It’s the dream isn’t it, how to get more sales from your website. You start a business, get a website and expect the sales to roll in. But it doesn’t usually work like that (unless you’ve given your website a LOT of hype before hand!).
Having a website won’t automatically bring you in sales and leads for your business and believe it or not it’s often a massive misconception.
I always say that your website is your business’ home online, much like a shop or office would be if you were a bricks and mortar business. But if you did have a shop or office would you fill it with a few bits, stay at home, never tell anyone about it and wonder why the sales are not coming in?
So what can you do about it?
Or if you don’t have a website yet, what do you need to know that will help you for when you decide to take that plunge!
The first thing I would say is before you look at different ways to drive traffic to your website (much like advertising and marketing of your new shop on the high street) is look what it contains first.
Is your home page (your shop front/window) appealing? Does it entice people in to want to look at more or is it full of the type of stuff that put’s people off e.g welcome to my website I’m Lisa blah blah blah (would you stand in your shop window and expect that to entice people in?) or reams of text (now even TK Maxx don’t put everything they have to offer in their shop windows!)
If you get stuck these two blogs may help you out:
But it’s not just the home page, the main thing you will want to be doing is giving your website a job and then being able to track if it does that job.
So for example, on my website I want people to book a call with me. Yes, I want to make sales and people can buy off my website, but unless it’s a low cost purchase potential clients would rather speak to me first to talk about their ideas or to see if it can be done. So booking a call with me is their first step to working with me or what I like to call it, the Website Mission!
Throughout your website you can then have clear calls to action to get people to do what you want them to do. You can have secondary missions, such as join a mailing list etc. but keep pushing them towards working with you. If they are not ready yet but want to keep in touch they will organically sign up to your mailing list.
If you want to know more about Website Missions and the customer journey you can sign up for my free masterclass, 10 Ways to Convert Clients on Your Website:
So now, back to how to make sales on your website
Once you have all of the above in place and your website is really user friendly, you need to actually have some way people are going to pay for things and let me tell you now, contact me to buy is rarely going to work. They want to buy, not send emails back and forth and then lose interest, especially if it’s a low cost item. They may want to speak to you pre-purchase (so get them booking in a date on your calendar not a thousand emails until you agree on a day and time) but some people just want to give you their credit card details and get what you are offering right now.
It’s why sites such as Amazon as so popular, with their Prime Delivery. You don’t see visitors to Amazon wanting to contact to buy, they want to spend their money and get it the next day (or as soon as possible!)
So make sure you have an easy way for people to purchase instantly on your website, without the need to strike up a conversation. Even if you don’t have ecommerce, this can easily be done with a Paypal, Stripe or Square Pay button.
Driving traffic to your website
Now that you’ve primed your website to do it’s thing (think of it as training your employees up to work on the shop floor and sell to customers) it’s time to actually market the thing!
There are literally thousands, if not millions, of people out there that want to buy what you are offering, so how do you get in front of them?
This is the step people miss, they create the website and then go back to social media, do a few posts (never mentioning their website after the launch date or directing people back there) and then announce they give up on their website as they look at social media as a seperate entity to their website, instead of getting them to work together.
Let’s go back to our example of if you were running a shop, what would you do to actually get people to the shop? Or would you just open the doors, pull up a chair behind the cash register and wait for it to start ker-chinging?
Below are just some of the ways you can drive traffic to your website, but what I would suggest is to pick one or two to start with and then build on them. If I were to pick any at the start of your journey it would be social media, email marketing (start building your list as that’s where the money is!) and blogging (showing your expertise, but don’t forget a call to action)
So, which one are you going to choose to start out with?
If you need some help planning your Website Success Strategy then I have a free course that helps you do just that!
Or join in on one of my regular Website WOW Weeks, just click the button below to sign up to the next one!