The simple fact is that you’re not in the position to have a 20 page business plan and keep it up to date. I know, when I started my first business, I had a 30 page business plan! It’s a great tool at the beginning of a business and if you’re just starting out I fully recommend you do one. But once you get into the day to day running of your business, updating a huge document every time something changes just becomes too difficult.

So, what do you do? Simple, you make a one page business plan. You’ll probably need a few of these for different areas of your business but they’re a lot easier to update and you can rewrite them in no time with a bit of experience. The free resources section includes a copy of my One-Page Online Marketing Plan that I use with all my clients. This sets our direction by working out what we’re selling and setting goals to achieve. I refer to it often when working on a project and use it to measure progress at every stage.

Now you have no excuse not to have an Online Marketing Plan, so use it!

Ok, so if you’re into business development at all, and I assume you are since you’re reading this ebook, you know the importance of having a business plan already. So I’m not going to harp on, the simple fact of the matter is you need to have one if you want your business to achieve its potential. You need objectives, you need goals, and you need a plan to get there.

End of story.

Sales (from website)
How much money do you make from selling products on your website? Deduct your expenses to ensure you’re making a profit as well.

Unique Visitors
How many unique visitors visit your website each day, week, month, and year? Make sure you are looking at unique visitors and not page views or impressions. For example, you have 2 unique visitors to your website. One looks at 1 page, the other looks at 30 pages. Using unique visitors, it counts as 2. Using page views, it counts as 31. Unique visitors are your potential customers, so keep a close eye on this figure.

Returning Visitors
How many visitors return to look at your website a second time? These show people more likely to make a purchase and if your website has a consistent audience.

Conversion Rate of Visitors to Sales
How many visitors are actually buying your products? 5 sales divided by 100 unique visitors means you are converting 5% of your visitors to sales. Obviously, the higher, the better!

Duration of Visits
How long are people spending on your website? Do they find it in a search engine but leave within a few seconds because it’s not what they need or has a bad interface? You want targeted visitors to find you from the search engines. People that want to buy your products.

Top Exit Pages
What page are customers getting frustrated with your website? If you have a lot of people leaving at the shopping cart phase, maybe you have a problem that makes customers stop their purchase. Watch for problem areas.

Statistics about your unique and returning visitors, duration of visits, and top exit pages can be found using any good web statistics program. Just be aware that due to different measurement techniques, different programs can give widely varying figures. Be aware of this if changing programs and try to keep using one program so you have consistent results.

Everything that is useful needs to be measured. How do you know if it’s useful? Work out how it correlates to your sales and bottom line and then decide if improvement in this area would make your business more efficient and productive. If the answer is yes, you should be measuring it.

I know, I know, that sounds like a lot of effort. Since my goal is to get you the most results with the least effort, I’m going to be a little bit more specific. The following are the key website measurements that you should be making and aiming to improve on:

• Sales (from website)
• Unique visitors
• Returning visitors
• Conversion rate of visitors to sales
• Duration of visits
• Top exit pages

These six measurements should give you an excellent starting point for improving your website. The last two, duration of visits and top exit pages, are more subjective than the others but can be used for identifying major problems in your website. I’ll explain more in a second.

Earlier we talked about discovering what benefits you were selling to your customers. These are obviously critical when it comes to writing your marketing material and webpage. So you take your benefits, work out your objective, and then add a little emotion into the mix.

First off, every webpage that you write will have an objective. Now you just have to work out what it is. What do you want your customer to achieve from this page? Do you want to make a sale? Do you want to have them sign up to a newsletter? Or is it something a little more subtle?

In between a customer visiting your website and making a sale, there is a process. It involves every webpage the customer looks at and all the information they gather that leads them towards the sale. Think about your website as a funnel. You want customers in one end and sales out the other. So your job is to lead your customer by the hand, answer all their questions and negate all their doubts, until they are simply compelled to buy your product. So what is the objective of webpage you are writing?

Next up, bring some emotion to play. Human beings are emotional creatures, it’s in everything we do, even if we don’t realise it. So you need to write with this in mind and generate a little excitement and emotion in your customer’s life. What emotion are you selling them? Are you selling something that will make them happy? Are you selling them something to avoid the pain of a task or chore?

Watch a Coke™ commercial. They’re not selling you a soft drink are they? They’re selling you fun, parties, good times with friends, the summer feeling, great weather, and beautiful people. Think about what you feel when you watch the commercial and it’s time to start thinking about how you want your customers to feel when they purchase from you. Does that make sense you incredible, wonderful, intelligent, and beautiful person?

