AdOnion

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about helping advertisers gaining the most from their advertising campaigns topics would include the website itself, stats and optimization, choosing an ad network, monitoring and optimizing your advertising campaign.

This week let’s start with the most obvious and important factor that determines a website’s  success or failure, the website itself.

First Impression

A website is just like a person going to an interview, the first few seconds are crucial for the visitors to determine if they will take time and browse through your website or will they close your website. Of course you would want them to take time to browse through your website. Therefore before you start a website take time to carefully plan out your website and think about the content and what value you would like your users to obtain from the website.  If you are looking for a professional to help you build the website, you should carefully communicate the idea to them and you might get more suggestions from the professional in the layout of the website.

When you get your website build by a professional you might consider the SEO aspects as well. Think of possible keywords  that is relevant to your website and it’s content and let the professional know so that they can take into consideration the SEO aspects of building the website.

Confidence

One thing about the Internet is the confidence and the hesitation that users have in engaging in an online transaction. Many websites are very successful now a day, with just a website without a bricks and mortar company standing behind the website. With these standalone website it is even more important to provide consumers with confidence about your product/service.

Some of the features that I would include to help give the confidence is to include testimonials along with the name and company of the person who gave the testimonial. Have your website evaluated and include the association’s logo on your website such as the Better Business Bureau or a logo that is relevant to your business. Also the contact information, including an address, phone, email and live support button where customers can reach you.

The Content

The content of the website is the key in determining the website’s success or failure. In order to have a constant group of users or visitors to your website, you need to provide them with value and the information they are looking for. These information should be constantly updated and by updating the information you will gain some repeated visitors to your website trying to learn more about your topic. As people use to say ‘Content is the King’ and this is what helps converts visitors to customers.

In addition, if you have good content visitors will likely bookmark your website, pass it on to a friend and possibly linking to your website. All this will help you with the next step of your website which is marketing.

Monitoring Your Website

In the past there’s a saying “If you build it, they will come.” In today’s world this is not true anymore, if you want visitors to your site you would need to work hard to get them. Therefore, once your website is built you will need to do constant monitoring. Here are some of the tools I’ll recommend in using in monitoring your website: Alexa, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Technorati Blogging Central and TweetVolume. In the past I’ve written a blog post on these 4 tools and you can review them here.

In this part you may ask what am I monitoring for? Well in this monitoring phrase you are basically looking at the daily volume going to your website, where the visitors come from, how long did they stay, what page did they leave at etc.  This will help you look at your site and tell you if your website is working for your visitors or not.  Also when you do an update to your website, you can see if the new update increase the user’s time in your site, create a different path etc to judge the new update that’s done.

Converting Visitors To Customers

This is the hardest part and it takes some monitoring and testing. No website is designed perfectly from the start, it takes a lot of learning with the process. What works for one website or for your competitors might not work for you, so the key here is to learn from your stats. From your stats you can see which page  users leave your website, and which page is viewed most, from these pages and in the middle where users learn more about your product or services you might need to change the layout to engage the users in an action earlier (such as an inquiry form, incentives in signing up etc.)

Here are some tips that you can look at when starting your website or if you already have a website you might want to see if your website included all of the above tips. If you have other tips you would like to share with our readers feel free to post them here.