Are You Scaring Away Visitors to Your Website?

Better Visitor Experience

For most small businesses, the goal of having a web site is to attract customers, gather leads, and convert sales. But is that what YOUR web site is doing? When you get it right, web visitors have a valuable experience and clearly understand how your product or service fulfills their needs. Get it wrong and you could be sending web traffic and potential business right to your competitor’s door! Here are some common web site mistakes that can scare away visitors and hurt your bottom line:

- Too many choices – When you give your visitors too many options, it can become overwhelming, making them less likely to make any decision at all. All options are not equally important, so be careful to present your information in an organized, logical way that is easy to understand.

Editor’s Note – Please read this article I had written on another website.

- Non-relevant web site content – Be sure that the content on your site is focused on delivering your main marketing message. You are the expert on your business, so you already know what information customers need in order to make a decision. Extra information that doesn’t promote or support your message doesn’t belong on your web site.

- Unprofessional web design – The way your web site looks and functions speaks volumes about your business, even if it is unintentional. If your web site has poor layout, broken or missing links, outdated information, or looks unprofessional, your visitors will have a negative impression of your company, regardless of how great your business may be.

- Red flags – Most web users today have a healthy skepticism when they visit web sites, so make sure you show them immediately that your company is legitimate. Provide detailed contact information that includes your physical mailing address, phone number, contact names, and email addresses so visitors know your business can be trusted.

- Asking for too much information – When visitors want to make a purchase, sign up for your mailing list, or request information from your web site, what kind of a form will they be faced with? Make sure you ask only for the information that you absolutely need, and don’t try to gather too much information at once. Instead, keep the form short and simple, and then follow up later to gather any additional customer information that you may need.

Lauren Hobson is the Editor of Biz Talk Newsletter, a free monthly publication designed to provide small businesses and non-profits with tips and techniques to help them make the most of their web sites and marketing efforts without spending a lot of money. Biz Talk is published by Five Sparrows, LLC.

Build A Website – 5 Factors You Must Consider

I have seen and heard crazy things…ah! But how to build a website! In my endeavor and quest for success I have heard people ask weird questions and I have seen those professing to be internet gurus give astounding answers.

I know of a fellow who posted a question on yahoo answers. This particular question kept me staring at my monitor screen lost of words. This fellow had bought a domain name and registered it with one of the leading domain name registrar. His question was simple yet to those familiar with the art of online business, the question leaves a lot to be desired.

My friend was seeking advice on what to do with his domain name. He had no plans or ideas on what to do with it! Think of lack of planning and we don’ t need to go further than this example.

To avoid being on the same predicament, here are 5 factors to consider as you ponder on your next move. Before you build a website, think about the following:

Type of web site.

Identify the type of web site you will be building. Are you going to build a website whose primary purpose is to sell hard good or e-goods? Would your site be composed of affiliate links or are you going to sell your own service or product? Is your web site going to be primarily informative in nature with google ad sense and other form of advertisement or is it going to be purely visual with little or no content.

Identifying the type of web site you are going to create will make the next step easy to identify.

Niche based.

Gone are the days when all a web master needed to do was to stuff their web site with links leading to all type of product and services. In the current internet world you can not succeed in building a web site designed in the form of a shopping mall with all kinds of goods and services.

The internet is increasingly and exponentially becoming a specialized super highway. Only those web sites that are able to distinguish them selves as authorities in a given area are poised to reap the benefits of online business.

Start out by identifying a profitable niche that you will enjoy writing about, identify an area that you already have experience on, have passion or will be comfortable learning about.

Only build a website in an area or niche that you believe in.

Research you market.

It’s not just enough to develop and build a website based on your strength and weakness. Care should be taken to do a little bit more research about the potential and profitability of that given field.

There are great tools out there on the net that would enable you to come up with a profitable niche, those tools will also enhance your research by shading light as to the exact phrases that your potential visitors would under normal circumstances type into the search engines in their quest for information.

Domain name and hosting.

Care should be taken while choosing the domain name and hosting company for your online business. A search in any of the leading search engines for the phrase “how to choose a domain name” or “web hosting” would return tones of articles that have been written advising us on the do and don’ t do as far as choosing a domain name or host provider is concerned.

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Quality Content.

Have you ever typed the exact phrase of a given keyword while searching for information on any of the leading search engines only to end up frustrated with the displayed results after trying several times? Search engines and human traffic thirst for information, great quality information.

One sure ways to win the search engines wars and in the process please your targeted customers is to create quality content. A site owner who remains focused and persistent in doing just start will in the long run reap the benefit of having their pages rank up high if not at the top of the search query results.

And there are many more things to consider, but why not start with this 5 first!

Joseph Nyamache is an Author and Webmaster specializing on web hosting and site builders That work. His site is devoted on providing information, tips and ideas on how to build a web business by providing great content that search engines love and humans thirst for.

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