How Much Should A Website Be Able To Make In Sales?

Is that a million dollar question? Or only a $50 question?

For some people, it is a MULTI MILLION dollar question.

If you set up a nice website on line, how much can you expect it to make?

I was curious to see what internet marketers say about this, so I went to Google and typed in How much should a website sell.

Well, the number one organic (not sponsored) response was this following link

Bored.com - Fun Stuff To Do When You Are Bored

Get Rich Online - Dozens of free tools you can use to create your own website. Sell stuff online or make a site and sell ads on it.
www.bored.com/ - 90k - 20 Sep 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

So I clicked through.

They are a pretty good site if youre bored I guess, they have access to lots of on line games, word games, silly photos, funny lists things like Make George W Bush dance! etc. And up on the top left hand corner of the page, (which is one of the most viewed points on a site) was this: Earn cash online

So I clicked on it. And it was a page telling you lots of ways to earn cash online.

According to them you can join up to fill in surveys (and get paid from .35 to $4) You can get paid 10 cents an email to read emails. You can play games on line and earn unlimited amounts of money. The pages slogan was this: When youre a member of InboxDollars.com money really DOES grow on trees.

So, shall we all abandon our businesses and go and fill in surveys, or learn how to play Tetris at a professional level? Sometimes it can feel tempting, especially if you have just put up a site, or just redone one, and you feel its looking pretty good, your product is excellent . . . AND NO ONE IS BUYING FROM YOU. Maybe, you think, I will go and fill in surveys for . 50. At least its sure money.

So what do you do? You feel like you need the internet equivalent of those wobble boards that Dominoes Pizza use on the side of the road at peak hour. You need to jump up and down, wave something and get peoples attention. But Dominoes has the advantage over us they are free to go and stand on the side of a high way with their wobble board. You need search engines to direct traffic to you.

Yes there are other ways that you can get known, you can put lots of articles on line, and there are some great sites to submit articles to that will get you published all over the web (if youre good). You can have press releases, and you can buy advertising on all the major search engines, and on adsense sites as well. But, at the end of the day, you also want the search engines to like you, as they will send traffic to your site all the time if they do. (For free).

So how do you woo Google and friends? There is a lot to it. One thing that can help is blogging on a blog attached to your site. In an earlier newsletter we talked about Blog Power! And blogs are a really good way to attract search engines.

A lot of the things that make blogs attractive can be applied to your site in general.

So lets have a recap of what makes blogs search engine friendly:

The content is updated regularly; the content tends to be specific to certain key words; blogs contain a lot of words search engines like words A LOT (as opposed to images or white space!); Search engines are weighted in favour of blogs thinking that intelligent people with relevant things to say write them.

The last pro blog point is a bit difficult to adapt to your website, it is, after all, a website and not a blog. But the first three if applied to your site will help your rankings. Search engines like these three things because they equate them with relevant sites. At the end of the day search engines want to present their customers (the searchers, also your potential customers) with the sites that are most relevant to the searchers search.

So they want to know what youre talking about (you need to have words),

they want you to add new relevant information regularly (a site last updated in 1996 is NOT going to rank well generally, unless it is from a government or a university),

and you will do better if you specialise in a few key areas. For example - dont sell cook books, Ferrari logos and wholesale baby nappies on the same site, because you will find it really hard to rank well for three such diverse areas.

However, there is more to do to rank well in the search engines.

You can get a quick indication of how important Google thinks you are by looking at your page rank or PR. You can find out a sites page rank fairly easily.

Download Google Toolbar

If you go into what ever is your browser (Internet Explorer, mozilla etc) and do a search for google toolbar it will pop up with the google tools page and there is an upload button that you can hit to install the tool bar. There is also an illustration of google tool bar. On it is PR, this is the page rank number.

The Alexa rating that the tool bar gives is also interesting. It is a measurement of how viewed the site is. 1 indicates the most viewed site and it was a wedding mall last time I looked. Alexa rankings descend down into the millions (the least viewed site). For various reasons Alexa is an indication rather than fully accurate. But it is good to see your Alexa rank improve.

PR 1 is not great. Neither is PR 2. PR 3 means that youre beginning to get somewhere, PR 5 and 6 are worth boasting about and to have a PR 8 or 9 is fantastic.

