I have been working with internet marketers for 12 months now, learning how they operate and how they think about planning their website.
Almost all of them make the same fundamental mistake - a website mistake so serious it really harms the entire effectiveness their of site strategy. Big companies looking to create mega-successful websites spend a lot of time and money avoiding this mistake. Smaller inexperienced companies seem to find it almost unavoidable!
So What Does go Wrong?
Inexperienced internet marketers struggle to impress users with their content because they put too much focus on filling the site with something that can house their keywords, and not enough focus on value, or the reasons why the user clicked on their page from the search results in the first place.
The ad hoc approach of throwing together a few pages, stuffed with some keywords and phrases is not sufficient to form a long-term relationship with customers – something that must inevitably be detrimental to their bottom line for many of them, since it costs so much more to keep getting new customers than to sell to the existing ones.
Don’t Rely on Listbuilding to Preserve Customer Relationships
Relying on a mailing list to form longer-term online relationships with users and customers is only one strategy for maintaining communication. By continuing the analysis phase and focusing on the users’ needs during development and incorporating those requirements into the site, the site owner is much more likely to benefit from:
- provide valuable content people want to spend time using
- generate rapid, natural social media based site promotion and marketing through social bookmarking
- turbo-charge getting more inbound recommended links
- boost the number of users bookmarking and returning by typing in the URL directly
- create more site loyalty and credibility because that impression of creating a site just to get a quick buck is reduced
- encourage members stay for longer on membership sites to increase subscription fee income
- and more….
And don’t forget, at some point, sooner or later, users tire of “empty” newsletters and unsubscribe. If long-term customer retention is important to you, focusing on your users’ needs in your ezine content and layout is good practice as well, .
If you’re looking to build a good website, a site with staying power, that is more than just a sales page and privacy policy, adsense plastered everywhere in hope of a click, and peppered with intrusive “Hey dude, sign up, Now!!!” pop-up windows, then it’s essential to be more user-centered in your approach to your website purpose and website design strategy.
Avoid the “smash-n-grab” techniques used by a lot of internet marketers, blinkered by the need to make more money online right now. Crush your competition by creating something of real value, with staying power. It might be more work up front, but the benefits of real visitor loyalty and better authority and credibility for you as a site owner are worth it.
You need to be building online assets, not just going through the motion of building websites, if you’re going to make serious money online now and in the future.
{ 1 trackback }
Comments on this entry are closed.