Creating a Profitable Website
Five Steps to Creating a Profitable Website
To make $$$ and creating a profitable website, you need to have five things,
1) develop a great product or service
2) develop a great back-end product or service OR joint venture to offer clients after you have offered 1)
3) write a killer web site that sells
4) direct targeted traffic to your site
5) great customer support and follow-up
Let us see how to do 1) develop a great product or service
First of all you want to over deliver. You can find great products by going to download.com and check out the downloads that get the most #. You can also check out top sellers at yahoo.com and amazon.com
If you don't have your own products, or services, you can sell someone elses.
You can join an affiliate program, where you get paid a % of the products value for every referral who buys that is referred to the mother company from a special affiliate link from your website. Although Amazon.com was an early pioneer and lets you offer millions of books and other products, it is not as good as programs that give you customers that buy, lifetime customer status. With Amazon.com, if a customer buys using your unique affiliate referrer link, but then enters someone elses site and clicks on some other amazon.com link and buys a second book, you do not usually get a commission. A far better program in terms of customer loyalty is the 5 Pillar Program by Sitesell.com
You can also attempt to obtain reprint rights, where you obtain the rights to sell unlimited copies of a product for a flat one-time fee. However, this does not give you rights to sell the rights to provide others with reprint rights - that is called having master reprint rights and these are far more expensive.
Do not try to sell a shoddy product or service on the web. Because it will come back to haunt you. Not only will you get e-mail flames, but 1 person will tell 10, the 10 people will tell 100 and you will have viral marketing against you. Also, it will prevent you from utilizing that greatest of $$$ makers, the back end.
2) Once you have successfully created great products and services, you want to develop a great back end. Find products or services that are the next logical step in the process, with a much greater price tag. An example is MYSS2002 product on website selling. This is about 1500 pages of pure gold on How to Make Your Site Sell!
The back end for this product is a webhosting service that builds your webpages, optimized it for search engines provides e-commerce merchant support, and helps you develop a theme based content site, in which you can further back end various additional affiliate programs to make additional income!
For Examples, you can visit www.free-web-traffic.com and check out Make your Site Sell 2002, and Solo Build It, respectively!
3) The next thing you need to know is how to create a site that sells. Your customer only cares about benefits to him or her. They don't care how many widgets your company produced last year, that you are a billion dollar company etc., unless it directly impacts on your customer bottom line First, you need to create a site that is easily navigable, with high usability, with quick load times. You need to create a killer sales copy pathway that in each stage, encourages the reader to click to the next phase of your site, without fail.
Most wanted response discussion ---- You need to set up a most wanted response and appropriate back - up responses that can eventually lead your reader to provide the original most wanted responses. Some appropriate back - up responses include subscribing to the website e-zine, where after a series of e-mailings, appropriate rapport and trust is built up, so when you repeat ask your reader to provide the most wanted response, there will be no problem in obtaining it. Another back-up response is to use autoresponder free courses related to your subject, again to build rapport so you can ask for the order and get your most wanted response later.
A good autoresponder is http://www.aweber.com/?19056
Additional info on most wanted response - what is it exactly what you desire your visitor to do! This is kind of like developing a business plan and should be down prior to actually laying down the words and HTML for your site, because everything you do subsequent to this is to guide the reader to this response. You will employee a website design and usability, including dead ends etc. or other obstacles that will force the reader back onto the chosen path that you chose for him. You employee key words that will encourage the visitor to travel only in the direction of the most wanted response.
Now, what are some good most wanted responses for typical priced products and services.
Let us say you have a low priced product, that has a very high perceived value. Here is an example :
Make Your Sitesell 2002 - exhibit free trial in class - encourage them to download it as a handout!
Here, this product has nearly 1500 pages and has full money back guarantee, with many testimonials to back it up. The most wanted response here should be to get a direct sale of the product. Appropriate back-up responses include:
1) getting a lead for a future sale (this is almost universally true. Sitesell does this my permitting subscription to their e-zine Sitesell.
2) offer a free trial download.
