Sunday, February 1, 2009

Profitable Website: A Key Ingredient List

By Angie Sandy

The key to internet marketing success is to attract website visitors and convert them into loyal and paying customers. This is accomplished with a variety of strategies and tactics which all begin and end with your website.

Wow your Customers

One of the most important aspects of owning an online store is your customer experience. To the customer that means being able to find all of the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

FAQ pages, for example, are a great resource for all those common questions. Shipping charges and easy to find product descriptions are also a must.

A sense of community is also a vital ingredient for a fantastic customer experience. This can be created with, a frequent buyer program, superior customer service and even your about us page can help foster a connection.

Article Management And CMS

For business owners, in order to provide your customers and visitors with a fabulous experience a CMS, content management system or article management system will make providing valuable content quick and easy.

A CMS enables you to create, edit, password protect and delete content without the assistance of a webmaster and without needing any programming skills or knowledge. You can upload and manage a high volume of content quickly and easily.

Secure, Easy To Use Shopping Cart

While a shopping cart may seem like a mere technicality to you, its an integral part of your customers experience. Customers need to know that their information and transaction is secure. They want to know all shipping and sales tax information right up front, and they want a system which lets them manage their cart with relative ease.

For business owners a good shopping cart system will manage your data, produce real time reports and not cost an arm and a leg.

Easy Navigation

One great feature for customers is the ability to search a site for a specific item or keyword. For example, imagine you're visiting a pet store and you need to buy a coat to keep your pooch warm during the cold winter months. Rather than having to search through pages and pages of items, having the ability to search for dog coats enhances your shopping experience

Offering your visitors a search tool tells them you respect their time and value their business and the keyword information the tool provides gives you valuable insight.

Easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

When building a profitable online business SEO plays a very important role in driving website traffic and sales. A key feature for a website builder is an easy SEO system which makes linking, content, and keyword tagging including meta and alt tags a straightforward process.

If your website builder also comes with a sitemap feature each time you update your website content, the search engines are automatically notified, saving you tons of time and ensuring your website is getting noticed by the search engines and potential visitors.

Branding

In the competitive world of online business, your branding strategy can certainly help set you apart from your competition. While a logo is important, think about the Nike swish or the colorful eBay lettering, for a small business owner your personality is a large part of your brand. Your personality can be reflected in the content and design on your website.

Many website building tools are difficult to navigate, have a steep learning curve and make it extremely difficult to get the look and feel you want to convey. A profitable website, one which provides customers a memorable and enjoyable experience, isnt impossible to create. You just need the right tools and to know what you want the end result to be. - 16039

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