Set Your Goals

A goal is at the core of your website planning. First, you must decide what to do with site traffic. For example, if you’re selling products, the goal would be to convert visitors to buyers.

However, you may have other goals in mind. It might be for people to sign up for your mailing list. You may use your website to grow your client list. It might be a tool for leading people to your webinar, or online forum, or a “loss leader”.  

Identify Your Target Audience

The success of your website depends on how well you meet your audience’s needs, so you need a clear understanding of the issues they face. For this purpose, you should create an ideal customer profile.

Your ideal customer profile describes the individual who is the perfect match for your products and services.

Describe them regarding demographics, values and attitudes, buying behavior, and pain points. The pain points are essential as your content needs to address them and offer solutions.

Start by making some educated guesses, then research your target market online and anywhere offline where touchpoints exist. The more you base your profile on objective data and feedback, the more accurate and effective it will be. You’ll refine this once you launch your site and engage with visitors.

Define Your Unique Value Proposition

Your Unique Value Proposition is a statement that describes how your offerings uniquely meet the needs of your target audience. The UVP is the core message behind all your marketing and branding. It helps you clarify what’s special about your products.

You can uncover your UVP by asking questions like:

• How are you different from your competitors?

• Why do your customers choose to buy from you and not someone else?

• What benefits do the customers get from using your products? How are their lives made better?

• Why do these specific benefits matter to your customers?

• What problems do you solve for your customers?

• What are the unique strengths you bring to the table?

It would be best if you researched your competitors. Try to gain insights into how they meet the needs of their customers. This can help you come up with ideas to set yourself apart.

Take your time working this out and seek feedback from members of your team or others acquainted with your business. Since it’s the core of your marketing, it needs to reflect how your customers feel about you.

Choose Your Platform

Now, it’s time for the nuts and bolts of your site. First, you’ll need to choose a service to host your website and give you a domain name and URL.

A hosting service is a company that allows businesses to use their server for storing their website. For a monthly fee, they keep your site running 24/7. Your domain names and URLs could be included in the price.

Alternatively, you may want to buy your domain name separately from a domain name seller like Namecheap, and then move it to a hosting company of your choice.

You should get an email with your domain name. This is better than using a free service like Yahoo or Gmail because it makes you look more professional. You can get your email address from a professional hosting service or the same web provider. Hosting services include Dreamhost, BlueHost, and Hostgator.

To make it easy, use a website builder to create your site. A website builder is a tool or platform like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, or Shopify that allows you to build your site without coding or programming skills. Instead, it offers templates and tools to customize, create pages, and add content.

Offer Engaging Content

Content is why people come to your website and stay there. It’s also one of the primary drivers of conversions. If people visit your website and find nothing interesting to read or watch, they’ll leave.

Engaging content is interesting and relevant to your visitors. It must match what they’re looking for when they come to your website from another source. The best content for engagement addresses problems the audience is facing and offers viable solutions.

Think about the ways you can help your target market with their problems. What can you teach them that would make their lives easier, save them money, or remove an obstacle they’re facing?

The content also needs to be relevant to your offers. This creates a seamless experience where people come to your site looking for help with problems. They will find information that offers solutions and might check out your offers for more.

Search Engine Optimization

You can’t convert website traffic if there’s no traffic to begin with. You could have highly engaging content and amazingly relevant offers, but without visitors, you won’t have anyone to convert.

Since traffic is the lifeblood of any website, you need a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your website planning. SEO includes various techniques to help Google index your site to send you the right traffic.

The basics of SEO include:

• Keywords. You use these search terms in your content and metadata people search for on Google.

• Fresh Content. You have high-quality content that is updated regularly.

• Backlinks. These are links coming to your website from other sites. They should be high-quality, relevant links from credible sources.

• Metadata. Tags and meta descriptions are vital for telling Google what your site is about.

• Clear Navigation. Your site should have simple, intuitive navigation between the pages with a logical internal linking structure.

You can optimize your site easily using tools like Google’s Keyword Tool.

Good User Experience

A good user experience simply means that people enjoy using your site. They can easily find what they’re looking for and get what they want. Everything is clear and straightforward. It is essential for both SEO and on-page conversions.

For a good user experience, your site needs:

• Easy-to-understand navigation

• Fast loading times across multiple browsers

• Functionality across all devices

• A search bar to make pages searchable

• Clean design

Regular Testing

Testing is a crucial part of website planning. Your site must be tested thoroughly before it goes live and regularly once it’s up and running.

Website testing takes many different forms. It includes:

• Testing metadata

• Checking browser capability and responsiveness on different devices

• Running a speed test

• Checking for broken links and 404 error pages

You can also test your site with real human beings. One way to do this is to invite friends, family, and colleagues to give you feedback. Another idea is to do a soft launch where you make it available to a limited number of people before the big launch.

Your Plan for Monitoring Performance

Finally, you need a plan for monitoring and tracking metrics. This helps you measure your new site’s progress toward your goals and success in converting visitors.

It will show you areas of improvement to make it even more effective at meeting your visitors’ needs.

Strategy #1: Targeted Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing relevant content aimed at educating your audience. The key to this strategy is to provide valuable contents that help your audience find answers to their questions.