3) offers other products - why should the customer buy these or similar products from a competitor - he just stocks them himself. Incidently, these are also great back ends for Make Your site Sell. There is even the back-up most wanted response of a quicktour of the website, which is becoming increasingly important in this time starved world - this way he avoids a click on the back button using the mouse and preserves the customer on the site and Sitesell.com is still in the game.
4) Seeing that the visitor may not fit the entire mold, Sitesell has further back up most wanted responses.
5) Free is one of the most powerful words. Sitesell offers many free trial downloads of Make Your Site Sell and of many other products. He offers many free courses, delivered by autoresponder, free sweepstakes, free reports, and various subjects including developing infoproducts to sell on the net , How to price perfectly, how to write for the net better, and how to start and grow a profitable net auction business. Ken Evoy, owner of Sitesell.com even has a free 5 pillar affiliate program which you can join for free and earn income selling Sitesell.com products and buy them at a special affiliate discount. The advantage of all of these freebie backends is that the webmaster is able to obtain a name, an opt in name, which to many webmasters, these are pure gold, as over time, after the opt in leads begin to trust the webmaster, they can joint venture with other peoples products that are appropriate for the list, with money being made by both, even if the opt in lead never buys the original product!
To further check out all these backend most responses and more, please visit the Sitesell link page at
www.courses-free.com/linksitesellbackendproducts.html
Let us examine the case of a high priced product, maybe suspension cables for bridges. Here, this may cost $20000- $1000000. Here you may want a Most Wanted Response of getting a lead and creating rapport by obtaining an e-zine subscription, both of which can be obtained by using a form on the website. This same approach can be done with a $20,000 piece of software, but here you have an additional advantage - you can offer a 60 day free trial download, with limited or light features, or the full version for a shorted period of time. If you are selling a service, you may want to generate a lead as the most wanted response. If you are really good at it, and can measure the value added, then you might offer your services on contingency - no money upfront. Or provide the first hour free!
Additional requirements of your most wanted response.
1) It must qualify your visitor. It is good marketing practice to place the price of your product in your description when using those pay per click search engines - why? It qualifies the prospect. If you advertise "ultimate time savingsoftware $39.95!" the clicker knows that the program is not free and he or she is going to be expected to pony up real money - $39.95 for it.
2) Your method of ordering the most wanted response must be doable by the customer.
Don't use a phone call method if the user does not have phone service.
3) It should be brandable if at all possible, or be strengthened by the brand. A good Amazon.com affiliate might instead of saying submit to order book by clicking here, would say submit to order book from Amazon.com by clicking here. People have come to trust amazon.com ordering process, and love the "one-click" ordering.
4) It should be consistant with the product or service price. For example the most wanted response for a $20000. product should be to generate a lead, while a lower priced $49.00 product may be to generate a sale.
5) it should be quantifiable - i.e. you need to be able to calculate your number of responses per $ promoted using promotion medium A. If they are responding from an E-zine ad, you can include a tracker URL in order to measure the effect of promotion A. You also want to know the conversion rate. Your techie should be able to access your log files, and by listing the number of most wanted responses, divide this number by the number of visitors to get the conversion rate.
You can get free tracker software by joining the 5 Pillar Affiliate program - it's free to join. Then you go to their free download page to get. Join 5 Pillar Program for Free and Download Free Tracker Software! http://affiliates.sitesell.com/successsales.html</A><BR>
Although, the number of responses is dependent upon how well you crafted the ad, and the qualities of the advertising medium, the conversion rate mainly depends on whether you have great products or services on your website and whether your website sells - these are entirely up to you. Now the great thing is if your most wanted response is truly quantifiable, you can test different approaches - like changing the headline in the ad in medium "A" to check on the # of responses and conversion rate. This way, you can stop wasting marketing $$$ where you are not turning a profit and instead, concentrate on those areas that do pay off marketing wise! Another example. You market waverunners. Let your customer fill out a form that helps custom design his own waverunner and offer a 5% discount for printing out this custom model if he takes to a dealer named on your site and buys it in the next 21 days. When you design the form, Input a hidden tracker code like waverunner5 and now test out various discounts, may be a 10%, 3%. While you are at it, you might vary the deadline. The key thing is to keep all variables constant except one.
6) Allows you to respond fast. It is very important that your most wanted response be responded to very quickly. Therefore do not choose one that you are unable to.
