Hi Folks,
I have spent some time researching the key steps involved to get your website to perform to its optimum and boost your sales.
Remember this sobering fact – Most website out there on the web are making zero sales or performing poorly.
Here is the good news – if you can set up your website properly and learn how to effectively make use of digital marketing your site could have a sale conversion rate of up to 50%.
So how to get there?
I have distilled 14 key steps from the Masters and here they are -
Step 1 – You need to have a serious web strategy in place before you launch your site. Don’t skip the fundamentals that pave the way for higher success. This strategy needs to cover paid traffic strategies and so called free traffic strategies (“so-called” because in fact nothing ends up being totally free when you take account of all the time and effort involved to generate high quality free leads). A big part of this is effective keyword research that aligns with what you know will work best for the google algorithms. If you want to know more about his join our program Online Results Accelerator.
Step 2 – Ensure you have the right domain and right hosting of your domain.
This will require a bit of research into where most of your likely customers will come from. Most of the time the best domain name will be one that ends of “.com” unless you are confining your market focus to just one country.
The ideal domain name is one that will include your name or company name and your major key words that people will use when searching to find you. For example “HowToUseVideoMarketing.com”. Try to avoid anything generic. The more specific the niche the better. For example, “Mortgagebrokerbusiness(name of suburb)” is better than “mortgagebrokerbusiness” or “mortgagebrokerbusiness (name of city)”
Before you settle on a choice of domain name it is best to look ahead into the future and try and see where you are heading for. You may see that what will work best for you is to have a mother ship site surrounded by a number of satellite sites.
Here’s a tip – Google favors older domain names. This is why a good strategy to take up is buying domain names you believe you will eventually use and “park them” until you use them.
On Hosting – your hosting server has to be on 24/7 and must be reliable. You cannot afford any sudden hiccup with your site being switched off and unable to be found. If your market focus is in one country then choose a hosting service in that country. If your market is more global then you probably would be best to use a US hosting service.
Step 3 – A well designed and well built website. Avoid packages aimed at newbies, as they are often poorly built and hence will be much harder to properly index for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Avoid push button designs.
Tip – Avoid using a designer that uses his own proprietary software so that anytime you need to make changes to your site you will be forced to go back to that developer and keep paying him to effect the changes. Rather, go for open source and a CMS (content management system) that will allow you to take charge of future changes to your pages. Never let yourself be left in a position where the developer can shut down your site. With open source this is impossible.
You want to set things up so you are the administrator and can log in to your site, and if you need to outsource work to a web developer you can give them a licence to log in to do specified work.
For CMS (content manager systems) consider ones like Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.
They allow you to do your own maintenance if you wish or contract it out.
I am attracted to WordPress because its software is constructed to be very SEO friendly and it has thousands of easily downloaded plugins to enhance its uses and performance. For instance there are plugins to make it easy to add photos, audio and video. It also has a big range of pre-designed themes, and you can easily do a split test on different ones to find out which ones perform better. You can also split test banners, headlines etc and see which ones outperform the others. The golden rule is always to let the market tell you what works best. Don’t just guess.
WordPress also lets you use Panels that you can move around on the page without interfering with the underlying code.
Remember – the money is in the detail beneath the surface.
For split testing you can use google analytics and crazy egg (heatmaps) and develop the habit and discipline to test every page. Never settle for just the first version. You cannot play the internet game with a “set and forget” mentality.
Learn what is under the bonnet of powerful software programs like Word Press. You can use Thesis in WP to build up your web platform and it allows you to make changes easily to accommodate results from your split testing.
Thesis allows you to use “clean code” for SEO purposes. Google loves clean code. Thesis will separate out the code from your different design elements. Google likes to see stable code and Thesis achieves this.
It is not expensive. I believe it is around $87 for a single website licence and $164 for a multi- site licence.
For someone who really knows Thesis they can build you a complete site in just 2-3 hours. Knowing this don’t fall into the trap for new players of being asked to pay $3000 to build a WP Thesis designed site.
If you want to learn more about Step 3 – we are offering a great deal right now to join Online Results Accelerator.
BONUS STEP – Would you like to learn how to embed a You Tube video into one of your WP Thesis panels?
Here is how -
- Go to y0ur You Tube page or other hosting site like Vidler.
- Select a video
- Select “embed” and the size you want
- Select “Copy Code” for that video
- Log in to your Word Press website
- Go into the Admin panel
- Choose the location where you wish to embed the video
- Choose the sizing of the video for the panel
- Then use our cursor to locate the panel location on page where you want to have the video
- Click on “Paste”.
- Bob’s Your Uncle.
That is not too hard, is it?
Further Tip for Word Press Plugins -
Just go to the WP Plug In Directory. There you will find all the plug ins (about 13,000 of them!). About 90% of them are FREE. Just select the ones you want and download them to your site.
Do you like this information? Is it useful?
If you do, then please leave a comment to that effect below and tell us what else you would be interested to know and we can work that into future posts here.
Well, if you like what you are getting here, you can always come back to receive Steps 4 – 9 and then Steps 10 -14.
If you want to make sure you don’t miss them when they arrive you can just use the RSS feed subscription on this page so that you get automatically notified.
Take care and all the best with your endeavors.
Christopher Whitelaw
Strategic Internet Entrepreneur.