Tips for Turning Your Website into an Online Business

So, you want a successful web business. You may have invested a lot of time and money in your website and now find that it’s not paying the bills. You may have a few people hitting on your website, but nobody is signing up or buying. If so, you are not alone.

Many business owners have been lured into putting up a flashy – or not so flashy – website, only to find that their hard earned money has gone into a black hole. It may be time to treat your website as any other business investment. Now that you have put in your money and time, how are you going to get a return?

Consider for a moment that there are over 100 million registered websites, with over some 24 billion pages between them. Your site is in there – somewhere! How are you attracting visitors to your website? Just putting up a website is like putting up a flagpole in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Who is going to notice? Who cares?

How are you going to get ships to visit your flagpole? And what kind of flag will be on display? Is it the kind of flag that people will want to see? Or is it like some websites we see, with no flag at all?

How do you turn your website into a profitable web business? Here are some basic pointers. To be successful online, you need to achieve two objectives:

Objective A   Objective B               You need as many people as possible in your chosen market to visit your website.   You need your visitors to perform the action you want (buy, sign up, etc).

For Objective A - getting visitors - your visitors will come from three sources:

1. search engine results from someone performing a search
2. links from other websites, emails and newsletters
3. return visitors from bookmarks, typing url in browser, etc
4. off-line marketing, such as print advertisements, business cards, etc.

To convert these visitors into buyers - the point of Objective B above - your site needs to:

1. offer something worthwhile
2. convey credibility and authority
3. be easy to navigate and get information from

The COL Principle ^©

Achieving the above two important objectives is no easy task. How do you do it? We have distilled the three essential elements for creating a successful web business. We call this The COL Principle ^©. What are these three elements? In summary, they are:

Credibility

If your website does not convey credibility on every page, no one will buy or take whatever action you want them to take. Your logo, color scheme and quality of graphics all play a part. Is your spelling and grammar all over the place? Do you have contact information clearly displayed on your website? If you are asking for payment online, do you convey a sense of security?

Optimization

Most of your visitors will come to your website via search engine queries. If they are not, you are missing out on a huge market. Is your website optimized for the search engines? Is it easy for the search engine robots to crawl your site? Are your pages and meta tags optimized for your keywords?

Free website optimization assessment sheet << Click here

These first two elements – credibility and optimization - constitute the onsite factors. Getting your own web pages right is critical for attracting visitors and converting them to buyers. However, without expanding your web horizons by getting your name about the World Wide Web, your growth will remain very limited.

Links

How many visitors you attract in total depends in large measure on how you are recognized by the web community. By having clickable links linking back to your website on other reputable websites, search engines will return the favor by sending visitors in search of information to your site. As an added bonus, visitors will also arrive at your site directly via these links.

In summary, you need to (a) attract as many potential customers as possible to your website, and (b) once there, you need to convert them into subscribers, buyers etc. By having an optimized, search engine friendly website with a variety of links from other reputable websites, you will bring in lots of visitors. Once you have enticed them to your site, visitors that experience a credible message and can easily find the information they need will convert to happy customers.

As you can see, there is no magic or secret formula to creating a successful web business. However, it will require a lot of your time and effort. The good news is that if you do most of the work yourself, it need not be costly.

How do you go about using The COL Principle ^©? What are the actual steps you need to take to get your web business on the right footing? At Business Performance Pty Ltd, we use our comprehensive USE PLAN D Strategy ^© to bring The COL Principle ^© to life.

USE PLAN D ^© is the cornerstone of our web business coaching program. It takes each of the elements of The COL Principle ^© and converts them into actionable steps – steps that move your web business from being a dead weight to a profitable arm of your enterprise.

Tell me more about the USE PLAN D Strategy ^© << Click here

Tell me more about your web business coaching program << Click here

Contact us at to organize a website review and an initial consultation.

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