In order to obtain order, you need tight compelling sales copy that repetitively stresses benefits, not so much features. The computer has 400 gigabyte hard drive is a feature. But that it can store all the documents and papers in my house so I can consider tossing the papers to make more room in my house is a Major Benefit!
Customers are much more likely to buy if you can provide names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of real live people who have been satisfied with the product. These letters are called testimonials and should be copiously displayed on your site.
A good guarantee should be provided. In fact, if you have an outstanding product, a 1 year guarantee, may get more in sales than lost in refunds!
You should have an excellent, well thought out order page, providing multiple methods of payment. Like cash, credit cards, paypal. A provision to print your order form so they can fax it in should be considered.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) Driving targeted traffic to your site
First thing is you want to have an idea of exactly who and what your customer is in OUTLINE FORM. Outline what he does from awakening to sleep. Where does he go, whom does he listen to what does he read, where does he surf on the internet. Does he like e-mail or worldwide web. OR does he use the usenet newsgroups?
You want to then devise ways to get you and your website in front of him as he does these things. Now where do you think your chances of success are going to be greater - if he is actively looking for you and raises his hand, or if he is not and you just are advertising blindly. It is the former. That is why direct mail is so effective on the ones who respond. When you compare sending follow-up mailings to the responders that sent in the little card, or phoned the 800 #, the responders to the first batch have a much greater chance of contacting you and eventually buying then the first non-responders. It is always better that they are looking for you then you are looking for them with no proactive response on their part.
Now, the key method for doing exactly the above, of having those who are looking for what you got is to master the Search Engines. The key traffic building device are the Search Engines. If you get highly ranked on the Search Engines, they will provide large numbers of visitors, who are targeted. The fact that you scored high on the engine is sort of an endorsement, as a good engine like google.com does not accept all sites that exist. So there is a mode of protection in buying from a highly ranked site from a highly regarded search engine like google.com
There is an art to writing search engine optimized pages. For an example of what a good search engine optimized page is place a competitive key word such as "internet marketing" in the google search engine and view source the pages of the top 10. Now, don't steal their copyrighted code, just learn.
You also want to get into directories like yahoo.com. Although now there appears to be a charge to get into yahoo.com. But it may be worth it. There are also pay per click search engines where you can bid on key words. IF you can get cheap keywords with high demand, this may be viable technique. If optimizing for search engines seems too onerous, then there is an easier way! Solo Build It Does an excellent job - visit www.free-web-traffic.com and check out Solo Build It.
Because there is so much competition for the broad based key words, the search engines are particularly good for very focused marketing campaigns.
Affiliate program - if you can start an affiliate program, that is a great way to generate traffic to your website. What you are doing is offering others the ability to sell your products and they get paid a % of the gross sales price. Advantage to you is that you only pay the affiliate provided they make a sale, virtually guaranteeing you a profit. For an example of a well run affiliate program that provides their affiliates with hundreds of pages of supporting materials, please visit- http://affiliates.sitesell.com/successsales.html
5 Pillar Affiliate Program
Please don't steal their materials when setting up your own.
To sign-up for affiliate master free course, send a blank e-mail
tamssuccesssales@sitesell.net.
It shows you how to become a high-earning affiliate champion.
Link exchange. Link Exchange involves where you find other compatible but non-competitive sites to exchange links with. You sell Caribbean Travel, another site sells Caribbean Real Estate. So you contact the site and inquire about each of you placing a link to the others website with appropriate praise and endorsement of the others product or service!
Use of signature file ... at bottom of each e-mail, you place a term like
For Free Web Traffic, please visit www.free-web-traffic.com
Usenet newsgroups. These can be good, particularly if you can leave a sig file. When beginning, lurk - observe, without posting until familiar with the group. Then, you can offer helpful advice and post your signature file and possibly other contact info.
E-mail discussion lists - can be a wonderful source of free web traffic. There are a number of sites that you can visit that will assist you in locating relevant ones. Like the usenet newsgroups, would suggest that you "lurk" - observe without posting. Once you learn the rules, you may be able to gently promote. Usually , they will allow you to post your signature file! This should result in more free web traffic!
