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Is Your Website As Successful As You Want It To Be? By Tatiana Velitchkov © 2002 Although your website is just one component of your total success as an Internet marketer, it's also important to ask yourself from time to time: "Is my site successful enough by itself?" A successful site contributes much to an online business; a failing website could eventually lead to its downfall. But in much the same way that "success" is defined differently by different people, a "successful website" can mean totally different things for different kinds of web marketers. But how do YOU define the kind of success you need from a website, and how do you make sure your OWN site delivers? Here are the 3 surprisingly simple steps: STEP 1: Define what a "successful site" means to you. Different websites achieve different objectives; the important thing is to make sure YOUR site is doing the most important thing you WANT it to do. Here are some of the kinds of "success sites" you can create for yourself, depending on what motivates & drives YOU to succeed: The Status Site If you feel that people's recognition, admiration, and respect are the most important parts of success, then this is the kind of site for you. A status site's objective is to establish a consistently exalted reputation for your business. Some people call it "branding," others call it the "online personality." Most standard website structures are enough to create the status website, as long as you maintain consistency in your design elements, lay-out, and the tone of "voice" for all your written content. The Selling Site If you feel that the only kind of successful site is the site that SELLS, then this is the site you need to create. The selling site can be structured in several different ways, depending largely on what you want to sell: a) the store site - if you're selling hundreds of different items b) the catalog - if you're selling enough number of items to be presented in an attractive lay-out, without overwhelming the surfer c) the direct mail piece - if you're especially selling one particular item, be it a new offering or something special on sale d) the brochure - if you're selling a service, a long-term relationship, or large pieces of equipment that people need to inspect before committing to a purchase. The Expertise Site This kind of site establishes your authority / expertise in a specific industry. It's ideal for those who do professional consulting work, public speaking, and authors of self help books in a specialized field. The expertise site often comes in 2 forms: a) the publication - which can be range from the online magazine to the daily tipletter b) and the virtual classroom - where lessons & courses can be offered for pay or for free The Creative Site If your success priority is to gain distinction for your creativity & innovation, then the creative site is what you need. Just about any website structure can be transformed into a creative site (because really creative people can always find a way), and this kind of site will greatly benefit anyone whose expertise & services are highly creative in nature. The Community Site Some net marketers believe that creating a loyal community of surfers is tantamount to creating an active base of returning customers, and so spend most of their online energy into keeping their community thriving & happy. If you think this is the kind of strategy you need to adopt to create your own brand of online success, then consider including these tools that will keep your community interactively happy: - chat rooms - message boards - the mailing list - the newsletter - and members only areas (that may include exclusive freebies). Step 2: Decide who you want to visit your site, and how many of these people you want flocking to your pages on a daily basis. After figuring out the kind of impact you want your website to make, it only makes perfect sense to make sure it actually has an audience to make an impact on. Currently, there are 2 ways to make sure you get this much-needed traffic: 1) You can advertise your website through other high-traffic sites, or high-subscriber base ezines. This is the more conventional way to get site traffic of your own, although you have no real control over the amount of response you will get. 2) Or you can make use of a legitimate guaranteed hits service. Fortunately, this is an area I can directly help you with, since this is exactly the kind of service I offer on http://www.Guaranteed-Hits.Com. Unlike hit-or-miss advertising techniques, Guaranteed-Hits gives you total control over how many visitors will browse through your site on any given day, any day of the week. So after you decide on the KIND of success you want your website to enjoy, you can also decide HOW MUCH success your site will get through the amount of traffic you decide to receive. Step 3: Get feedback on your efforts, and act on it. The other major component of your success is how your surfers/clients respond to your products AND your website, so keep communication lines with them open, and make it easy for them to tell you what they think about your services and why. Remember that success is an ongoing process. Each action you make creates a reaction, and the way you deal with each reaction will determine if the next reaction you get will be more favorable, profitable... ...and generally make YOU more successful. © Tatiana Velitchkov About the Author: Tatiana is the publisher of: http://www.TheFortunesEzine.com, the FortunesEzineWeekly at http://www.TakeYourFortune.com, and owner of the traffic-solution slam advertising sites http://www.Guaranteed-Hits.com and http://www.Guaranteed-Hits.net |