5 Tips to Creating Sites that Sell

Your business site, whether a self-hosted WordPress site or a traditional website, is your storefront, your business card,  and your most important marketing tool all rolled into one.  How your visitors and customers are affected by the look of your site is essential to your success.  Provide a memorable experience and your visitors and customers are sure to return again and again.  To ensure your visitors have a good experience, you will need to ensure that these 5 keys factors are used when creating a site so that it sells.

#1  Make your website interactive.

It’s very important to create a community (niche) around your business. Engaging your visitors and customers is the best way to create a community that comes to your site repeatedly.  To accomplish this, you can use any or all of these methods:

• Provide a forum where viewers can discuss topics related to your business
• Post surveys or polls so you can learn more about who your market is and what they are looking for
• Allow visitors and customers to review or rank items.  Have a scale of 1 to 5 stars or something similar
• Have a blog on your site and encourage comments and feedback
• Hold contests and sweepstakes and offer prizes that would be of interest to your market
• Publish video and/or audio as well as written content as this gives visitors another way to get to know you and your personality

#2  Ensure that your site provides value

Since people go online to research a possible purchase, to find solutions or answers to problems they’re having, and to be entertained, your site has to provide these. If you are offering products, information, and entertainment, then you are in good shape.  If your content is well written as well,  then it will inspire purchases of whatever you are selling on your site.  Here are some examples of content that provides value to your customers and prospects:

• How to articles, videos, and audio
• Tips articles, videos, and audio
• Case studies
• Workbooks and reports
• Interviews with experts
• Product reviews

#3  Make sure your site is easy to navigate

You have approximately 10 seconds for get a visitor’s attention and make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your site. If your site is logical, intuitive, and laid out nicely, people are more likely to hang out.  If you offer Products and Services, Information, Prices, FAQs, and the content is easy to find, they are likely to move around your site, checking out the content on your pages.  The longer they stay on your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again. Consider:

• Keeping your site as simple as possible
• Keep your pages uniform with the same options and appearance (WordPress is awesome at this!)
• If you have a lot of content, use drop down menus and organize your content by topic
• Offer a search field so users can search for products, services, or topics quickly and easily
• Provide a way for visitors to go back and forth between pages
• Test your site’s appearance on several browsers to make sure it has a consistent look and feel for everyone

#4  Make your site easy on the eyes

You’ve probably been to sites where the colors were so incompatible that you couldn’t read the content. Or maybe the font was so small you could barely read it.  Or the content was in one solid block with no space for your eyes to rest.

Readability is critical to a selling website.  Make sure that:

• Your chosen colors are easy on the eyes
• Your graphics aren’t distracting
• You keep any formatting such as underlines, bolding, and italics are kept to a minimum
• Spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate
• Font size is large enough for people to read
• Your font is legible on a computer

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#5  Give them a soft sell.

People on the internet are wary of being sold to. No one likes to be sold to. Instead of hitting your site visitors with a hard sell provide information, solve their problems, and show them the benefits of your products or services.  They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors.

If you are looking to have a site-that-sells built, you are new to online business, or you want to move your existing site to WordPress, contact me. I’d love to help you get your business rolling. Call me today toll free at 800.921.4812

I am known for:

1. overdelivering on my promise to you
2. for being able to take complex ideas and making them easy to understand
3. I can put together a pretty snappy looking site too