E-zine/opt in mailing list. This method is rather slow and tedious, but can have favorable results in the bottom line. As your subscribers tend to trust you, your conversion rate may be rather high. This technique can be well suited for joint venture endorsement of compatible complementary products and services.
Write Articles for other peoples work , both on-line - on websites or E-zines, but don't forget about off line as well, to build free web traffic. This will help build credibility for you as an expert. For a good example, visit
http://www.myss.net/nojob.html,
where you learn how not to have a job. This is sort of like a "joint venture" where the writer wrote the article while Sitesell company provided the support, website hosting and graphics! Whoever said you have to work your entire life! ____________________________________________________________________
Offline - word of mouth, dead tree advertising (printed media) neon billboards - Yahoo.com as of July 03 still has a neon billboard type of ad in Houston Street and Broadway in New York City. If it is good enough for them, may be there is something to it.
more off-line ways to promote free web traffic-
1) post on community bulletin boards a text version of your web site. Example is the page at
http://www.myss.net/nojob.html
which, after slight modifications, I have used successfully as an off-line promotion device for free web traffic.
2) handbills - check local ordinances, but find out where a large # of your audience is going to be - i.e. maybe near a convention and distribute hand bills - a good source of more free web traffic.
3) newspaper and TV - promote via press release for free web traffic.
4) have message play to visit site while on hold on phone - will increase web traffic.
5) interesting off-line joint venture - Allow a store that attract a targeted audience to pot off-line ads and flyers tailored to that audience, directing these people to an appropriate affiliate URL for a website that will then sell products and services geared to that target audience. The store owner benefits because, prior to posting the ads and flyers, he has signed up for the appropriate affiliate program(s), so he makes good $$$ on the ales. You benefit, too, because you chose programs that are at least 2 tier, so you get an override on all sale! A good example is a computer rental store,
frequented by people who have websites! A good affiliate program is the sitesell 5 pillar program, which is 2 tier, and has products that are geared to such an audience. Such an audience would like to sell oodles of products and services from their websites. They may be in need of web hosting service. They may need to determine the optimal price for their products or services. To see most of the major ones offered, you can visit the link page at
http://www.courses-free.com/linksitesellbackendproducts.html
To sign-up for this affiliate program so you can start making $$$ doing this too, visit http://affiliates.sitesell.com/successsales.html
6) find people that also benefit when you make money and have them pay for all of your promotion costs. Example is the mutual fund salesman who agrees to fund your free seminars on financial planning! This will also work on-line too.
7) referrals - find satisfied customers who will recommend you to others. Where legal, offer them a referral fee and a discount to the referee. In fact try testing doing all business by referral only -i. e. - "you must have been referred to be seen by us."
E-mail Advertising - first of all make sure the list is double opt-in, else you may be accused of spamming people, which is unethical and is becoming illegal in different regions of the country. You need to test using a tracker URL as discussed previously to measure your conversion rate. Success with this technique is strictly dependent on how well targeted the readership of the e-zine is, plus how well your ad encourages people to visit your website, and your conversion rate of your visitors.
***time wasters the book MYSS2002 does a very good job on revealing time wasters plus a great deal of other information especially on the search engines. It is written by an internet marketing and search engine optimization expert Ken Evoy. If you don't believe it, type in anguilla beaches in google.com, and check out the top ten entries. Many of the high ranking ones are the home page or other pages of Ken's teenage daughter’s website anguilla-beaches.com
Bad or ineffective techniques
Banners - are a waste time for most people with the exception of the google adword program.
A Revolution in Web Site Monetization -- Google's AdSense
A Tailor-Made Way to Monetize Your SBI! Site!...
Rarely will a custom-made solution be dropped into your lap
(let alone from the Net's smartest company), just begging you
to capitalize. Ride Google AdSense for all it's worth. Send
visitors to THE word on how to get the most from AdSense...
http://adsense.sitesell.com/successsales.html
Banners - Most people ignore them. How about the branding element. This is hard to measure. I would only do it if I could get it for free or near free. If you have an affiliate program - this may be the only good reason to have them is because this is all many affiliates will do for you in your program. In addition, you might be able to place a bid with a description on some pay per click search engines that people hardly ever click on, but always see it in the top ten. Now that is nearly free branding!
