It is generally a waste of time and money for many small businesses to build a large, expensive web site with web pages that includes items such as how long you have been in business, a list of your core skills, the qualifications of key employees, or overall how great your company is compared to the competition.
Web designers love these pages and encourage their clients to build elaborate and artistically looking websites because they are expensive and they can get more money from them. However, as a marketing tool, they are “boring” and most often as ineffective as a fancy billboard in the middle of the desert.
Before you build a website you need to ask yourself a few basic questions:
Who is the intended target of the website?
How will you make sure it reaches them?
What is the content that the prospect really needs?
How will the site be marketed to the prospect?
When the prospect finds your site, how will it make you money?
Is the site even necessary?
Rather than build a full-blown informational website for a new business, why not consider building a simple squeeze page first? A squeeze page is a simple one-page website to capture a customer’s email address.
The key to a good squeeze page is an easy to spell URL or domain name. Additionally, the page must give the prospect a good and clear message why they should give you their email address.
One popular approach is to give away an item of perceived value for free. Once you have sent the prospect their free offering and you have the prospect’s email, you can set up an automated email campaign and move them through your sales pipeline.
Perhaps your goal is to reinforce your brand, move them up the permission marketing chain, or make them offers to buy your product or service. Setting up a squeeze page is easy and inexpensive.
I use a slightly more elaborate process that leverages my blog site. Basically, I use Facebook to target and drive traffic to a Featured Article on my Facebook fan page. The prospect’s read the article and at the end, I encourage them to download some free tools where I capture their email address with WooBox. Once I have the prospect’s email, I copy them to an automated MailChimp email pipeline and offer the prospect discounts on the products I sell using a free WordPress plugin called WooCommerce.
Do you really need a fancy web page or will a simple squeeze page be more effective for you?
