1. Keep Your Website Design both Simple and Well-Organized
In the desire to look cool or flashy, many businesses add unnecessary detractors to their websites. Music, flashy animations or huge graphics won’t necessarily lead the customer to the information they want and since everyone’s time is valuable, if they don’t find their answers quickly, they will bounce right out of your site. It is much more important that visitors be able to find the answers they are looking for at a glance, particularly for a business oriented website.
2. Respond to Visitors Promptly
If a visitor to your website (future client) emails or fills out a contact form, you MUST respond to them as soon as possible. They will note how long it takes and consider that part of your customer service protocol AND they are also their most interested at the moment they filled out the form, so you should strike while the iron’s hot.
3. Engage Your Visitors
A great way to get this potential client involved and feeling like part of the team already, is to post a blog in your site and invite comments. Set yourself up on a number of social media platforms and provide posts of high quality content. You’ll soon develop a fan base that your visitors can join and feel like part of the team.
4. Give Visitors a Reason to Return but Don’t Over Sell
Adding quality content on a regular basis is a good way to get your visitors to keep checking you out. You can do this through regular blogposts on your site for instance. You can also let your visitors know of a monthly discount or special that you run. Be careful not to badger them however or to use “super spammy” language – no one, including online visitors, wants to experience a pushy salesperson.
5. Don’t Over Optimize Your Website or List in a Bad Neighborhood
Stay current on the best, most integrity-based, methods of search engine optimization or SEO. The old methods were more like smoke and mirrors and actually hurt a company’s chances of improving their ranking in online searches. Likewise, links and “back links” were initially used to increase the search engine attractiveness of a website, but very quickly this trick was discovered and sites that existed merely to provide a ton of links (often paid links) to another, were recognized as “spammy” sites and ultimately hurt ranking rather than helped. Integrity-based methods and high content quality or the way to go – if someone is offering you SEO at rock bottom rates, be suspicious, because doing it right requires more time and attention and should therefore, cost a bit more to ensure success.
6. Maintain a High Quality Mailing List
Ask customers to sign up for your newsletter and be sure that they can unsubscribe at any time, and that your newsletter provides useful, high quality information. Be careful not to send out more than one per month with the occasional additional announcement.
7. Remember Your Customers are Still Real People
If you remember that your customers are people just like you, with money concerns, time constraints and a desire to find the very best for their own endeavors, you will be well on your way to your own successful online business.
Source Material:
9 Prime Rules for Running a Successful Online Business by Joel Brown, Addicted2Success.com