local coupons or discounts. Service oriented businesses can even use their website to schedule appointments, saving them time and money versus hiring a receptionist to do the same job. There are many benefits of a website, and it is smart to take advantage of all of them. They can help you to market to a wider audience and make your business stand out against the competition.

Make sure your site has a site map. This is helpful for your customers of course, but it also allows search engines to better analyze your site so that they can rank you more highly in their results pages. When that happens, you can attract even more traffic to your website.

A narrow niche means you will quickly run out of customers. A narrow niche is fine if you have a high profit range on your products through the sale of refills and upgrades or if you can extend your activities to other products and niches. However, if you want to limit yourself to selling one product, look for a broader audience. Stay up to date with trends; your product might become interesting to a different audience in a few months from now.

There should be a large section of your site dedicated to product descriptions, reviews, pictures and videos. These pages should be easily accessible from your menu, your homepage and your social networks. Draw people to these pages by letting them they can learn more about your products and order them on these pages, and do your best to get some back-links to these product pages when it is relevant to do so. Your goal is to direct traffic to these product pages, but do not fool people into clicking links or push your products too hard toward your audience.

If consumers must wait to hear back regarding their responses or inquiries, they will likely forget or quickly move on to other options. It is best to have a dedicated staff to answer such tickets, but this cannot always be achieved on a smaller budget and is instead handled on your personal schedule. A business owner might take the time to change their presentation or product to suit such a ticket, rather than respond and inquire further with the specific customer. Finding this information may lead to actually calming the individual, answering a simple question, or quiet a troubling issue that was inherent and well warranted in the online market place.

You need to keep updating your site regularly. Think about creating a monthly newsletter or social network profiles to stay in touch with your audience. Post new content at least twice a week. You can discuss your new products, write reviews, feature pictures taken by your customers or simply discuss your industry. Find out more about your target audience and their interests, so you can write on topics they can relate to. If you notice you are not getting a lot of responses on a certain article, perhaps it is a topic your audience is not interested in.

Your main goal is to get more business, but there are many smaller goals that you're going to have to accomplish before getting there. One goal could be that you want to set up a business website. By breaking this goal down into sub goals, you'd end up with having to build the website and coming up with content for the site. Make sure your goals are as clear as possible and keep track of your progress whenever you accomplish something. Just in case something doesn't work, you can go back over what you've already done and figure out where things went wrong and fix that.

Create a positive image for your brand by getting people to identify with it. You could create a message board where customers can interact with each other and find that they have a lot in common. Start discussions on Facebook; posting polls or asking people to comment on a post with their opinion on a product or topic are great ways to get people to interact with you and with each other. As far as Twitter is concerned, check if you have been tagged in any posts every day and answer to these updates.

Now that you know a little bit about Internet marketing, you're ready to get yourself out there. With time and dedication you will get the word out and will have new customers. Get things in order and watch your profits skyrocket when you follow this article's advice.




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