For more information on Branding, please visit Rob Frankel's website.
Sweepstakes - usually ineffective, but need to test. Exception - when prize is product. Sitesell has a Solo Build It sweepstakes! Solo Build It! SweepStakes
It is a highly viral, traffic-multiplying vehicle.
http://sweeps.sitesell.com/successsales.html
Classified ad services - free ones are usually ineffective.
SPAM - don't!!!
5) follow-up and customer support. Lastly, you should have a good follow-up system to thank the buyer after the sale, telling him or her what a great decision that he or she made. You might even use a good autoresponder for this like aweber.com described above. Or you may consider a phone call - the personal touch still helps. This reinforces the buyer’s decision to buy - that it was a good one. This tends to reduce immediate refunds!
Customer support is key. This is the key to building long term trust in order to keep those back end orders coming in.
As a rule the back end product should have a much higher selling price then the original product. In fact, some savvy marketers often run the original product as a loss leader, in order to obtain lucrative back end sales. For an example ot a product that in my opinion is worth 10 X the selling price, please visit this loss leader -
The Sitesell Loss Leader! Make Your Site SELL! 2002. "The definitive work on making ANY Web site SELL! http://myss.sitesell.com/successsales.html
Here the back ends are all their other wonderful products - please visit
www.courses-free.com/linksitesellbackendproducts.html
So, Let's Summarize. To succeed to make $$$ and have a successful website, you need to have five things,
1) develop a great product or service
2) develop a great back-end product or service OR joint venture to offer clients after you have offered 1)
3) write a killer web site that sells
4) direct targeted traffic to your site
5) great customer support and follow-up
Most of the stuff I have read stress only one or two of the five. You need all 5! _____
Advantages of Selling On The web
· Very affordable start-up investment costs
· Low staffing expenditures
· low operational expenditures
· Easy to automate
· Work at own pace
· Low promotion costs
· Quick to generate income
· Worldwide customers, easy to reach
· Quick and inexpensive to test, lowering risk
· Easy to track customer response
· Easy to track effectiveness of advertising
· Can apply many offline marketing techniques online
Since the internet and worldwide web are so new, most people started at an even keel.
your customer sought you ought - often this puts them in a ready to buy mode, as compared to other modalities.
However, you have the huge negative to deal with - the customers hand is on the mouse and can click away from you in a split second, and go to one of other tens of millions of other websites. And the cute thing is that you never see his or her face, and the customer will not blush and feel that she or he should not have clicked away without giving you a chance to reconvince the customer not to.
The internet is a Big Savings Opportunity
You don't believe it? Check below.
...As a business owner, you will have certain tax deduction that will be available to you, that you would not as a mere employee.
...Cost cutting. Can use e-mail instead of snail mail, and expensive long distance calls. Can often use e-mail instead of faxes. In fact e-mail is preferable to fax, as e-mail is editable text, while fax is an image, which needs OCR, which is not yet 100% perfect.
...Employee and staff recruitment - people visiting your site represent a well targeted stream of potential employees/staff. If you place your own ads, there, you can attracted a talented educated work force.
...Employee and staff training. You can archive old lectures, notes FAQ, lessons, tutorials, seminars, software, PDF files all on your website, or you can send them to your employees and staff by e-mail.
...improved efficiency - using e-mail greatly reduces the cost of courier services and is faster.
...your competition - some of them will be online. If you are not, it is going to cost you, this in effect saves you money by allowing you more revenue to cover your expenses.
... vastly reduced customer service expense. With the world wide web and your website, you can offer online customer chat service, which after redaction of the names, can form the basis of FAQ pages and PDF, and HTML files. You should be a able to vastly trim the toll free # expenses 800 877 888 - both the telephone company expenses, plus the employee and benefit expense required to operate them.
... shopping alternatives. By offering a website, you allow additional alternative ways your customer can deal with you 24 hrs 7 days a week, regardless of the weather outside. Now, you should already be allowing the customer to deal with you in a variety of ways, too, like check, credit card, paypal, cash, courier pigeon (just kidding).
... branding value - having your company name/logo presented tastefully - will save you money in the long run by increasing your company brand awareness.