You Have Visitors - What Next?

Part 8 of our online marketing course.

We'll perhaps look at other ways to get traffic to your website in the near future but for now let's look at what results you want from your website.

From that, you can decide what you want your website's visitors to do.

From that decision you can frame a 'call to action'.

A call to action is where you tell your website visitors exactly what you want them to do, but it's not usually quite as simple as that. To get people to do what you want you must give them a reason.

For example, you might want your visitor to join your mailing list. To persuade anyone to give you their name and email address (at the minimum) you will need to offer them an incentive. That could be a free product, a discount or something they can't find elsewhere.

If you want people to buy something you need to offer them a reason to buy now rather than going away to think about it - people who go away to think about hardly ever come back to buy.

That reason to buy now could be a one-time offer or a limited period discount and urgency is a very persuasive factor as long as you're offereing something people want.

If you just want people to stay on your website and learn more about you or your business, you need 'sticky' content - content that they will enjoy staying to read.

But all these incentives and reasons for people to do what you want will be less effective if you don't actually tell them what you want. You must highlight your offer, your special deal or your discount and tell people to act now and exactly how to act.

So you need to tell them to enter their details in the sign up form, click on the link to buy now or even 'read on for more information'.

Tell people what you want them to do, why they should do it and exactly how to do it.

Then test each element of your website in turn to see what improves response, and gradually, step by step, your website will become an effective 'direct reponse' website.

Then you really are making use of online marketing for your business!

Here's an example of a direct response 'squeeze page' that collected the details of almost one hundred percent of the people who visited.

Next time we'll look at what you do with those names and email addresses you've collected.

Roy