Give Your Audience What It Wants

Far too often webmasters make websites that contain just fluff. Visitors don’t come looking for just any random stuff, but usually they have certain things they are looking for, and if they don’t find it, they are gone faster than you can say, “Thanks for visiting!”

Its simple in theory to keep your visitors on your site because all you have to do is, “Give them what they want.” To do this though you must answer the following question, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you’ll need to research the following three sub-questions: Who are your visitors? What attracted them to your site originally? What do they want when they come to your site? Knowing more about your visitors, what attracted them to your site and what they are looking for on your site makes it easier to retain them and keep them coming back for more.

The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank. A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it. With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.

Build Traffic

Once you have created a reason for your visitors to stay on your site you need to learn how to attract more visitors to your unique content. You have many options to build a constant flow of traffic to your site. We discuss two of the most important tactics to build traffic in this section.

If your not using PPC Advertising (Pay Per Click) then your missing out on what could become a website goldmine. With all PPC campaigns it is important to start out with a low budget, to improve your results before you unleash this method. Although there are many services that offer PPC Advertising, we suggest to start with Google Adwords. Not only is Google Adwords one of the most powerful systems, but it also can be connected to Google Analytics for very helpful tracking. By targeting the right traffic you’ll be increasing your profits in no time.

Albeit a slow method, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a necessary tool for the traffic hungry enthusiast and to build your website profits. In a short definition, SEO is about bringing relevant traffic from search engines (Like Google) to your website. The more valuable, unique and search engine friendly your content on your website is the more traffic you’ll see from the search engines.

Monetize Your Website

As mentioned earlier, you want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to get what they want. On the other side of the coin, you need to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. For example, why make them click through endless pages to sign up for a membership or newsletter? The easier you make it for your visitors to do what you want, the more they will do it.

You’ll need to keep your site clean, but you also need to get their attention to key areas of your web page that encourage them to make a profitable action. You can do this by changing the contrast, color, style and/or font. Try different ways to draw attention to get your visitors to do what you want on different pages.

There are other tactics and tools you can use to increase customer sales as well. Using call to action, branding, A/B or multivariate testing, design improvements and product/service cross promotion can improve your sales many times over.

Partner with an Expert

If a lot of the concepts discussed in this article seem relatively new to you, honestly, it will be easier and more profitable to turn to a professional to help you out. In choosing an expert partner, make sure they have a marketing background and are focused on building your profits.

Matthew Henage is an expert web marketer and CEO of Superior Design Inc, a Utah web design and web marketing firm. Visit his website now and you can get an expert website consultation.