18 May 2012
Hi Visitor
A question I get asked often is "how can I make money from my website?" Well, one obvious answer is to design websites for other people...!
However, I know that's not what you wanted to hear so broadly speaking there are 2 basic ways of making money from your website, 3 if you decide to combine the two.
There's also a lot of great and free ways of driving traffic to your website which I'll cover in brief here also...
In this issue...
Making Money From Your Website
Of-course, it's most peoples' dream to have a website that just coins in the cash while you sit on the beach. Well, I have news for you guys... I design them and live just 1 Km away from the beach and rarely do I get to enjoy it...! There are ways of improving your online sales though and some of them are quite easily achieved.
Selling Your Product or Service
Clearly selling a product or service through your website is the best way of making money but it's not as simple as placing a half a dozen types of flooglebinders on your site and sitting back expecting to rake in a fortune.
Nope, before you even begin to sell you have to open shop and encourage people to walk in (virtually speaking). The analogy isn't lost though. Imagine you were to open a new premises selling your product, what else would you do...?
Getting Good Quality Traffic
I refer to good quality traffic as a "pre qualified lead". This person went and searched for flooglebinders in Taiwan or is on a Facebook page or in a forum dedicated to your product and you just happen to have a website dedicated to that product in that location, bingo...! Your website "should" be the first link in Google. However, Google isn't the only source of traffic
Clearly having a well designed site that's above your competition in Google is the best way of achieving this. However, there are lots of others including:
- Forums
- Message boards
- Social networking sites
- Radio
- Press
To name but a few...
So what do you do once you have them coming to your website...?
Encouraging People to Browse
I know when I was in shorts I worked selling bits and bobs and an important thing was making the isles wide enough for people to walk around, displaying products in such a way that they could see them easily and making things accesible. It's pretty much the same with a website, make it easy to navigate and select a product or service. If you're not selling online then make it easy for them to contact you.
Ease of use is the key here...
I know I may be over simplifying the sales process here but it's difficult to put everything in a newsletter so if you want to improve your online exposure and drive traffic to your site just get in touch.
Also, I'm not in any way diminishing the role of the sales person here because many customers want that verbal or face to face contact. All I can do is help put them in front of you.
Monetizing Your website
Placing adverts on your website to affiliates, competitors even or people who run similar businesses is a quick and easy way of generating revenue. Google AdSense is by far the most popular and I use it on a number of my own sites to generate a nominal income. However, with a site that receives a large number of visitors this could easily generate more than a nominal income for you.
New Services
I've had a few clients recently who needed to get images and documents to me so I have developed the following:
Upload Files
If you have a large number of files to get to me and e-mail isn't appropriate because of the volume or size of the files then you can login to Website Design Tenerife and select "Upload Files" from the "My Account" menu. Upload the files and drop me a quick mail letting me know what you would like to do with them. It's that simple.
Facebook Page
We're sure you've heard of Facebook and maybe even have one. If you do then that's great, embrasing and using social media is by far the best and cheapest way of attracting new customers.
One client we worked with recently saw an increase of 100% in the number of fans and sales enquiries also increased simply because I got involved with their Facebook page. Granted, it was a joint effort because as you know I don't do ALL the work so can't take all the credit.
Links of Interest...