Small Business Blog

Interested in making money online? The website business plan sounds easy enough: create a website, get some traffic, sell some product or compel your visitors to click on ads, and bammo…you’re in business. The costs are low, the margin is high. So what’s the problem?

The problem is, making money with a website isn’t quite that simple. You have some serious competition to tackle. And I’m not just talking about competing websites, although there are many of those. (An article by Digital Inspiration cites two sources that peg the total number of websites on the Internet at more than 100 million.) Your site will also be competing with cable television, magazines and books. On top of that, the individuals in your targeted visitor group will face tough, daily choices about how to use their time: visit your website, work, take the kids to soccer, go to the bar, and on and on. If your website doesn’t fall high enough on that list of priorities, then it won’t gain traction.

With that in mind, here are some primary reasons why your website will fail…

1. Your site is boring. Ok, it’s obvious, I know. But you may fall into the trap of not realizing just how boring your own site is. Is your site compelling enough to inspire visitors to visit surreptitiously while they’re at work, in meetings, discussing wedding plans with their fiancée? If it’s not, it’s too boring.
2. Your site doesn’t tell visitors what to do. Most people are not investigative in nature. They don’t want to gamble their time on trying to figure out what promise your website holds for them. If the site doesn’t have an obvious and compelling click path, your visitors will feel confused and leave.
3. Your site has no focus. This is related to the point above, but your site cannot be all things to all people—at least when you are first starting out. You might have grand plans to be a one-stop solution for mortgage information catering to brokers and mortgagees (for example), but you will have trouble winning over loyal visitors with a scope that broad. Start out with a sharply refined focus in both subject matter and services offered. Expand your depth of content before you expand its breadth. Once you have established a regular audience, you can start branching out, one area at a time.
4. Your site adds no value. Are you buying $5 articles, or reprinting free articles from a mailing list? Do you offer the same tools and resources as your competitors? If your site’s content has no uniqueness, it is doomed. You have to give visitors an undeniable reason to visit your site over someone else’s.
5. You have no clear, attainable monetization strategy. Once you develop a steady traffic base, you still have to convert that traffic into dollars. How will you do it? Adsense? Affiliate marketing? Selling memberships to your exclusive community? Make sure your plan is appropriate to your audience and appropriate to the way your visitors use your site. Don’t assume that visitors who are intensely involved in playing video games are going to stop their play to click on an ad.

A few words on SEO

You’ll notice I did not include anything related to SEO in the points above. That’s because if you build a site that is compelling enough, that adds enough value, that tells visitors what they are to do and enhances their lives in some way, you can always buy the traffic you need. Having a search-friendly site obvious improves your bottom line substantially, but it’s far more important to build your site to be compelling and engaging to your visitors.

Come back next week and we’ll talk shop about fixing your boring website.