If you’re new to internet marketing, the idea of getting a big list of targeted consumers and converting them into paying customers can seem a little daunting. Truth is, the idea of successfully promoting your business online is a lot more achievable than you’d think. It just takes a bit of planning and some understanding of what makes potential customers tick.

Building A List

Creating a list of qualified leads is the first step to generating sales from within the web. The process starts with attracting potential customers to your site by offering valuable content that will compel them to opt-in to receive regular emails from you. From there, you can nurture these leads into paying customers by providing additional value through email marketing, landing pages, and more.

To get these results, you need a targeted list of consumers that are searching for your product or service. If you’re just starting out, you can use free strategies like Google adwords, Facebook ads, and Twitter ads to gain some traction in the marketplace. From there, you can develop a list of qualified leads who are interested in your product or service and are searching for these keywords.

Optimizing Your Site

All told, there are about 60 million searches per day on Google. These search queries generate about $16.8 billion in annual revenue. In other words, there’s a lot of money to be made in online marketing. So, it’s vital that you put in the time and effort to make sure your website is appearing at the top of the search rankings for the keywords you’re targeting.

To make sure your website is head and shoulders above the competition, you’ll want to work with an experienced digital marketer to devise a comprehensive SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. Depending on your experience, you can either do this yourself or hire a freelancer to carry out the work for you.

Along with SEO, you’ll want to work on creating high-quality content that will attract potential customers to your site. The content should be informative, concise, and – above all else – beneficial to the user. If you’ve got a lot of websites, it’s a good idea to look into hiring a content writer to produce content for you.

Get To The Point

To avoid losing potential customers to other websites, your site should always have something of value to offer. Otherwise, you’re just taking up space in a digital world that’s already overflowing with information.

For example, if you’re selling skincare products and your website is offering basic information on the topic, you’re compounding the fact that there are dozens of other websites out there with similar content. In this case, you might want to consider producing a few high-quality videos to go along with your text-based content. You can also add social media buttons on your website so that users can share your content on the platforms of their choice.

Make It User-Friendly

As the name implies, user-friendliness is all about making your website easy to use and pleasant to navigate. While search engines will give you an idea of how well your site is performing, you’ll only truly know the truth about its popularity and usefulness to your target audience with user-experience surveys. These surveys should be administered to actual site visitors and not merely to prospective customers who’ve left their email addresses.

In addition to testing the usability of your site with user-experience surveys, you can get a leg up on the competition by creating a flawless buying experience. To do this, you must first install a shopping cart on your site and then work on ensuring that every step of the buyer’s journey – from researching the product to checking out the items in their virtual cart to finally making a purchase – is as smooth and effortless as possible.

Pay Attention To Performance

As an online business owner, you’ll be keenly aware of the amount of time you’re spending on your website. After all, you’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and – most likely – some tears into its creation. To ensure that you’re not losing customers to your competitors, simply because your site isn’t operating at its optimum capacity, you’ll want to pay close attention to the metrics that rate your site’s performance.

Firstly, you’ll want to look at the overall traffic to your site. To get an idea of the volume of traffic that’s coming in, look at the number of pageviews your site receives per day. A healthy website should receive about 15 to 20 pageviews per day. Anything above that and you might want to consider what’s causing the bump in traffic.

Next, you’ll want to look at the bounce rate of your site’s visitors. The bounce rate indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your site without making a purchase. To minimize your bounce rate, you should consider making the most out of your website’s content by creating compelling offers that will entice potential customers into making a purchase. Never put up offers that are too good to be true – after all, you don’t want to come off as being too good to be true, do you?

One of the best tools for analyzing traffic to your site is Google Analytics. With this tool you can view all your site’s traffic in great detail. Not only will you be able to see how much traffic you’re getting from various platforms like social media or affiliate marketing, but you can actually track the behavior of your website’s visitors. This makes it much easier to figure out what causes your site’s decline in performance and to correct it.

Keep Your Eye On The Future

To continue on the previous point, you’ll want to consider what’s going to happen five, ten, and – ultimately – twenty years from now.

If you want to ensure that your business continues to grow and flourish, you’ll need to keep your eye on the future by constantly evaluating the present. One of the best ways to do this is by tracking customer behavior and determining what motivates them to buy your product or service. Additionally, you can gain valuable insights into what doesn’t seem to work and make necessary changes before it’s too late.

For example, if you have an e-commerce store and you find that older shoppers (>50+) are only visiting your site to buy limited-edition items that are becoming increasingly difficult to get, you might want to consider removing these items and replacing them with something more suitable for a wider audience. Additionally, if you see that a particular product or service is causing your customers a lot of frustration (poorly designed website, unexpected shipping charges, etc.), you might want to reconsider offering that product or service.

It’s also important to evaluate whether or not your product or service will still be relevant in five, ten, or – God forbid – twenty years. For example, are graphic tees still popular today? Will online video tutorials still be necessary in 2022?

Find out what motivates your customers to buy your product or service and create marketing materials that will delight them. The better you answer this question, the more valuable you’ll be as a business owner.

With the right tools and a little bit of determination, you can easily build a profitable business online.