It’s good for your website to suck

If your website has powerful sucking power then it’s more likely to achieve your desired outcome, which is generally to make more sales. People are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter, buy your product or use your services if you’ve provided them with free information that adds value to their lives.

If visitors return regularly, then your business creates ‘top of mind awareness’, which means that they’ll think of you when it’s time to buy.

An example of a website that totally sucks

Whenever I require information on anything business-related, I visit Flying Solo, type in my key words to the search facility and then enjoy the many informative articles related to my topic. I find out all the answers to my questions and I also end up exploring a multitude of other enticing links. Before I know it, I have been sucked in to a vortex of irresistible information. The Flying Solo website pulls me in and keeps me in; for this reason, it can be considered to be a ‘sticky’ website. Although in my book, it just totally sucks!

Three tips to help your website suck

1. Create a killer home page

There are no shortcuts with this one, if your home page isn’t effective it just won’t pull the visitor in, and quite often it can inspire them to click away. Here are some basic points to consider if you want your home page to double up as a vacuum cleaner.

• Keep it concise and uncluttered. If it looks messy and confusing then people won’t stick around.
• The message on your home page should state what you do in an obvious and simple way.
• If you want to convert browsers into buyers then make sure that your home page is written persuasively.

2. Include a well-constructed Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page

FAQ pages are fantastic. While many people visit this page to find out the answer to one specific question, they’ll generally read more. If you effectively address every issue related to your customers’ concerns, it also helps to break down any barriers to doing business with you. Within the FAQ’s page you can direct browsers to other pages so that they can enjoy your entire website. For example:

• How much do your bags cost?
• Prices range from $50 – $550. Please visit the products page for more details.
  Do your bags come with a money back guarantee?

Yes, though we’ve never had a bag returned yet! Read comments from our happy customers on the testimonials page.

3. Regularly post fresh and interesting content

If your clients know that you will regularly post interesting content in the way of articles, blogs and tips that will help them, then they will gladly return to stay updated and will generally ‘stick’ around for a while during each visit.

So, do you agree it’s important for your website to suck? Does your website suck already? If so, allow it to pull us in here.

Source: Lucinda Lions

So to get you thinking about new strategies, I’ve put together a list of the seven ways you can earn income on the Web, and then I’ve explained how you can incorporate all of these methods to create success.

Online Profit Steams

Whether you’re just beginning to develop your business model or simply analyzing an existing business, your chief focus should be on how you’re going to generate income. There are seven ways to generate revenue on the Web:

• Sell your own products
• Sell your own services
• Drop ship products
• Recommend affiliate products
• Sell ad space
• Create a joint venture with like-minded businesses
• Start an affiliate program

Let me explain each of these a little further:

1. Sell your own products. The main advantage to selling your own products is that you ultimately control how much profit you make on every sale and you therefore have the potential for the biggest profit margin. You know exactly what each product costs, and you can try out different price points to see what works the best. People appreciate good value, and removing the middleman is a great way to provide your customers with competitive prices that keep them coming back for more.

2. Sell your own services. Whether you’re a small-town dentist, a high-priced online legal consultant, a real estate agent, a tutor, a landscaper, a bed and breakfast owner, an auto-mechanic, a caterer, a fitness trainer or anything in between, you can profit from selling your service online. It’s easy to get started selling a service online, but your revenue potential, in most cases, is limited. That’s because, unlike someone selling a physical product that can be stored and shipped on demand, you can only provide as many services as your time allows.

When you sell a service, you’re essentially selling a relationship with yourself. And this requires that you spend more time and effort establishing your credibility and developing rapport with your visitors than is typically required on a site selling a physical product. You not only need to establish the benefits of the service you’re offering, you also need to establish the value of you providing this service.

3. Drop ship products. If you want to sell products without the hassles of tracking your inventory, setting up warehouse space and maintaining a confusing shipping/receiving infrastructure, drop-shipping may be the choice for you. Drop shipping lets you sell quality, brand-name products on your site for a hefty profit, while the drop shipper takes care of fulfilling the order. They warehouse the stock, pack the orders and ship them out to your customers.

4. Recommend affiliate products. Recommending affiliate products creates a “no-risk” partnership that allows you to promote another company’s products or services on your site to earn a percentage of their sales. As one of the company’s “affiliates” or promotion partners, you earn a commission each time someone you’ve referred to their site makes a purchase. To advertise their wares, you might post a banner on your site that links to the affiliate program’s site, or you might publish an article about the company and their products in your newsletter.

5. Sell ad space. Once your site has lots of highly targeted traffic, or a large, targeted opt-in list, you may be able to sell advertising. Advertisers are willing to buy ads when they’re being directed at large numbers of their target market. Nowadays, though, advertising revenues are a lot less than they used to be, so I don’t recommend you plan on making this your sole source of income. Selling ad space can be a great additional profit stream, but it’s unlikely to keep your business afloat on its own.

6. Create a joint venture with like-minded businesses. Joint ventures are all about related businesses teaming up and combining skills, products, services and resources to create new streams of income and profit. One great way to profit through joint ventures is to seek out products or services that would benefit your visitors, and then approach the companies that provide those products or services. Ask them if you can recommend their product or service on your site for a portion of the profits. Most companies will gladly agree to this arrangement–after all, there’s no risk for them since they only pay you when you refer a paying customer.

7. Start an affiliate program. With your own affiliate program, you can recruit an army of people (your affiliates) who will recommend your product on their web site for a percentage of any sale they refer. You have the power to exponentially increase your income as more and more affiliates sign up and you continue to teach your existing affiliates how to increase their commission checks (and your income).

It’s one of the most powerful forms of online advertising I know. It allows you to grow your profits while keeping your business small, since you don’t have to go out and spend money on salespeople and advertising. Your affiliates do the advertising for you, and you only pay them when they make a sale.

Source: Corey Rudl

Answer: That’s a good question. In fact, it’s one of the most important and often-asked questions of the digital business age. Before I answer, however, let’s flash back to the very first time I was asked this question. It was circa 1998, during the toddler years of the Internet.

I was giving a speech on the impact of the Internet on small business at an association luncheon. Back in 1998, which was decades ago in Internet years, the future of e-commerce was anybody’s guess, but even the most negative futurists agreed that all the signs indicated that a large portion of future business revenues would be derived from online transactions or from offline transactions that were the result of online marketing efforts.

So should your business have a Web site, even if your business is small and sells products or services you don’t think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is the same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a Web site. Period. No question. Without a doubt.

Also, don’t be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can’t be sold online. Nowadays, there is very little that can’t be sold over the Internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

Internet marketing research firms predict that online revenues will range between $180 billion and $200 billion in 2003. They also predict that the number of online consumers will grow at a rate of 30 to 50 percent over the next few years. These numbers alone should be enough to persuade you that your business should have a Web site.

Let me clarify one point: I am not saying that you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the Internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you certainly should be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the Web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

That said, it’s not enough that you just have a Web site. You must have a professional-looking Web site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your Web site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your Web site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well-designed Web site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I’ve seen many big company Web sites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

You also mention that yours is a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a Web site, size does not matter. I don’t care if you are a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don’t have a Web site, you are losing business to other companies that do.

Here’s the exception to my rule: It’s actually better to have no Web site at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your Web site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, “Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful Web site for our customers!” or it screams, “Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!”

Your Web site is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.

Source: Tim W. Knox