Internet Marketing Strategy 4 Tightly Focus Your Site

Effective marketing is about more than just promotion of whatever you sell. Online, it is just as much about the structure of your web site itself. How you build your site will have a major impact on how effective your online promotional tactics can be.

The internet is a highly fragmented, highly specialised marketplace. Your online business will achieve optimum success by having a tightly focused web site that appeals to a narrowly defined target market.

Conversely, you will have less than optimum success by trying to appeal to a broader, not so specialised market. The idea that you might sell more products by offering a diverse range of material from your site does not work, for reasons given below.

Follow this rule: Have only one product, or one product family, per website.

If you want to sell more than one type of product, get a second web site to specialise in that second line. And a third web site if you have a third product line, and so on.

A one product web site is self-explanatory. Perhaps you have a book, a CD, a weight loss program, a pop star fanzine, or whatever. You set up a web site to sell that specific product to a highly specific target market. There are many web sites out there that illustrate this approach.

A product family is a closely related set of products or services on a single theme which appeals to a specific, narrowly defined target market. There should not be any material that does not relate to that specific on the site.

Example:

Let’s say you sell racing bikes. You could develop a web site to sell racing bikes and racing bike accessories online.

You could attract visitors by adding useful information about caring for racing bikes, caring for yourself as a racing cyclist, cycling competition news, tips and quotes, news items about competitions won by cyclists using exactly the same products that you sell, and so on.

All of the above would be highly relevant to racing cyclists. And a lot more interesting and visitor-attracting than simply having an online bike shop, don’t you agree?

You could probably add on (maybe by a third party supplier in return for a commission) a product line such as lightweight clothing designed especially for racing cyclists. Or a range of top quality racing cycle accessories.

These types of products would give you a product family website built on the single theme of racing bikes.

But you would not add mountain bikes – a totally different type of product that appeals to a totally different type of cyclist – to your site. Nor would you add kid’s bikes to your online range.

You would instead build a totally different web site for each of these product families, if you wanted to sell them.

Why? For several reasons:

1) Kid’s bikes (or any other type of bike) are not relevant to your main theme of racing bikes. People who want racing bike products and information are a highly specialised market. By focussing solely on their needs you can build a site that works exclusively for them by giving them what they want.

2) It affects your site’s search engine effectiveness. If every page of your site is about racing bikes and cycle racing, it will appear rich in relevant content to the search engines when people search on these topics. But if you water your site content down, even just by adding extra pages irrelevant to your main theme, your site ranking may be less than its potential best.

3) You confuse your visitors. They came looking for racing bike stuff. But now you’ve got them thinking about the kid’s Christmas or birthday presents. Better for them not to make any decisions… Oh, no! Now you’ve blown a sale by distracting your highly specialised potential customers with unrelated products, thoughts and ideas!

4) You look greedy. You want to get your hands on their kid’s Christmas and birthday money too! But if you’d just kept your focus on racing bike accessories to help them win their competitions, you’d stand to make as much (or more) money by showing them you have strictly their main interests – the interest in racing bikes that brought them to you site in the first place – at heart.

5) You have a better chance of attracting alliance partners or commission referral partners with a narrowly focussed site. Only when a potential partner can pinpoint what you are specialising in, can they make a decision about the likelihood of success in selling their own products via your site. Which means you have a better chance of making more money from the online arm of your business.

6) You have a better chance of people telling their friends about your site when it is narrowly focussed. Racing cyclists are much less likely to mention your site if it is just a general purpose online bike shop, than if it is a site with a special appeal to their main hobby interests or possibly their sporting career.

The above reasons should be enough to convince you that you must have only one product or product family per web site.

But to push the point further, consider a music site. It could sell CDs – any CDs – and try to compete with any big city music store. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for online success, does it?

Or it could specialise in folk music, or heavy metal, or classical music; or better, a specific subdivision within these areas of interest, such as Scottish folk music, Christian heavy metal, baroque classical music, medieval French ballads, and so on.

It’s obvious which type of site is likely to get more repeat visits and therefore repeat business, don’t you think?

So Rule #4 again is: Have only one product, or one product family, per web site.



Internet Marketing Strategy 4 Tightly Focus Your Site - To learn more about this author, visit Susan Regier's Website.

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