TreyMarkel

One of the biggest mistakes that I see small business owners and entrepreneurs make is spending way too much time, money, and effort to develop a website or some kind of brochure-ware before they decide to go out and try to start generating revenue.  These entrepreneurs some how are lead to believe that everything needs to be perfect before marketing their services to the public.  I ask these entrepreneurs one thing, “That $10,000 you just spent on that pretty website, whats your return?  How much money have you made while paying some over priced web developer to create your website?”  The answer is always “Aaaahhhhh I haven’t made any money yet, the website isn’t finished.”

If everything had to be perfect before small business owners and entrepreneurs could start generating revenue for themselves, we would all still be in the stone age.   Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.  In this particular case, the beholder is the website visitor.  You are going to get some website visitors that absolutely love your design.  There are going to be other website visitors that hate your design.  Who do you cater to?  Who says one design is better then another design?  Why aren’t there only two or three wordpress themes?  Look at Craigslist.com.  Look at Google.com.  Look at Amazon.com.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any of these websites are going to be winning awards for their looks any time soon.

Instead of spending time and effort thinking about how your website looks, spend time and effort on how your website functions.  Here are a few things to think about.

Your Website Goals - When a website visitor hits your pages, what is the goal that you would like that website visitor to hit?  Do you want them to become a member of the site?  Do you want them to buy something?  Do you want them to read something?  Think about the path that you would like to push your website visitors down and take them there.  Make it simple and easy to understand.  Compliment that path with an article or a video of some kind.  I am finding that other business owners and consumers love trends.  If a trend compliments your website goals, put it on the page and usually most website visitors will lean that way.  Make sure you track the path and where visitors are going on your site.  For my website and blogs, I use Google web master tools and a tracking software called Clicky.  These are great tools you can use to see how many visitors your site is getting each day, where people are going on your site, what links they are clicking on, and how much time they are spending on your site.  Both of these tools are free, as in NO COST!!

Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate – When I was working for iBank we were probably spending over $50,000 a month in pay-per-click marketing between Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  With this kind of cost, it forced us to pay attention to how many iBank website visitors were actually using the site, and how many website visitors left the site right off the first page.  Make sure you are tracking where and when website visitors are leaving your site.  This will give you some valuable insight on what might be wrong with that particular page.  If you have a 80% bounce rate on the first page of your site, then maybe that particular page isn’t clear enough on what you want the website visitor to do.  In certain tracking softwares you can set up funnels and goals.  The software will tell you what your bounce rates are and what your conversation rates are between each goal.  The worst thing you can say to yourself is “Well I do SEO and I get all my website visitors for free so I don’t really care about bounce rates or conversion rates.”  Not a good attitude to take.  The more you track your website visitors, the better of an experience you can potentially create for them.

Information With Call to Action – A fundamental flaw that I see with 99% of business websites today is there is no call to action.  The same holds true with the opposite.  There is a call to action but no information.  These can usually be segregated to websites that participate in PPC or SEO.  Often PPC websites have very little information and great call to action, and SEO websites have great information and then leave you hanging when it comes to a call to action.  I can’t stand it when I read a great article and then at the end of the article they don’t give me a destination for the solution.  If you’re going to create a website with lots of content, make sure you have a call to action at the end of it.  For example, if you wrote an article or blog on business taxes, give the reader a few recommendations on where they can go to get their taxes done.   Give the reader the information they need and then lead them down a path to get the job done.  If you own a business tax website, give the website visitor a bit of information on what business taxes are all about.

In these tough times entrepreneurs should be trying to generate a return on every red cent they spend.  You don’t need some flashy website to start generating revenue.  Get creative with your business and how you get it started.  There is a sang out there, “You have to spend money to make money”  NOT TRUE!!  Well, not all the time at least.  Use the free tools out there to get yourself started.

Great Free Tools:

WordPress – Website content management system
Clicky – Website tracking
Google Webmaster Tools – How Google sees your website
Skype – Phone calls and phone conferencing
TweetDeck – Dashboard to mange your social media efforts
Gmail – Email
Google Docs – All different kinds of documents for your business