By James D. Brausch of Target Blaster
[April 24th, 2002]

See Also   Why You Need an Add URL Page   A Tale Of Two Sites   Don't Duplicate...Differentiate!   The Continuing Battle Against Online Fraud   Taking Care of the Pennies   How To Recession-Proof Your Business   Your Fulfillment Choices   The Silent Thief - How to Get Rid of TopText   A Checklist for Accepting Credit Cards Online   Five Questions That Will Help YOU Succeed Online   Back To "E" Basics   Beyond SET: Enhanced Security for Online Transactions   Just How Serious is Online Fraud?   Your Direct Channel to Customer Service   Online Customer Service: Best (and Worst) Practices   How to Survive the Dot.Com Shakeout   Step-by-Step to Your Own Profitable Web Business   Where Do Average People Find Business Success?   What's REALLY Required To Start An Online Home Business?   CRM in SmallBiz: Disappointing Misconceptions

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

Let's start from another direction. Let's say you sell widgets offline and followed the advice last decade and registered www.widgets.com. If a widget can be described easily on a web-site and costs less than $1,000, you probably sell them directly on your web-site. If not, you probably have press releases, contact information for your various departments, descriptions of your various widget products/services, etc. You sell your widgets off-line, but your site supports that process.

Every site in this category would like more traffic. More traffic means more sales means more profits. Isn't that odd? The guy with the information site had the opposite problem. He had too much traffic. Let's say you realize that and try to increase your traffic by adding some free content. You start writing articles about widgets, start a discussion forum, etc. What happens? Your traffic increases dramatically, but your sales barely increase at all. In fact, you might notice that your sales go down. The new distraction of free content on your site is pulling away the attention of those who might otherwise be buying. You find yourself with the same problems as the above guy who runs a content site. Your focus has been split and the core mission of your site (selling widgets) suffers.

There must be a way. Of course, if you sell widgets, you can purchase advertising on widget information sites. And if you have a widget information site, you can sell advertising space. Many find a balance that works well here.

Here's another option. Create a sister site of the other type. One site will be 100% informational (almost). The other site will be 100% sales. On the informational site, devote most of the home page to an advertisement for the sales site. We find that about 40% of our traffic ends up at the home page no matter how they entered the site (many search engines deliver them to a page other than the home page). If you place a large advertisement on the home page with a large "Enter Site" link under the advertisement, we find that you can receive a 30-50% click-thru rate if your sales and information sites are well matched in topic. That means that you can deliver a significant portion of the most likely buyers from your information site to your sales site. Now that your ad is done, don't ever think about commercializing your information site in any other way. Don't put any banners, affiliate links or anything else to drive away information seekers. Just focus on being the very best widget information site possible.

Do the same for your sales site. Don't ever place anything to distract folks from buying. If you are tempted to put up some kind of content, do it on your information site. If you are starting with an information site and looking for a way to monetize it, forget about all the affiliate programs and banners. Either find one good sponsor and put them on your home page, or start your own sales site and become your own sponsor. After a bit of lost focus (setting up the sales site) you can hopefully turn all of your attention back to your information site and leave your sales site alone.

With this arrangement, you can drive traffic from an informational site to a sales site and never lose sales because they are distracted by some free content on your sales site.

The author, James D. Brausch, is the Vice President of Marketing for
Target Blaster, Inc., an Internet Marketing firm specializing in targeted traffic.