I am an Internet marketing specialist and website designer. People ask me how to make more money online every day.
If your website is not making enough money, it might be for one of these two reasons (or both of them):
- You are not getting enough traffic
- You are getting a lot of traffic but your visitors don’t become paying customers
More traffic
If not getting enough traffic is the problem, there are a lot of ways of buying traffic. I use the word “buying” because that’s exactly what it is. Don’t fool yourself thinking that there is such thing as free traffic. If it doesn’t cost money, it takes time. And time is money.
A lot of people freak out when it comes to investing money to get traffic. Those are the people who aren’t serious about having a successful business. I’ve come across many people who think that owning an online business is a great way of making a quick buck without much effort. An online business is very similar to any other kind of business. You need to have a great product, price it right, and market it to the right people.
Many of these people get really happy when they get a $20 commission for an affiliate sale because they spent no money promoting this product. They only spent 3 days of their lives. Now, if you are happy being paid $20 for 24 hours of work, great. I am not here to judge you.
But don’t you wish sometimes that you owned one of those websites that make $10,000-$100,000 a month? If you do, you need to start thinking as a real entrepreneur. You need to forget about making a quick buck overnight and realize that great results come from hard work and doing the right things.
More conversions
Once you start thinking as a real business owner and not like a wannabe Internet marketer you will realize that there is nothing wrong with buying traffic as long as your return on that investment is higher than the investment itself. How many people would you be willing to pay $5 to visit your website? None? What if I told you that for each one of them you will make $6? Then your answer should be “as many as I can!”
The reason why most people are afraid of spending money promoting their websites is because their websites don’t convert visitors into paying customers.
There are many reasons why this happens, but these are the most common ones:
Poor copy
A lot of online business owners don’t realize that the copy they write will have a major influence in the buying decision of their visitors, so they really don’t spend enough time writing good copy.
Unprofessional website
There is no bigger turnoff that an unprofessional website. People don’t know you. They don’t know your brand. All they see is a tacky website done by a high school kid. Why should they trust you?
No USP, poor USP, or USP not well displayed
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. It is a fancy way of saying “what makes you different (better) than the competition”. Your USP should not be based on what you want it to be, but on what your prospects would like it to be. In other words, don’t highlight your great prices too much if people are looking for quality instead of price. And vice versa.
Not testing the product and business model
Several people spend months getting a website, negotiating with vendors, getting a fancy office with a brand new coffee machine, and then they throw a huge launch party. The day after, they don’t get one single sale. One month later, two sales only. The business is not working out.
We should never assume that we know all the answers and just because we think that a business is going to work, it will. We need to test the business model and the product as soon as we possibly can and spending as little as possible.
Not being persistent
A few businesses start making tons of money from day one. But that is the exception, not the rule. Chances are that you will test four or five things that don’t work before you find something that does. Don’t use all your money for one marketing campaign. Start small. Test it out and if it has a high ROI you can always invest more in it. If it doesn’t, then your business will not be upside down. Forget about the magic bullet that will make you rich overnight. Persistence is more important than intelligence.
