More than half of the people that take our 6-Week Fast-Track Profit Program inside InfoMarketer’sZone already have their own website and are not making any (or at least enough) money.
My guess is that many of you fall into that camp, or at least are entering the “wild and wacky” world of online marketing and will be in the position shortly to test your chops at being able to convert “invisible” visitors into champion buyers on a large scale.
Typically I choose to teach lessons using the positive perspective – instead of 5 reasons why your website is NOT making money, X reasons why it WILL.
However, in this case, there is more value in pointing to the common mistakes and assumptions that you want to avoid or overcome than pointing only to the RIGHT way.
In effect, we’ll get to the same finish line, a much better ability to turn your website (along with the associated investment and effort required to create, update and maintain that website) into profit.
So let’s get started…
1. You Aren’t Monetizing It – YET!Â
Believe it or not, I have had people that wonder why their website is not making money despite the fact that they may have either NO monetization of that site or have stuck an Adsense Ad, a randomly chosen affiliate product or some other link to try to sell advertising – in all cases, the problem is that the method of monetizing the site is poorly thought out. Â Websites will make money as traffic grows but only IF you do a very good job at targeting a market and understanding the most important things that bring value to that market AND make sure they come to your site in a state where they are open to buying. Â What this means is that it is far better to create a piece of content that helps someone use a certain product or service and then try to sell it to them than to develop content about something else and then strap an ad to that site, blog or post and hope that magically someone will want what comes up and buy. Â Please know this…there is no magic with online marketing or any business for that matter.
2. Optimal Value At The Right Time
There are also many sites that do a very poor job at adding value to their target market. Â So, if someone is desperately (you’ll see me use that word a lot) seeking help with parenting their teenage son or daughter, and they arrive at your site either via an ad or via SEO content or even perhaps via a social profile you have on Twitter or Facebook. When they arrive, what do they see? Â Do they have the option of getting real value up-front? Â Real value could be a free video that talks about 3 of the most challenging aspects of parenting a teenager or it could be a case study from a desperate parent who found a solution that helps, shares one tip from that finding and then guides them to a product or service they can buy. Â What will NOT work well is arriving at a website where they must buy something right away or where they see content that doesn’t exactly match with their state of mind where 30-seconds later they have moved on. Â Always think about how you can add maximum value within the first 30-seconds of someone arriving at your site.
3. Poor Product or Service
Once you have attracted the attention of your prospect and caught them within the first few seconds of them visiting your site with valuable content or messages, you will step them through a series of offers that may involve a free incentive to sign up with you, low-priced introduction products all the way to high-end packages or services. Â Those products must exactly match and demonstrate how they will speed up or make less painful the journey your prospect is on in their desired life transformation. Â If you find people sticking around your site, perhaps engaging with you in your blog and even signing up for your lists but not buying – take a close look at your product or service to ensure there is a high degree of emotional match with how they found you in the first place.
4. Site is Old Or Outdated
We come across these frequently as well, people may have older html sites, older social profiles, older blog templates where there is little or no activity or where the design just looks stale. Â A refresh which puts an emphasis on your content and your value is required typically once each year (at minimum). Â We know your pain here – on occasion we have waited years before updating a site just because of the hassle, but in the end you will notice a significant up-trend in your sales if and when you do.
5. Confusing and Unclear Call To Action
We especially see these types of sites when we work with content developers, designers, outsourcers, etc…who fall in love with the building, designing or content producing function forgetting that they need to make money to stay in business. Â Once you have your site designed, you want to continually experiment and improve your calls to action until you get higher conversion. Â This is essential in today’s online marketing environment given that traffic is getting more expensive and harder to generate – if you have a site that converts well and you know your ROI then you immediately know how you can ramp up your traffic such that you will scale your sales and improve your profit. Â For instance, we have worked with websites with thousands of pages of content that generate decent traffic, but the challenge is that traffic is across many different visitor profiles which means very low conversion rates for any given offer. Â By improving the conversion of a specific offer, that same website owner could run targeted ads, build their list faster and be far more profitable.
If you have a website that is not making sales or profit then work your way through these questions.
Put yourself in the shoes of your market, walk your website and see where you may have gaps in your system.
One small change could lead to 2X-5X more sales and profit – use these 5 common mistakes as your initial guide.
