So now you have your brand fine-tuned and you have a highly advanced marketing method, let’s take a look at how you can hone your website too to absolute Internet marketing perfection. How can you turn your website into a veritable sales machine that will turnover more profit than you can shake a stick at?
Remember, we’ve opted to build our website with WordPress and it’s highly advisable that you take heed of this. Much of what we discuss here then might apply specifically to WordPress, though other parts will apply to any website.
How to Make a Stunning Website
Let’s start with making your website really work well. A good place to start is by installing a custom theme that will help you to give your website a professional look almost instantly. You then only need to upload your logo, alter the color scheme to match said logo and you’ll have something great and unique looking.
You can get custom themes through WordPress itself and many of these are free. While there are some good themes to be found this way though, they do lack professionalism when compared with something you might find elsewhere. What’s more, when you look elsewhere for your theme, you instantly make it much more unique and that way people won’t have seen your design before – which makes a big impact on first impressions.
One place to get great paid themes is ThemeForest.com. However, if you shop around and look throughout the web, you’ll actually find there are lots of good custom themes out there that you can get for free. Either way, the themes on ThemeForest will likely only set you back $100 maximum which isn’t too bad when you consider that you’ll likely use it for over two years before it starts looking outdated.
Another option is to build your own theme from scratch, or to outsource the process. This takes longer and requires an up-front investment but the result is something more tailored to your content, niche, brand and vision. A good compromise is to begin with a pre-made theme and to make your own later down the line once you’ve already started to gain some momentum and the idea has been – you guessed it – verified.
But how do you go about choosing a theme and knowing what looks good?
To make this simple to begin with, we can use a checklist.
Here are some criteria that your marketing website must meet if you want to optimize your sales:
Responsive Design and Mobile Friendly: Absolutely crucial these days is that any website be completely mobile friendly. Google now has a ‘mobile friendliness test’ you can use and this is a great place to start if you want to make sure that your site meets their criteria. This in turn will help your site to show higher in mobile searches and it will ensure that it works well when someone views it through their smartphone or tablet. You can find the test here: https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.
Responsive designs work by changing shape to accommodate the size of the screen they’re being viewed on. Images move around, certain elements get dropped entirely and links become bigger for touch input. If your site doesn’t do this, then it will undermine your message and look very broken when someone visits it on anything other than a website. It makes you look dated and out of touch and is generally very much to be avoided for all businesses. A responsive design is an absolute must.
Intuitive Navigation: Also very important is that your website be very simple to navigate. People have hugely short attention spans these days and especially when they’re online. If someone visits your website and it isn’t immediately apparent where they need to go, then you can be almost certain that they will just leave. Make sure that your navigation buttons are easy to find and that they’re clearly marked so people know what they do.
The Devil is in the Details: Likewise, it’s also very important that your site be highly readable. You don’t want your viewers to have to squint to see the text and the font you choose should look modern, appropriate for the web and generally smooth and easy to read.
Likewise, any images you create should line up perfectly and you need to get your borders just right. In other words? Tiny changes make a huge impact to the overall ‘feel’ of your website. Don’t skip on this stuff.
Minimal and High Def: It’s important that your web design look modern in order to gain attention. Two things that do this automatically are a minimal layout which is very popular right now (and ideal for fast load times and for responsive layouts) and high definition images and elements. Your site should look crisp and new and state of the art. In short, it should be able to compete with the very best in your niche and if it doesn’t you need to spend either more time, or more money on ensuring that it doesn.
Keeping People Engaged
Ultimately, the objective of a website created for marketing purposes is to keep the visitors on the site and to keep them engaged until they make a purchase. There are a few changes you can make to your overall web design and the extra features in order to ensure this happens.
Fast load times is just one thing. If your site is slow to load, then not only will Google penalize you but you will lose viewers who are impatient.
Likewise, you need to ensure that at no point does anyone come to a ‘break’ in your content. This means you need to ensure that your visitors are always shown just ‘one more thing’ that they can do. For instance, at the bottom of your articles, you should include links to other related topics that those readers might want to check out. Likewise, after someone has bought a product from you, they should be shown somewhere that they can buy more products from you, or they should be encouraged to check out articles you’ve written on how to get the most from that product. The longer people stay on your page, the better your SEO will be and the more you will profit.
Something else that helps with this surprisingly is to use light coloring. A light blue website is more calming and keeps people engaged longer than a red one. Consider this when choosing your brand color and only switch to red when you’re trying to close your sale.
Web Design for Landing Pages
As mentioned, landing pages also require a very specific type of web design. We’ve already mentioned that these should be a redder color and that they should be long and narrow.
