Don’t let the woeful tales of the dot com failures depress you. Making money through a web site is possible. But do keep in mind that it takes hard work, planning and organized thinking.
Start by asking yourself: “Why am I thinking of building a web site?” Is it because everyone else is doing it too? Do you have a specific purpose in mind for it?
It is very tempting for us to assume that our web site would turn into a money making machine as soon as it is launched, and that everyone in the world would be dying to visit it. Unfortunately, this is very far from reality.
Clearly defining the purpose of your web site, before you start building it, would ensure that your web site is optimized to achieve the required purpose. After all, you can only meet your goals when you know what they are.
Of course, defining a purpose may not be as easy as it sounds. It comes naturally to some of us while it is a lot harder for others. But the importance of determining your purpose cannot be stressed enough.
1. Product Sales
This is the most important reason for building a web site. You want to sell your products to the net surfers who would visit your web site. These products might be your own or you might be selling them as a sales representative of a company. But why would people visit your web site and not thousands of others selling products similar to yours? What makes you different from your competitors?
You need to chalk out a strategy to draw visitors to your web site. Only then will you be able to sell your products to net surfers. For the purpose of drawing visitors you would need to promote your site well. Moreover, you would need to offer them something that they consider useful, on your web site. This could be special offers or bonuses etc. For example, most web sites selling software tend to offer a free trial download.
One good way to draw visitors to a web site, is to offer unique and useful product related information to them. For example, Amazon.com offers a number of customer reviews for each book it is selling. This serves as very useful information for people who might be thinking of buying that particular book.
Observe the sites of your competitors closely and see what they are doing to draw visitors to their sites and make sales.
2. Brand Awareness
Some web sites are built to create awareness for a brand. Let’s take the example of Coke’s web site. Is it there because the Coca-Cola Company hopes to sell coke bottles on the web? No, it is there to create brand awareness amongst the net surfers and assert its brand identity. It wants to stay with the times and project an image of being trendy.
You may decide to bring your business to the web for the sole purpose of reassuring your customers that your company is willing to evolve with the changing times. The web site that you build would center on the purpose of enhancing and reasserting the image of your company.
3. Cost Reduction
Another purpose for building a web site can be cost reduction. A web site can result in cost reductions for you in a number of ways. You may decrease your customer services costs by having an online customer services system, your order processing costs by having an online ordering system for distributors and retailers, and your printing and paper costs by having brochures or product manuals online.
If your business has no offline presence, building a start up business on the web would involve minimal costs as compared to building a brick and mortar store. This is a major reason why many start up businesses are emerging on the web.
4. Providing Information
A web site can be constructed for the sole purpose of providing information about your company. A web site, which is built for this purpose, would take the form of an online brochure. It would result in cost savings from advertising for you. Furthermore, It would be easy to build and would not require a lot of maintenance.
5. Facilitating Communication
You may choose to build a web site to make it easy for your customers or target audience to communicate with you. A lot of television channels and periodicals have web sites where they conduct online surveys on different topics. An online survey is very easy to conduct and compile in comparison to an offline survey, and is a good source of eliciting customer opinions about a product or idea.
Moreover, traditional mediums of communication like fax, telephone, snail mail etc are expensive and time consuming. Through a web site or email, your customer can easily get in touch with you.
6. Affiliate Commissions
Another reason for building a web site may be to make money through promoting affiliate programs, which offer you a commission on sales. If you plan to build a web site for this purpose, do keep the following in mind:
- Try to restrict yourself to promoting programs that cater to the same target audience
- Offer information in the form of articles or compiled links that this target audience would find useful. This would ensure greater hits to your web site.
- Do not try to over stuff your web site with banners and popups. Visitors find them very irritating
- If you are promoting a certain program write an article about why it is useful. It is bound to get more attention than a usual ad. Besides text links get clicked a lot more than banner ads.
7. Revenue from Advertising
You may want to earn money by putting up the banners of other business on your web site. However this is not as easy as it sounds. The foremost concern of advertisers is the amount and quality of traffic your web site is drawing. You need to promote your web site well to ensure that it has a high amount of traffic. Moreover, you need to offer information similar to the advertisers’ products to ensure that they are getting the audience they intend to target. This would require hard work and planning.
No matter what the purpose of your web site may be, make sure that you keep track of the visitors of your web site. A traffic tracking system would give you valuable information about your customers or prospects that are visiting your web site. It would also enable you to make important decisions related to the optimization of your web site.