Over time, the audience begins to see you as a trusted expert (i.e. authority) and starts to like you. This is how you build loyal followership that can be converted into paying clients.

Content marketing can range from newsletters to blog posts, videos, audio, and even images. And each item must be tailored to your intended demographic.

To be successful, you must first define your target market, understand your products and services, and create content that addresses each stage of your customer's buying journey. Marketing giants like Hubspot and Copyblogger swear by content marketing.

Strategy #2: Collect Customer Testimonials

A great way to get the word out about your offerings and to persuade your audience to buy what you’re selling is to ask for testimonials from satisfied customers.

If you’re just starting you can give work or products away in exchange for a testimonial. Put the testimonials on your website and link back to the customers’ information so that everyone knows they are real people.

Customer testimonials help to give you something called, “social proof,” one of the potent weapons of marketing influence, according to the legendary marketing professor Robert Cialdini.

According to Dr. Cialdini in his highly influential book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, “one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.” Potential customers will first read testimonials about your products or services before they read your fancy sales letter. They want to know “what other people think.” If they don’t get a good vibe, they are out. That’s a well-proven psychology of human behavior.

Strategy #3: Email Marketing

Permission-based email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies on the planet today. Every business is using this strategy, from the one-woman laptop entrepreneur to the largest corporations. Craig Ballantyne calls it the “Holy Grail of Internet Marketing.” If you’re not using email marketing in your business, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Permission-based email marketing can become your primary lead source (I emphasize permission-based because you MUST get the permission of a recipient before you start emailing them. Spamming is the fastest way to have your business shut down).

If you know how to generate quality lead, and nurture that lead with regular valuable content sent directly into their inbox, you can build and scale a small business in virtually any niche.

Strategy #4: Host Webinars

Webinars have come of age. As the technology gets better and less expensive hosting and performing a webinar is a great way to prove your expertise status. When people can see you, and hear you they’re more likely to trust you.

If you also interview movers and shakers within your industry you can gain some of their audience as well as impress your audience by increasing the trust factor you already share. When you hobnob with influencers you can become one too.

Webinars have become so hot that the Australian marketing consultant, Tom Polland of the Leadsology fame recently published a bestseller titled: Marketing With Webinars, in which he gives you a step-by-step method for generating new client inquiries in bulk and without significant cost or complication using webinars.

Using webinars as marketing strategy has grown even more exponentially in the past year since this global pandemic shutdown.

Strategy #5: Give Away Good Stuff

When you decide to build your list you already know that you need to create a “freebie” so that your audience will sign up for your email list.

But, did you know that the stuff you give away free should be just as good as the stuff you sell? It may seem counterproductive but when you give away super-targeted information that is high quality it builds a lot of trust in you from your audience who will recommend you to others even if they never personally buy from you. This will help you expand awareness and make more money faster.

Legendary marketer, Dean Jackson, calls this “Potato Chip Marketing.”

Here’s how it works. You’re at a park with a bag of potato chips, and want a squirrel to eat out of your hand. What do you do?

First, you make a line of potato chips. You set one chip down first, then another two feet away, then another, and so on. Then you sit on a bench further away. The squirrel will come out and steal the first potato chip. It will wait, look around and then eat the next one when it feels comfortable. And then the next one, and the next, until it’s eating straight out of your hand!

Just like you cannot expect a squirrel to eat out of your hand on first contact, you cannot expect a client to buy from you when they first land on your website. You must build trust first, then you sell.

Strategy #6: Speak at Live Events Online and Offline

Most people are terrified of public speaking. It’s been said that most people are more afraid of public speaking than dying. Ouch! Therefore, if you can do it, and do it well – the payoff can be enormous.

You can speak online and offline today. Look for speaking gigs through your network and let people know you’re ready to do it by creating sample videos and a “one sheet” to market your speaking services. This one marketing strategy alone can explode your business.

Strategy #7: Partner with Other Businesses

It's a quick method to raise exposure and grow your business when you collaborate with other businesses. One method to accomplish this is to develop short-term joint venture initiatives with someone who provides complementary goods, services, and skills to you.

Make sure you have a contract in place that spells out each party's obligations and responsibilities in the joint venture. If you collaborate on a short-term project with someone, such as a live event or an online webinar, you can explore collaborating on longer-term initiatives, such as joint product offerings.

Bonus: Build an Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is a great marketing strategy for small businesses. This is true whether you sell physical or digital products. Getting others to promote your products and services is a win-win for you and the affiliate. You reach more people than you could on your own and the affiliate earns a commission for sending buyers to your site.

You also get to grow your email list. When you build your affiliate program, consider using an affiliate network such as JVZoo, ClickBank, or Commission Junction to promote your offerings in order to reach even more potential affiliate promoters.

These top marketing strategies will help you get more attention to your products or services if you do them persistently and consistently.

Of course, there are other marketing strategies you can also use. Social media marketing is an amazing addition to traditional marketing methods in the 21^st century. You can build an entire business using almost any of the platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

The key is all marketing takes time and consistency to produce results, but finding one or two (or three) strategies that work for you, and working them can yield profitable results for you.