Modeling Your Website After the Greats - What Information Need do You Address?
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Ignore the greats at your peril; it is not only e-tailers that should take heed. All web sites should address a need. Information is at a premium. What information needs does your web site address? If your focus is not needed, then you won't be visited. The fundamentals will get you all the time. The Internet does not spare "fools." Pareto's principle applies with a more diverse ratio (the top 2% get 80% of the business). For example, if an e-book you are selling does not address a need, then no matter how well you optimize your site, no one will bother to find it.
Eat Internet, Drink Internet
After the need of the information age consumer has being found, and you decide to assuage his pain, you must find ways to market your website to him. This is where search engine optimization, site design and consulting come in. All the leverage available to you must be exploited fully. Your most important resource is human resources -- in this case, it is you. You must be interested in using every means to identify your customers, and lure them into becoming repeat customers by offering value. Get a database of their emails; track them; send a free e-zine. Use every tool available to find out how they arrived at your site. Write and rewrite your web copy until it does what you want it to do. There is no "instant;" "instant" success costs money, which may or may not come back. If you don't study the Internet, the Internet will not reveal itself to you.
If you cannot spend the time to eat and drink the Internet, and you can afford it, then hire or go into partnership with someone who does -- your sixteen-year-old son, cousin, neighbor or nephew perhaps. This will enable you to discover all the leverage you need to find. Good staff will not necessarily cost a lot; you can offer them a share of the profits. If you can't handle permanent staff, then a web consultant should be hired. When Jeff Bezos headhunted Richard Dalzell from Wal-Mart, Joy D.Covey from Avid Technology, and Mary Engstrom Morouse from Symantec, he ran the risk of their being headhunted over time. But by having a long term profit sharing plan, he kept his workers.
Techno Leverage
The Internet offers so many tools that it would be ridiculous not to take advantage of them. They reduce the need for man hours to be spent online responding to emails and make tracking your customers easier. Despite the fact that technologies are rapidly changing and the half life of new technologies can be as short as 180 days, it is suicidal, repeat suicidal for a web site not to use as many tools as possible, and to change them as regularly as possible. If you want to be able to handle large numbers of customers, you must automate email responses, tracking, and e-zine subscription. The automation will definitely keep your running costs down. With a lot of your systems automated, you can run relatively large sites with a few staff (even with part-time staff)
Technology is also used in getting customized solutions to your own firm's unique problems. If it is not available off the shelf, then get programmers to build it. Illustrations include Amazon's first software, which they used to take and confirm credit card payments. Google did the same with coding their search engine program. Not all of us are computer science graduate students, however. Nowadays, custom-built solutions can be contracted out to software development firms.
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