Another area usually overlooked by web designers is how your website is going to sell your products. Sure, they will have all the ecommerce facilities in place, the shopping cart, and places for product descriptions. But how does your website actually get your customer from finding your website, through to putting their credit card details in and clicking confirm?

This is the most critical part of your website design. You wouldn’t let a customer wander into your showroom and then just cross your fingers and hope they buy something. You would give them assistance, you would answer their questions, and you would remove all doubt from their minds until they simply had to buy your product. This is exactly what your website needs to be doing for you since you can’t be there in person.

Firstly, you need a website that is easy to use and hassle free. There needs to be no barriers between the customer entering your website and leaving having bought one of your products. Everything in the interface must be correctly positioned so customers cannot get lost. You must have an easy to follow system for the customer to get through the shopping cart process and enter their details.

Secondly, your product descriptions must be finely honed pieces of marketing material. They must lead your customers through the full buying process. They must eliminate all the customers’ doubts and answer all their questions, just like you would on the showroom floor. And in the end, you must leave them with no other alternative except to simply purchase the product as they know it will fulfil all their needs. Remember, you need to sell the benefits here, not the features like everyone else.

Now it’s time for one of the most important topics when it comes to your website. Simply put, if you don’t have a specific strategy to rank highly in the search engines, you are wasting your time and money on the internet. This is the most critical aspect of your online marketing and also the most commonly overlooked. Get this right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

First, a word of warning: Most web designers and web design companies have no idea how to rank well in the search engines. Some companies give it a fleeting thought and do a few things right. Others just ignore it completely. Still others screw it up completely and actually do things that are detrimental to your website’s rankings. I speak from experience; no web design company I have ever worked with has paid sufficient attention to this area. These are the companies that can create impressive looking, feature rich, and knock your socks off websites that will do absolutely nothing for your sales.

This is one of my professional focuses and an increasing number of individuals and companies are consulting in this area all the time. Your business needs to consult with a dedicated Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) consultant, preferably before you even start building your website. Once you have a website, our job becomes a lot more difficult and a lot more costly to you. So if you’re thinking about creating or redesigning your website, talk to a SEO consultant first, before your web designer. Your sales will thank you for it.

Now there is plenty of information in the free resources section about this area and more will be posted on my website as time progresses. You are quite welcome to do it yourself to save yourself some money. Just be aware of the trial and error involved and the steep learning curve you will have to face. SEO consultants make it look easy, it most definitely is not. I urge you to contact one today. Anyone, not necessarily me, talk to as many as possible. You wouldn’t just rush out and choose the first accountant you met, or the first marketing company. Do your research and make an informed decision based on your needs.

At the moment you are probably relying on a lot of word of mouth to create you business. You do a good job, your customers are happy, and they recommend you to other people. This is a great way to get customers and grow your business. If a customer is sent to your business by a friend, almost all their fears of doing business with you are eliminated right from the start. Then all you have to do is sell them the right colour.

But if you really want to grow your business you need to think bigger. You need to get people talking about your business before they’ve even bought from it. You need to offer them something truly unique and different from your competitors.

There are plenty of books out there to give you ideas for this, commonly called viral marketing campaigns, amongst other things and you can find a bunch of resources on my website. It could be as simple as writing a free ebook on your specialised topic, or creating a game that gets emailed around offices all over the world and links back to your website. The sky is the limit and creativity is heavily rewarded.

Next up on our list is the one line that means your customers buy from you and no other. You need to boil down all your benefits and needs into a simple, clear, elegant statement that sums up your business. I choose to put mine at the top of my website which gives both myself and my customers focus about what this website and I are all about. You can use it in your marketing materials or not, it’s up to you, but use it to focus yourself on what your business is all about.

Mine is: The expertise to bring cash from your website.

So now you have the needs of your customers, you need to translate that into the benefits that you are selling them. The benefit is what the customer will get from solving their problem with your product. For example, maybe your shovel prevents blisters while digging (benefit) because of a specially designed rubber grip (feature). As you can see the benefit clearly gives the ‘why’ for using your product over others. The feature is ‘how’ the product will give you the benefit.

Let’s look again at my business. I offer a service that:

• improves the business
• improves the website
• makes more sales and profit
• frees the business owner to focus on other tasks
• handles all aspects of website promotion

This is why you should be using my business. You’ll notice I have no features in the list. I’ll mention features of course, but not before I have my customer sold on the benefit. The reason comes before the method.