Are You Wasting Money on an Ineffective Website?

Millions of dollars are being invested annually for company websites. Is yours effective? Is it driving business to your company? Are you getting more leads? If not, read this short article and begin to get a handle on your website investment.

There are basically three kinds of websites. One of these is simply a dead end, a no business generating, waste of money. One is designed merely to capture names and email addresses. And the last one is designed to be "picked up" by the search engines for good placement in word searches.

Let's begin with the death trap website. This website is usually the most common, it features attractive graphics, tabs for any number of reasons, music, audio, and even videos. It suffers from two major problems. First it has no objective except to make a favorable impression. It has no compelling message; it is simply very pretty. Second, it offers no means of identifying visitors. To say something positive about it, well... it can be purchased for as little as $5 a month. This is the website that companies often provide their representatives. It is a false sense of Internet presence. They simply do not work.

Website number two is considerably different than the "pretty" site. It has one objective, find out who is visiting. This type of website has a number of names including capture page, gateway, squeeze page, and perhaps others. The trick here is to present something as a "giveaway" that entices the visitor to register his name on your email list. In Internet marketing, the list is the key to success. Once on the list, the owner emails additional information and proposals of interest to those on the list. This is a bread and butter website for serious Internet marketers.

Website number three has the same overall objective as the capture type website but it does it a little bit differently. These websites usually contain information that is of use to specific Internet surfers. It might appeal to those starting a new business, or those who collect coins, or any number of other interests. Its heavy content (meaning useful information) is meant to cause the website address on word searches to be quite high (preferably on the first page in the first position). Additionally, the use of key words in the text will help its rating as well. It will have some kind of enticement as well to capture names and email addresses or it will direct the visitor to the owner's capture page website (#2 above).

Which should you use? In my opinion there is no reason to have a "pretty" website without clear objectives and the ability to capture visitor information. Have one if you like, but remember these websites do not pay for themselves. The capture page website is critical if you do business over the Internet - again, a bread and butter website. If you a limited budget, this is the one to build. The third website is clearly a good one as well and should be considered once you have the capture page website complete.

In all cases the real trick to Internet marketing is to drive visitors to your site. There are a number of ways to do this, some you pay for and some you can get for free. Those you pay for include Google Adwords, and traffic exchanges (pay for). The free ones include article writing, press releases, traffic exchanges (free), blogs, and social sites such as myspace.com. A clever one, if you can manage it (and it does require management) is to have a product featured on a website that others (affiliates) link to. This additional traffic ups your position in the search engines.

So the bottom line is do not do the "pretty" site; do a site that has the purpose of finding out who is visiting and builds your list. Then market to the list.