Enticing visitors with lots of free content and hoping for an impulse sale is a quick way to starve! Yet so many "how-to" publications and gurus tell you to design a full site with helpful, frequently-updated content for surfers. All completely wrong.

Selling SINGLE products

If you are selling one or two products, you need a one-page mini-site for each. You need to focus visitors' attention on each product - and keep it there!

Example: A writer put lots of wonderful, useful content up on his website -- which attracted lots of visitors. The problem? No sales! He's trying to sell newsletter subscriptions, but nobody is buying.

And why should they? They get tons of content already from him -- for free on his site! (Guess his mother never told him nobody will buy a cow if they get the milk for free?)

What should he do? He has only two choices:
-- Kill most of the content at the site. Make the site into a single-page compelling letter that would cause people to subscribe to his newsletter. -- Same as above, but the letter should sell signing up for a free e-letter. Then he could use the free e-letter to sell subscriptions to the paid newsletter.

Another example: My sister was selling a book "written" by her cat. She had a wonderful website, full of pictures, funny content, a page of advice from site visitors to the cat, etc. The only problem? She was selling just 1 book a month.

When I had her change it to a single page mini-site, which did nothing but sell the book, her sales went up to 20-30 per month.

Selling MANY products

If you are selling lots of products, you need a catalog site. Don't try to pretend you're an informational site. What visitors will want most is easy, clear navigation so they can quickly find exactly the products that would best suit them. And, they want a simple, reliable, and secure ordering setup.

If you also have physical sites ("clicks & mortar"), you may do even better with a site that does nothing but offer discount coupons!

Example: A "clicks and mortar" department store built a full, wonderful website -- with lots of info and helpful tips. But they didn't see any increase in visitors to their stores. Then they ruthlessly axed most of the content on their site- shrinking it to a site that mainly offered discount coupons for particular merchandise. The result? Traffic increased dramatically -- at the physical store AND at the website. Most important -- their sales went up.

Thinking about designing your own website?

Just remember that when people are searching for a product, that's what they want to see. Don't divert them with tips and hints and other copy that can make them forget what they wanted in the first place. They probably did a search to find your site. Give them a chance to buy what they were searching for -- from you!

About the Author:
Harold R. Fann is a website designer who specializes in helping small marketers build effective money-making websites. His mission is to demystify web applications for non-techies. Harold is the author of Step-by-Step Websites in 3-6 Hours using Dreamweaver. http://www.HelpForWebDesign.com

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