Web advertising can take all your money suddenly without no reason. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Optimisation (SMO), and Maintenance just eat your budget without giving nothing. I am writing this article to teach you one important point before you make a California dreaming in your mind about online sales.
Online sales just not come through web advertising techniques
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Famous advertising platforms such as Google Adwords and Facebook Pixel come with a truck load of high-tech features that will mess your brain in a flash. Therefore, many online business owners hire third-party companies to run their SEO/SMO, yet it has counted that they cannot get the exact results from these services. Why is that so?
The sales you make through a website will not only be a part of advertising, but also a bunch of variables that affect your customers’ mindset. Simply, it’s all about psychology. Let’s see what are they,
- User Interface & User Experience (UI/UX).
- Brand value and its age.
- Trust score, user reviews, social feedback.
- Sales history & price range.
- The amount of web traffic you receive.
- Customer care & mail server technology.
- Physical location and the phone number.
We will dig through these secrets of “before online advertising” criteria to bring more sales to your web-based business.
1. UI brings the first impression, UX keeps the customer
User Interface AKA UI brings a huge message to your website visitors in a flash. UI colours, font styles, images, and also responsive design will do an amazing job to give a pleasant feeling for your users. Here we will focus more about logo design, domain name, and template as they are major objects of the UI.
Your logo is the watermark of your business
If you plan a long-term business, I recommend you to spend more time on designing an attractive logo that will stay in your customers’ mind forever. Decide the main colours you use and match them with font colours. Logo designing is just a onetime work, but consider spending more time/money on that work.
The domain name is the search keyword
Your brandname should be the domain name in most cases. People search on search engines to find businesses and they read your domain name always. If a visitor see a meaningful word on the domain name, they will never forget your brand and will easily reach you from any device.
A template, a theme for your online business
I have seen many people use WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and similar CMS to build their website. They just use free templates to represent their business. I should say this is really a bad strategy which will make a cheap viewpoint on your business. There are some professional template designers and I personally recommend Creative Tim Templates as they have unique designs for any business. For a startup business, you also can use HTML5Up Commercial Templates.
2. Your brand has a value and an age
Basically, a business must have a brand name and it will always bring a value to the company. This brand can be bought from a third-party or be built by yourself. With the time, your brand name will be spreader all over the world and we call this process as brand situation. A saturated brand will always have a big value which can be converted to a virtual wealth. For example, Facebook bought the photo-sharing start-up, Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, paying what seemed like a shocking sum of $1 billion for a company with 13 employees at the time. If you have a brand which attract more clients, I guarantee that your brand value will be huge.
3. No trust no sales, so boost it
Over 90% online customers check the trust score of a website before they make any payment. The first thing is you should have a section on your website for customers to put a review. This review should have 5 stars, 10 stars or similar ratings. Collect their true feedback and show everyone how they feel about your service.
There are some services such as TrustPilot that help businesses to do it easily. My personal thought is that can make more harm than giving a good impression. Just ask your customers to write their review on your website and do not remove bad reviews even they are bitter. Showing your true service is better than showing fake reviews to the audience.
4. Price matters always, keep it competitive
Your services or products can have different kind of competitions. If there are many competitors for your business, you cannot decide your price as you need. Therefore, do a better market research before you put a price. You can also use offers, gift codes to attract more customers. Spend more time on this to attract more customers to your website.
If you can do, I recommend you to show your sales history to the public. That can encourage new members to buy your services without thinking twice. Showing sales proofs is another secret method to get more sales. Ask your buyers to upload delivery photos to your social media or website with a review. It will also encourage you and your team to make more sales in the future.
Anyway, just keep noted, a competitor can also see your sales when you do this.
5. Get web traffic everyday
The number of web traffic you receive to your website will be marked on many network providers and analytics records. These data affects directly or indirectly to your sales always.
For example, Internet Service providers (ISPs) gather their traffic and measure top active websites in their network. Many search engines keep these records to understand the competition well. Let’s say a website get 10,000 visitors per month and another takes 50,000 visitors. The second one should have more resources to handle that traffic, therefore it is noted that second one must be a popular one.
Question: What if the first website has 100 sales per month and the second one has only 10 sales per month?
