Succeeding online is a tough challenge. With more than 1,679,340,000 active websites on the web today, standing out and attracting visitors is becoming increasingly difficult.
Luckily, even though the competition is as fierce as ever, there are more opportunities than ever before as well – the number of online users is growing each year, and new ways to promote your site are becoming available.
So, if you take the time to create a comprehensive strategy for your website, you can start growing traffic relatively quickly and should find that a lot of people are interested in buying your website if you would ever want to sell your site.
But what are the most important things to focus on when launching a new website?
Well, let’s explore four of the most important aspects below.
Identify Your Target Customer
Before you start building your website, you need to know who you want to attract because that will dictate all of your choices that come afterward.
If you don’t take the time to clearly establish who the ideal person that you want visiting your site is, it will be impossible to provide him with a personalized experience that will make your website stand out from all the others.
But while most aspiring website owners have a general idea of who might be interested in their site, if pressed, few would be able to describe a real person with real interests and online browsing habits.
However, if you take the time to develop a detailed customer avatar, you’ll be miles ahead of many other sites and will have a much better chance of success.
Think about the main problem or problems that your website will help solve, and then try to identify who would benefit the most from what you have to offer.
Then, try to list as many details about that person as possible – their age, education, location, interests, browsing habits, expectations, challenges, objections, and anything else that you might find relevant.
Once you complete your customer avatar, you will likely have many ideas for how to improve your site that you wouldn’t have thought of before, which will not only help you succeed but will actually make creating the site much easier.
Create a Memorable Brand Identity
Once you know who the ideal customers that you want to attract are, the next step is creating a brand identity that your target audience will be able to relate to and trust.
And the first step of the process is coming up with a name and finding a domain name to match. Luckily, you don’t have to spend hours matching your ideas to available domain names and can instead use a domain name generator that makes the entire process much easier.
Once you have the name, you will need to come up with your brand’s mission and voice, which will serve a vital role and dictate all of your promotional decisions.
When possible, always opt for a more personal and down-to-earth image because people like to feel like they’re interacting with a real person and not just being promoted to by a faceless company. Even Google has a person who is the public face for all of their SEO guidelines and updates, and that’s because audiences tend to respond much more positively to personal interaction.
You should also try to find a good balance between being unique and being authentic – although it’s great if you’re different from your competitors, don’t try to fake something that you’re not, and instead look for a voice a voice that truly represents you and makes your company stand out because of who you are.
Promote Your Business on Social Media
It’s impossible to run a successful website without a social media presence.
Well, theoretically it is possible, but it’s hard to think of even a single reason why any business would want to leave such a huge pool of prospective customers to the competition.
The number of social media users is projected to reach 2.77 billion in 2019, so if you’re not doing your best to engage this audience and attract them to your site, you’re missing out on a large majority of your best potential clients.
But how to get started on social media?
Well, there are many ways you can promote your business on the major social media sites – you should build your own following and engage your prospects organically, as well as run paid advertising campaigns to expand your reach and ensure that you’re growing consistently.
However, before you can get started on all that, you need to figure out where your audience likes to hang out – if you perform a thorough and comprehensive customer research, you should have a pretty good understanding which social media platform do your prospects like to hang out on most often and can focus your efforts there.
One thing to remember when running social media campaigns for promoting your site is that you must always be optimizing your ads and posts to ensure that you’re producing the best possible results at the lowest possible cost.
That means running split tests for everything from your audience targeting, to which types of content your audience responds to best, to even the smallest details like your Facebook Ad size.
Over time, your social media presence can become your biggest marketing asset and provide you with a steady stream of targeted new leads every single month.
Provide a Seamless User Experience
Today’s internet users are more sophisticated than ever – they have high expectations for websites that they choose to spend time on, and have learned not to trust sites that don’t look professional or are difficult to navigate.
That’s why one of your top priorities when setting up your website should be to take a user-first approach in every decision that you make.
And since more than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices, all of that starts with catering to your mobile audience. You need to make sure that no matter what device a user may be using, they will enjoy a convenient and seamless experience and will be able to navigate your site with ease.
Luckily, most of today’s platforms already offer mobile-friendly responsive website designs that are able to adapt to different screen sizes.
But if you want to take it a step further and make sure that your mobile users have additional functionality, you might want to consider creating a mobile app for your site as well.
Another aspect you must think about is making your site look trustworthy and reliable – if you’re selling products, you need to ensure that every detail looks professional because otherwise, you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to buy from you.
That means you should be transparent about who you are, what your business is about, and how do you deal with clients.
What’s more, you need to make all the visual elements look professional as well – it’s essential to find high-quality product images for ecommerce listings because generic blurry stock photos look sketchy and don’t inspire trust in your company.
If you can’t find good-looking images online, you might need to consider organizing a photo shoot yourself.