The Webmaster Place

Creating a web site is just the first step. Most clients actually want to make money from their sites, yet the webmaster builds a site which has poor SEO (i.e. no traffic) and a bad sales flow.

I have been asking site owners lately the most basic questions such as:

“Are you collecting the email addresses of your visitors?”

“Are you offering an upsell (a second offer) at the time of the purchase?”

“The holidays just passed. Did you email your previous customers to get them to buy some of their gifts from you?”

The answer is inevitably no to all these questions. And then these merchants wonder why they are not making decent money from their sites.

The rules of business are the same online as off; in fact it is much easier to make money online than off if one just follows the same rules that one would follow in their online business. Rules like “it takes multiple contacts before prospects are willing to buy” (hint: so get their addresses and start emailing them) and “it is much easier to sell a satisfied customer a second time than it is to sell a new prospect the first time” (hint: so get your purchasers email addresses and start emailing them) .

The big money is made on the back end - that is repeat business. If your clients aren’t collecting addresses and working the back end it is the webmaster’s job to educate them.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 11:44 am and is filed under The business of webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.