Do you want a website that makes money?

Is your website struggling? Are you unclear of where it should be heading? Here are six easy steps to making a difference.

Is your website struggling? Are you unclear of where it should be heading? Below I have suggested an “ultimate vision for your online marketing” to help you create a website that makes you money.

The desirable future scenario: You have thousands of visitors coming to your website, which are converting into sales. They refer their friends, they come back and buy more and your profit goes through the roof. You get a promotion and the company’s share price goes up 4%.

How are you going to get there?

Follow this six step plan:

1. Check if you can be the big gorilla in the jungle – Do a little research on the market. See what it’s like over in the US. (Use Google.com to do your research, even Yahoo.com to get the US slant.) I always look at the US then Britain to see where a market could evolve to. If you think you can be the leader or the big gorilla (like Microsoft, eBay or Google) then prepare for a bigger launch. If you can’t be the big gorilla but you have a good little niche, search for a good domain name, preferably one with a keyword in it.
2. Start with a small investment and test it – Invest a modest amount, say $1500, in a website and give something away for free. The website can be a 1-pager, offering a free report. Save your cash for a bigger attack later when you know what works. I would invest a good $100 in some tracking software and get that happening immediately, otherwise you will have no idea what works.
3. Run a small amount of search marketing to the website – Then run say $100 of paid search to the website and use your tracking software to see if people download your free offer. After 70 clicks from your paid search or approximately 30 downloads of your free giveaway, use the database created from the free offer and send them a paid offer for a product. See if you make any sales. Ask yourself was it easy to make sales? Even if you only made one sale. Now you know you have a market. If you made no sales and the entire process was extremely unsuccessful, go back to step one. Alternatively change your offer and your search marketing to find the right customers.
4. 40% website, 60% marketing – It’s never the website that gets under-invested, it’s always the marketing. What that results in is no people coming to the website and no activity. I always over-invest in the marketing and under-invest in the website. As long as it’s basically usable, prepare your marketing instead.
5. Slightly upgrade your website and marketing – Invest again in your website by adding some different sections relevant to a special niche, get some more copywriting done, design up the pages nicely and buy some more marketing. Keep testing each page to see how it performs.
6. Continuous improvement – Repeat step five over and over again. You will notice over time you site will grow into a powerful marketing tool. The key tactics here are: Get something up and running and test it. Continue to improve it.

Good luck. Do you want a little example?

Here is a little e-book I have created with Michael Kiely to help people with trouble in their marriage save their relationships, “A survival guide for males in marriage”. It’s a simple website with a mountain of testing and all the money is spent on the marketing. Sure the product is fantastic, but we need to find our niche first.

Fred Schebesta’s company Freestyle Media is an established innovative online marketing agency specialises in building search engine friendly corporate websites and running online marketing campaigns.

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