|
A_Tale_Of_Two_Sites
| A Tale Of Two Sites
There are only two kinds of sites on the Internet:
1. Informational 2. Sales
Of course, that is a gross exaggeration and over generalizes the
landscape of the Internet, but it will be useful for this
article. We want to talk about how you can take any site you
have and create a sister site of the other type in order to
improve your traffic, sales and mission. First, let's define
these types of sites a little more and give some examples.
1. Informational
This is the classic content or free information site. It
includes hobby sites, huge communities like Yahoo, search
engines, discussion forums, news sites, how-to sites and a vast
majority of the Internet in general.
2. Sales
This can be a classic e-commerce site sells something directly.
It can describe a product/service and provide a way to provide
payment directly on the site. The famous sites in this category
include Amazon, Orbitz, and Ebay. The less famous sites sell a
vast variety of the kind of merchandise that used to be sold via
direct postal mail campaigns, catalogs, etc.
It can also include a more subtle type of sales site. Everyone
was warned in the last decade that you had better be "on the
net" or you would be out of business. Most organizations have
taken that advice. Almost every corporation, non-profit
organization, government agency, church and school now have a
website. When many of these organizations created their website,
they realized they had nothing to sell directly, nor did their
true mission include providing a lot of free information content
about their topic. Most of these sites provide information about
their organization, press releases, methods to contact various
departments, information about upcoming events, and
product/service information (albeit, not for the purpose of
direct sales). The end result is that these sites are there to
promote the organization's mission. They are really sales sites
in that way.
Now that we've over generalized these two categories of
websites, let's admit that almost every website has some element
of each. I've owned sites that have completely morphed from one
type to another with lots of hybrid during the morphing process.
I've come to discover though that it is often not a good idea to
mix these up. Let's talk about why.
Let's say you have a pure information site. You are really into
widgets as a hobby and you create a massive site with a popular
discussion forum, lots of articles, pictures, how-to
information, a massive resource directory of other widget sites,
product reviews, etc. Your site is the #1 place people go to
find out about anything to do with widgets. In fact, your site
is so popular that your hosting bill is now way over your hobby
budget, but this is a labor of love; right? Many of us have been
here. The obvious answer is to mix in a bit of e-commerce to
offset the bills. Maybe you add some widget banners or text
links. Maybe you put an affiliate link to Amazon after your
review of a book about Widgets. Maybe you even install a
shopping cart and start buying widgets wholesale and selling
them directly on your site. You even dream of someday making a
living doing what you love: maintaining your site about widgets.
What happens? First of all, your traffic starts to decrease.
Inevitably you turn some people off by your new emphasis on
e-commerce. Second, your focus on what made your site great
starts to suffer. You now have two competing forces pulling you
in separate directions. One side of you wants to create great
free content; the other wants to maximize profits. Some people
find a good balance and press forward. Many others start a
downward spiral. How many great search engines have we seen come
and go because they lost their focus in exactly this way?
Let's start from another direction. Let's say you sell widgets
offline and followed the advice last decade and registered
www.widgets.com. If a widget can be described easily on a
web-site and costs less than $1,000, you probably sell them
directly on your web-site. If not, you probably have press
releases, contact information for your various departments,
descriptions of your various widget products/services, etc. You
sell your widgets off-line, but your site supports that process.
Every site in this category would like more traffic. More
traffic means more sales means more profits. Isn't that odd? The
guy with the information site had the opposite problem. He had
too much traffic. Let's say you realize that and try to increase
your traffic by adding some free content. You start writing
articles about widgets, start a discussion forum, etc. What
happens? Your traffic increases dramatically, but your sales
barely increase at all. In fact, you might notice that your
sales go down. The new distraction of free content on your site
is pulling away the attention of those who might otherwise be
buying. You find yourself with the same problems as the above
guy who runs a content site. Your focus has been split and the
core mission of your site (selling widgets) suffers.
There must be a way. Of course, if you sell widgets, you can
purchase advertising on widget information sites. And if you
have a widget information site, you can sell advertising space.
Many find a balance that works well here.
Here's another option. Create a sister site of the other type.
One site will be 100% informational (almost). The other site
will be 100% sales. On the informational site, devote most of
the home page to an advertisement for the sales site. We find
that about 40% of our traffic ends up at the home page no matter
how they entered the site (many search engines deliver them to a
page other than the home page). If you place a large
advertisement on the home page with a large "Enter Site" link
under the advertisement, we find that you can receive a 30-50%
click-thru rate if your sales and information sitse are well
matched in topic. That means that you can deliver a significant
portion of the most likely buyers from your information site to
your sales site. Now that your ad is done, don't ever think
about commercializing your information site in any other way.
Don't put any banners, affiliate links or anything else to drive
away information seekers. Just focus on being the very best
widget information site possible.
Do the same for your sales site. Don't ever place anything to
distract folks from buying. If you are tempted to put up some
kind of content, do it on your information site. If you are
starting with an information site and looking for a way to
monetize it, forget about all the affiliate programs and
banners. Either find one good sponsor and put them on your home
page, or start your own sales site and become your own sponsor.
After a bit of lost focus (setting up the sales site) you can
hopefully turn all of your attention back to your information
site and leave your sales site alone.
With this arrangement, you can drive traffic from an
informational site to a sales site and never lose sales because
they are distracted by some free content on your sales site.
About the author:
James D. Brausch, is the Vice President of Marketing for Target
Blaster, Inc., an Internet Marketing firm specializing in
targeted traffic. http://www.TargetBlaster.com
|
|
| |
| |
