The Four Parts of Every Successful Web Site by Gihan Perera

Despite the overwhelming number of Internet tools and Web sites now available to consumers and businesses, the fundamentals of Internet marketing have remained the same.

Briefly, Internet marketing is still about getting more people to your site, persuading them to interact with you, and eventually persuading them to take action by "buying" from you. The purchase might be buying an actual product, registering for an event, or picking up the phone to call you.

There are four key stages...

Think of your Web site like an onion, with three layers.

1. Build a shop to take orders

The first, innermost, layer is your on-line "shop", where your site visitors take the ultimate action you'd like them to take: Buy a product, order something, register for an event, or even just pick up the phone and call you.

Every product and service you offer should have some call to action, and a process for your site visitor to take that action.

If you don't have a shop of some form, there's not much point to your Web site. On the flip side, if you only have a shop, it's very unlikely that anybody will buy without any other supporting material.

So the second step is...

2. Write sales letters and flyers

The second layer of the onion is to write a sales letter, brochure of flyer to promote each of the products and services you offer.

Each product and service you offer should have one of these sales letters, describing the benefits and features of that product or service.

This is an important step in building your Web site, because you're now promoting, not just taking orders, on your site. But this still isn't enough. A purely promotional Web site is most likely to turn people away, unless you have a strong relationship with them already.

So the third step is...

3. Write high-value content

The outermost layer of the onion is your free, high-value content you create to make your site attractive and useful to site visitors.

This can take the form of articles, video clips, photographs, audio clips, surveys, slide shows and the like. The point is that you're giving value, not just promoting your products and services.

You do promote as well, but only at the end of each content piece. For example, you could write an article with tips on how people can improve in your area of expertise, followed by a direct link to the sales letter you've written to a related product.

These three layers make up your Web site. But there's a fourth step as well...

4. Push your content out into the world

The final step is to take that high-value content and push it out into the world.

For example, you put your videos on YouTube, your audio clips into a podcast on iTunes, your articles into a blog and e-mail newsletter, your photographs onto Flickr, and so on.

Together, these four steps give you the broad framework for your entire on-line strategy. Here they are again in summary:

Build a shop, so you can take orders.
Write a sales letter for each offering, so you can persuade people to buy it.
Create free content - text, audio or video - to increase the value of your site.
Push that content out to other places on the Internet.

Review your site to check how well it does these four things, for each of your products or services.


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