Planning Your Internet Marketing

My experience in counseling internet marketers is that they either have a highly technical background (or know someone who does) or are marketing and sales people with limited technical background. Of course there are many in between. One common denominator among them is the lack of planning the website or blog and answering the basic question of what do you want the thing to do? This leads to the second question that is most important, does it do it?

Most answer the first question with, "I want to sell the stuff that is on my website". Obvious answer. Everybody does, all 400 million websites want to sell you something or tell you something. Does that message really come across on your website? The purpose must be obvious or self evident to the user in the first few seconds of the visit.

If you have accomplished that, then you must design the navigation and the purchase process toward a fictional user that has limited ability to think and minimal time to pick and buy. If you think you have succeeded here you must test it. Do not become your own judge and jury. I see people who come in and can show how easy it is to use the website or explain what the website does. When I try to do something it does not work or requires special knowledge to make it work. If I were a user, I would be gone. It is the forest and tree thing. Test it with your friends, family, business associates and listen to what they say. Take the approach that your first pass at your website is not very good, but let others tell you why. Let them click around. Let them even buy something. Listen, listen and listen some more. Watch them go through your process, watch what they struggle with or when they get exasperated. What seems clear and simple to you is probably not that way to many others.

So take some time an jot down what you want your website to do, how you propose to do it and what it might look like. Even consider an outline or flow chart and write some copy you might include. Starting like this will increase the probablity of having a site the does what you want it do to.