Tech Boost: How To Increase Website Traffic
By Roberto Motta.
As a business owner you might be aware that in order to have a successful business you have to choose the right set of processes that will create a product, a product that the company will receive its income from, it can be an answer that someone is looking for in a corporation or a hot dog in a very busy street downtown.
All this processes can be improved in several ways to create a better outcome. Improving the final product, things like delivery time, better presentation or even a smile on a customer’s face, make a huge difference. Human, by nature, want to do their best in whatever the challenge they undertake. But there is a moment where creativity gets blocked by outer factors preventing you from solidifying an idea. Have you ever been working on a project focusing and telling yourself “I need to work, I need to focus, let’s do this!” for like three hours? Well this roadblock happens way more often than you think; this is when a web solution comes in handy for a business.
Every Company has always had the curse of having issues with manipulating information; therefore, they have always looked for better ways to organize information that they have collected, like receipts, bills, pending accounts, customers, etc. It is as simple as “the faster you access the information the more efficient the process is”. Many systems that have been proved efficient in the past are now obsolete. A web application will erase these unconfortable situations and will store your data so that you can look at it later in an organized way, allowing you to track where the posible money losses in your business are.
Another thing that businesses have always been after is different and original ways of advertising their product to the public. Not so long ago people would use media like T.V, radio, newspapers and other methods of transmitting information to the customer; these methods are still useful, don’t get me wrong, but have you noticed that everywhere you go, someone is staring at a Smartphone? People are hooked on this devices now because let’s be honest here, this is an era where if you need any kind of information you will look down into a device of this nature and I don’t blame you!
So what do you say if we combine the administration of information, the company image and the P.R all in one single app that the customer can see and that you can administrate? Applying this techniques will provide the customer a way to know that you’re proud of showing up who you are, what you do and what you sell, giving you more credibility. I personally like to shop in a place where I can see that the product I’m buying was created by smoking Swedish girls and not Chinese slaves working in a factory. Now that you have a way to display all the information, you want to go crazy and make some money!
Everyone would like to have a physical store where the customer could come in, just take their products and just pay at the cash register. Fortunately you can create the same feeling by selling your product online and giving the customer the right amount of information (purchase and shipping). Sites like Amazon or EBay have mastered the art of selling online, developing a massive empire that is now worldwide known as the place to shop anything you can’t find in the store near you. With this functionality in your site you save nearly two active job positions. A very delicate thing with online selling is the relationship you immediately create with the customer. You have to treat them as if they were physically there, remember whether they are or not, they are still customers.
Making the site interactive can help you collect information about your online visitors, that way you can practice some target marketing that will increase your sales and customer/provider relationship. The information that you get, let’s say a contact form that the customer has to fill up with different information, will help you determine who you are actually dealing with. All of this information collected has to be displayed somehow for you to play with it and see what’s going on.
“All right I have a website, now what?”
Now you’re ready to hit the social networks, just by having a web app you are already increasing the reach of more potential customers. Different ways of spreading the voice like; word of mouth and social networking. If you own a small business and want to start selling, you need go back to basics and start persuading the customer to buy your product, start with the people around you telling them how amazing your product is, eventually they will spread the word and increase your reach. Once you have a small market you can step it up and start using the social networks to make this small community visible to others that have got the same interest.
After your website is completely functional and you have the social networks bombarding people to visit your site, you will eventually start generating traffic to your website and within that traffic there’s a source of traceable information that web developers can now make happen thanks to technologies such as Google analytics. This provides you more accurate information of what the customer does on your site, which places they are clicking on, which places they spend more time on, you figure out which is the information you have on display.
You’ve seen that throughout this article I have not referred to websites as “websites” but as “web applications”, the reason I refer to them a little different is because you actually use your website to execute business processes, generate reports, statistics, display information, and many other actions that make your website a web app.
Forget about looking at a website just as an online business card or a brochure, but as the key to major sells and company branding.
About the author: Roberto Motta is web developer/graphic designer and a Martial Arts athlete. He leads expeditions to the mountain in Honduras. Follow him on Twitter @RobmottaV