Another tip for making your landing page work, is to always put your ‘buy now’ or ‘subscribe’ button on the bottom right. This is what you call the ‘terminal point’ and it’s always where a call to action should go. Why? Because this is the last place that anyone looks on the page, and the last thing that anyone should see on a landing page is where they go to buy. This way, they’ll already have heard the sales pitch and their eye will lead naturally to the buy button. This is instead of them having to back-track back over your content to find it.
Another tip for creating a landing page layout that will work well is to use lots of short paragraphs and lots of bold headings that effectively tell the entire story in the text. You can also use red text and underlines to highlight key words in said text.
The reason this is a good idea, is that it allow someone who skim reads to easily understand what you’re talking about and to get sucked into the content. This helps to capture all those people who have short attention spans and who otherwise might just have glossed straight over the content and ignored it. About 75% of the denizens of the web identify as skim readers, so make sure you cater to them!
Using some compelling images can also help to keep people on your page, as can having the right borders and other graphical elements. The great thing about all this though, is that building a landing page is so easy. Not only does it not require any navigational elements but any images are just going to be ‘in-line’.
But don’t think this means you can just knock something together. You still need to ensure your landing page looks highly professional as this is what’s going to give people the confidence to buy from you. Landing pages do run the risk of looking spammy so you need to work hard to avoid this label. One way you can do this is by using a tool to build your page such as OptimizePress (www.optimizepress.com). This lets you build sales pages that are WordPress compatible in just a few clicks. The pages are designed to sell well and they allow you to include some advanced features such as penny sales (we’ll come back to this!) and affiliate schemes.
A bit like using WordPress, using OptimizePress lets you know for sure your pages can convert and makes the process quicker and easier, so it’s recommended.
Creating an eCommerce Store
We haven’t spoken much about eCommerce stores yet but don’t think that they’re not highly important.
An eCommerce store works like a landing page but for multiple products. It lets people search for your products, to look at them by selecting categories and to buy with a click or to add to their shopping basket.
In other words, this feels a lot more like shopping rather than having someone shout at you (which a lot of Internet marketing is guilty of). There’s a time and place for both eCommerce stores and landing pages, but don’t make the mistake that lots of marketers make of thinking eCommerce stores aren’t for them. Ecommerce stores can not only be more professional looking (thus building more trust) but they also let you take advantage of some advanced techniques like contrast (again, we’ll get to that!). If you have lots of items, then this will let you showcase them in a great way and the experience of shopping will be very familiar for lots of users.
Building an eCommerce store from scratch is a huge undertaking though and can present a number of problems – such as data protection issues. Thus, it’s a good idea to use a readymade eCommerce solution which could include any of the following:
Self-Hosted Platforms
Magento: Magento is possibly the best self-hosted solution and can list up to 50,000 items. It’s also the most-fiddly though and requires a fair amount of work to set-up. It has tons of features and customization options and is the option of choice for a big business. If you’re an individual marketer then you may find yourself turning to a web developer to help you get started though.
WooCommerce: Bearing in mind that most Internet marketers do not own huge conglomerates, WooCommerce will likely be the one that many people reading this choose. WooCommerce has the distinct advantage of being a WordPress Plugin which means tons of support, one-click installation and easy customization. It has a great, intuitive UI and a big community. It can support up to 500 items.
Volusion: Volusion is another WordPress plugin and has built in CRM (contact management) functionality, along with autoresponder and affiliate marketing features. This is all very handy for marketers in particular, but whereas Magento can host up to 500 items, WooCommerce is only good for 50 items or less making it less scalable. This is quite a good ‘half-way house’ between a landing page and an ecommerce store and may be handy for businesses in that transition stage.
Hosted Solutions
If you want a hosted solution that you won’t need to install on your own server, then you can choose from the following:
Shopify: This is one of the biggest and best known hosted eCommerce platforms. It has great support and offers hosting for up to 5,000 products. Small businesses really like Shopify but it suffers from a lack of customization options – which you’ll find is a theme among hosted options.
BigCommerce: Big Commerce is another hosted solution. This is suitable for large numbers of products again but has the same limitations as well. That said, it’s also more expensive.
The best choice then for most people is going to be either WooCommerce or Volusion. If you must go with a hosted option (which damages your engagement bear in mind) then Shopify is the best known and the most affordable choice.
To really make the most of your eCommerce pages or your landing pages though, you need to know how to write persuasively and you need to know how to use your pricing strategies to maximum effect. That’s what we’ll be tackling in the very next chapter…