To recap what PR is, it is an indication of how valuable Google thinks a particular page is in your site. Different pages within your site can and will have different PR. The more valuable a page is, the more likely it is to be turned up as a result for a search term. PR is good to use when looking at your competitors web pages. You can get a quick idea of how easy they will be to replace by looking at their PR.

That being said, a good PR does not GUARANTEE that you will be no 1 on Google, the algorithm is complex, but PR is a good indication.

So if you have an Alexa of 10 million a PR of zero and no customers, how to you go from woe to go?

You need a plan. Just like a good business has a plan, a killer website is also (generally) a planned affair. There are people who get lucky and just have good marketing genes, but most of us have to work at it.

Youll be happy to know that good website marketing is not voodoo, or an art, it is a science. It is a fast changing very information heavy science, but it is a science, meaning that the laws of cause and affect apply.

But bear in mind that website marketing laws can be as difficult to understand and change more quickly than taxation promises before an election. Google in particular tweaks its algorithms regularly, and staying fully on top of online marketing is a full time job, or a very exciting hobby! But there are things that are a pretty good foundation upon which to build your site plan, with regards to wooing the search engines.

We use these basics when planning our sites:

Search engines like stability, so plan for it:

Search engines attach greater relevance to sites that have been around longer. Google wont even look at you until you are past its sandbox period (a few months). So dont put up pages, spend time and money getting them good PR and then, while redesigning your site, remove those pages. What a waste of effort. Plan your site well ahead.

The same goes for domain names.

Chose a good name from the start. Something keyword relevant, short and easy to remember is good. Try not to change your domain name. If you have one now that you know is a dead loss, then you may have to change it. But please try and register good domain names from now on! It is very sad to get a domain some PR and google recognition and then can it.

Domains are like on line real estate. People sell domains, they watch for domains currently in use to come up for expiry so that they can buy them if the current owner doesnt renew them. A domain is something of value and should be chosen carefully.

Make sure that you have a good web host.

What do you think when you click through a search result link on google and the site isnt found? I tend to think that the site no longer exists. I definitely dont return tomorrow and check again.

But it could be that the site still exists and it just has a bad web host. Before putting your site to host with any one, check them out. Can you get them at 11.30 pm if you have a problem?

Are they available via email contact only? (Not good. When your site is down you want to be able to phone someone straight away.)

Where are the servers that theyre selling space on? Some countries are more reliable than others.

Cheaper is not always better. If you are down 1% of the time you are with a bad host.

Make sure that you have a good web designer.

We recently did a site inspection and a redesign proposal for a business that wants a new site. The site had a few problems that the owners were aware of, and some that they werent. One of the things that we did was have a look in the source coding.

The whole site was full of empty tables. Tables with nothing in them at all.

They didnt show up when you uploaded the regular page, but they were there in the source coding. They were messy, and they were the sign of a designer who was not very professional. They most likely would have been caused by the designer using drag and drop type programs (such as Dream Weaver).

Dream Weaver etc are not bad if they are used as the first round of design, but it is best if your designer can also read html script and can clean up after themselves.

This is especially important if you want to rank well in the search engines. Search engines dislike coding errors and so your designer needs to be able to recognise what a coding error is. Coding errors do not necessarily show up on the web page, but they are visible in the source code and search engines read your source code.

Make sure that your site is easy to navigate.

Your links need to work, you need a short path between customer entry point to order point. People do not want to read a page of text and then have to click through to another page to keep reading. Web sites are not books. Every time you give someone the option of clicking through to your next page you are actually giving them the option of clicking AWAY from your site completely.

There is a lot more that can be said upon the importance of having a website plan, and it will have to be said another day.

I hope this has got you thinking and made you aware of what you might need to do to get your site to sell well!

Oh, and to answer my initial question, how much should a website sell?

According to Derek (ceo of a $50 000 000 on line business) that depends upon your product price, but if your product is priced at $50 US then two out of every hundred visitors to your site MINIMUM should be buying.

Cheers
Katie

Katie Mackay is a copy writing and seo expert at http://www.websitetips.com.au. If you are interested in contacting us please do so at http://www.websitetips.com.au.Giselle Blog86914
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