Someone can argue that the first one is wealthier than the second one. But in the reality, the traffic you receive improve dozens of variables that affect SEO/SMO dramatically. It means the second one will claim more sales sooner or later with that amount of traffic.
On the other hand, the traffic you received will be shown on many public places such as Alexa ranking system. Therefore, send a much as traffic to your website everyday to see a long term result.
6. Customer care is the core
Many website visitors you can get quit the pages, if they do not see any interaction from your side. A customer care team can immediately catch these new customers through a real-time chat widget or a “submit to newsletter” popup message. Just do not let your visitors leave your website with an empty hand. You can offer a discount for them and try to convert them as sales.
There is one important thing you must fix in technical level. The email address you use to communicate with your clients should have your domain name (brand name). I have seen many companies use Gmail, Yahoo to contact their potential customers, somehow, this should be avoid when you do a solid, longterm online business. Just create a simple email address such as “[email protected]” to show your audience that you are a serious company.
When it comes to your own email address, your mail server will play a major role. Many mail services such as gmail, yahoo are restricted for spam emails. Therefore, you must keep a valid IP address to send emails to your customers, plus update valid SPF records in your name server to avoid deliverability issues. This can be a bit complicated, therefore I can recommend you to use an email gateway such as mail gun to avoid the complexity.
7. Be real with a location & a phone
A real business always have a physical location and a real phone number. Show your customers your location and provide 24/7 active phone line to answer their inquiries. This will be simple, and show amazing results on your sales report.
When do you start online advertising for your business?
You just can do it anytime. Open up a Google Adwords account and create a smart campaign to get visitors. Also you can use Facebook to do it. The problem is, you must spend around $1 to get one visitor to your business.
10,000 visitors almost around 10,000 USD!
Advertising agencies are not responsible to your loses, therefore your advertising budget can be disappeared in a flash if you select the wrong marketing method. Here is something that you must know before allocating money for web advertising in your company.
- If you are a startup, Allocate only 20% from your budget for promotion.
- For are middle-scaled business, they can through 50% for online marketing.
- A big firm will always spend up to 80% do their overall marketing process.
A start-up should be aware of expensive advertising
Even if you are a rich person, I advise you to avoid expensive advertising which charge more than $0.05 per visitor. Because, your business can have many other issues that you have to look after.
For example, many start-up faces resources problems, such as server load, backup issues, bandwidth limit, etc. You must keep a big rainy day fund to fix those issues when it comes time to time. If you spend a lot of money for promotion, your project will end up with a bankrupt in near future.
Do not forget that cheap automatic traffic can boost your online business
Some people believe that bot traffic or auto-surfed traffic has no value. But surprisingly, I found more than 100 big websites who sell automatic traffic to their customers since decades. I was wondering why they are still there. The answer I explored scared my reality.
Autosurf traffic providers such as Hitleap, 10khits, as well as Bux sites play a major role in web advertising industry. A lot of high-tech people use them to generate automatic traffic to their websites to boost their web ranking and shockingly to get impressions to Google Adsense.
Google is a big company with a lot of staff members and bots. Somehow, the recent article says: Google is pledging to fix their fake traffic that bombed my brain. It is proven that web giant is suffering to deliver a quality traffic to their customers. How much do we have lost so?
There is no doubt that Google, Facebook are top traffic sellers. But when we compare the price and the quality issues with their service. I believe buying cheap traffic to a website is better than get cheated for a big amount. I must mention that Google or Facebook is innocent with this issue. The problem is, they cannot filter the fake traffic and the quality traffic as their network is full with tricky publishers.
For a business owner, there is no budget to waste on fake traffic. Therefore, spending that budget on cheap traffic and boost the web ranking is a good investment.
Final conclusion: Web advertising is essential but be aware!
I am not against web advertising, but I want you to open your eyes and see the reality. Just do not through your money for an ad that bring a fake visitor for few bucks. Consider improving your UI/UX, brand value, customer feedback, web traffic, service quality, and infrastructure to gain more sales.
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I remember I lost a lot of customers coz I forgot adding 404 page for some urls. Thanks for this article Man!
Agree with your article. I normally use alexamaster.com website to do SEO. Also I buy traffic from 10khits. I use bidvertiser ads and they pay better than adsense. No need to spend more money for ads.
I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up!
I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back later.
Cheers