You Don’t Need A Website, You Need Sales!
October 29, 2009 by Andy Black
Filed under Grow Your Business
Many businesses spend a lot of time and effort building a website and then leave it at that, but at the end of the day you don’t need a website, you need more sales.
Once you have your website you’ll often discover that no-one finds it unless you tell them the website address, and so you don’t get the phone calls and sales leads that you were hoping for.
You realise that you can’t compete if you can’t be found, so you then try and get your website visible and optimise it for a search phrase such as “kildare electrician shower installation” only to find that no-one ever uses that search phrase.
Profit by Giving People What They Want
Here at Digital Insight we do things the other way round. We find out what people are looking for first, and then build a website to give it to them.
We build “online sales funnels” to divert people who are searching online for your products and services to a website that leads them to fulfilling your goal.
Our strategy means that you have an online presence as quickly and cheaply as possible, and you start getting traffic immediately. At the same time we create regular reports that can help you tailor your offering to where the most demand is.
It’s all about boxing clever. Don’t spend all your time and energy building out website pages for things no-one is looking for… concentrate on the low hanging fruit, get profitable, then start working your way through the rest of the market until you’re the dominant business.
If you’re getting all the online traffic then you just have to work out how to make money out of it.
A Business Model To Help You Grow
Our business model is all about creating a win-win situation with our clients. We build the initial website and online advertising campaigns for as low a price as we can, and then charge a monthly fee for managing it and producing a monthly report with recommendations for evolving the site.
People don’t realise that a website should be a living, breathing entity that evolves over time as you learn more about your market, as you come up with new business ideas, and as market demand changes over time.
If you aren’t able to adapt to change quickly enough you’ll go out of business, plus if you’re more agile than your bigger competitors you can sneak in and take the food from right under their noses.
Typical costs start from €100 (+VAT) per month rent of the website and advertising campaigns, and you will need to have a starting advertising budget for the Google Adwords campaign.
The initial advertising budget will depend on how competitive your market is, how ambitious your are, and how deep your pockets are, but please note we can do a lot with an advertising budget of just €100 (+VAT) per month!
We start with a 3 month trial period as it takes a little while to get the ball rolling, and at the end of the trial period we can discuss whether you want to continue.
Our aim is to provide results… if you continue to get a return on investment then you will continue to use our services. We take on the risk from the start as if it doesn’t work we won’t end up making any money out of it!
Getting Started
If our way of working sounds good to you then the next steps are for you to let us know the aims of your business and what products and services you offer.
We then do some preliminary research online to find out demand and competition and create a “keyword research” report for you to review and for you to rate the keywords as to how likely the searcher is a potential buyer.
If you then want to proceed we produce a preliminary Search Engine Marketing Report to help determine whether there is indeed a market for your products and services, how competitive it is, and where to enter the market (hint: pick the low hanging fruit first!).
We look forward to helping your business to grow.
A very good headline, its so true! When I meet clients to set up a social media campaign , most of them are still thinking about traditional websites – they look great but don’t have any real call to action or interaction with readers, so people don’t tend to return.
Think your approach sounds similar to mine, and it works.
Thanks for a good article
Thanks for the comment Helen.
Yep, the approach works alright.
It’s funny how many people do it the wrong way round isn’t it?
Build it and they will come… rather than find out what people are looking for, then build that instead.