Cheap Professional Web Sites

Your Products

In order for your website to succeed, you have to provide products that your customers want to buy, once they arrive there.  This may mean creating your own product, finding wholesalers to provide these products, or simply re-defining your viewpoint and description of your current inventory.  Find or create or pick a product or products you can sell to your market, and research how it compares on features and price to other similar products in this market.  Deliver more value for less money, or way more value for more money, and your product should succeed.  It may also give you some ideas on how to expand your current business, or how to change the wording in your current advertising.  

For example, if your off-line pet store carries a wide variety of different cat toys, and “unique cat toys” is a highly ranked search term, you might consider adding that phrase to your off-line ads or flyers.  If “organic cat food” is a great term, and you carry a brand or two that is organic, you may not have thought to advertise that fact.  If you don’t carry it now, maybe you should consider adding it to your off-line and online inventory.  Many of the products carried by the online horse supply store in the dressage example, could certainly be used by people who into that sport.  Simply adding the sentence “Perfect for use in dressage competition.” to the descriptions will increase the relevance of that site for dressage afficianados, and perhaps lead to more sales to that market.

Explore different options in expanding your inventory.  You may not be able to offer everything in stock for your customers, but having the option available to special order it for them may also increase your business.  If the demand for orgenic cat food versus the quantities you have to order it in doesn’t make it practical to stock, see if you can find a drop shipper that will send it directly to your customer’s home.  You can take the order at your store (through your own website!), and the customer can have it delivered in a few days.  The “big box home stores” use this procedure to sell a much wider variety of products than they could possibly stock.  They carry in store a hundred or so popular bathroom faucets, but you can special order several hunderd more through their special order service.  They make a profit either way, and so can you.   You can also re-sell products that are outside of your scope to handle on your website, or in-store, from many other websites.  The affiliate link on your website sends your customer to the other site to place their order, and you receive an affiliate commission for sending them there.  Your customer gets the same price they would pay if they went to the site directly, and you get a profit that can range from 10% to 50% or more, all with no additional work and no orders to fulfill.  The affiliate site looks on the orders placed from your website as having $0 in advertising cost, so they are happy to pay you a commission for a sale they otherwise wouldn’t have. 

For affiliate products, long term keywords containing the actual product name are often excellent. If you carry products that aren’t as well known as one that is searched for frequently, but that you believe are even better, referencing the searched for product in your description can help make the page relevant for that term.  For example, if the “Whozit Dress Saddle” is more comfortable, better looking and less expensive than the “Whatzit Dressage Saddle”, and both are suitable for that sport, say so in your description.  Someone looking for the Whatzit may wind up buying the Whozit from you.  Better yet, they may also tell a few of their aquaintances in that sport about your website, and about the terrific deal they got there.

Remember, if you’re expanding your offline business to the online market, you don’t have to put your entire inventory online at once.  If you focus on the most popular and profitable products to begin with, you can always add others later.  The same holds true if you’re trying to start a new business from scratch, and break into a niche with a particular product or product line.  Get your site up and running with a product or a few products that your research shows are good choices.  Collect as many email addresses as you can with a free offer, then add additional complimentary products, and market them to your email lists at the same time.  A previous visitor may not have needed your “Complete Guide to Playing Better Golf”, but a guide to putting better that you offer down the road, might be just what they need. 

Once you know you have a market waiting to be sold to, and you have your product or products picked out, you need to actually start writing the content that will appear on your website.  For help with that, continue to Step 4…