The Official Internet Marketing Sweetie Blog

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

New Website Phobia

For a long time in my networking groups, I saw what I like to call "new website phobia". This phobia inflicts people who are fearful of starting a new website for a variety of reasons:

  • Because they think it costs too much
  • Because they think its too much work
  • Because they think they already have a website, so they don't need another

No, I'm not talking about setting up a website for dog lovers, another for bird watchers, another for golf and yet another for homeopathic remedies. You can certainly do that, but I'm just talking about building websites in your chosen target market for specific purposes. Whether it's for list-building, providing specific information to your target market or selling your information product.

If you want to have one website do all your jobs for you: traffic generation, sell a product, relationship-building, list-building and so forth - you have some extremely hard work ahead of you.

If you've surfed around my sites (come on, I know you're spying on me, just a little bit!), you'll see I have all kinds of websites. This site is a relationship builder, other sites sell products, others collect email addresses and so forth. The result has been building more relationships, selling more products and rapidly expanding my email database.

Like I said, for a long time, I saw people fearful of starting new websites...but that is changing. Just yesterday, I emailed a fellow online business owner who offers transcription services on the side. I wrote to her and said, "Do you have a website that outlines your services, so I can recommend you in my upcoming course?"

Well, she responded and said she didn't have anything, but she quickly purchased the domain and the site will be up tomorrow. She doesn't have to make it complicated. She just needs a simple page that outlines why people need her services, what she offers and a way to order. That's it! I'm sending her the targeted traffic and she can also use this domain for others to send recommendations her way.

If you stick with one website, all your information and products will inevitably get buried in the clutter. Present a clear and focused marketing message with your websites and your marketing will improve greatly.

As far as it costing too much. No way! You can grab cheap domains just about anywhere (I resell them here). You can also get web hosting for as little as $15 per year, so there's no more excuses. The new purposeful website you create will net you way more than it costs to get them set up.

So, challenge yourself this week. Create a website that just promotes your newsletter. Or create a website that sells just one of your products. Then send traffic to it and see the results!


6 Comments:

Blogger ZedPro said...

Hey Alice - I think you hit the nail on the head here. But my question is - setting up the new site - how to get traffic to it - SEO or adwords - or ???
Give us your thoughts.

Of course JV would be the absolute best!
Thanks

4:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

O wow, Alice. I never knew others were like me. In my case, it would be pure laziness instead of a phobia ;o). I actually specialize in fitting everything I can in one domain :o). The thought of having to backup data for different domains and remembering different logins and checking different stats and juggling 5 pre-teens just overwhelms me. How do you handle it?

7:58 PM  
Blogger Alice said...

Thanks for the feedback and questions.

For traffic, if you are concentrating on one market, your network of sites generates a lot of the traffic for you. Your content sites will generate search engine traffic and word of mouth - and they will feed out to your opt-in pages and sales pages, etc. Affilates can feed to your opt-in pages (if it's too sell a product) and sales pages.

Of course, you can use PPCs for sales pages and opt-in pages and you can quickly build a customer and mailing list that way. Me...I'm just a bit too lazy to set up proper PPC campaigns, so I only spend a couple hundred dollars per month on PPC. That is a tiny fraction of the traffic I get each month.

Bina, I used to worry about the stats thing too, but I'll tell you I was worried about the WRONG stats. Yes, I still log into my cpanel and check my visitor stats to see where I can make improvements, which keyword phrases are doing well, etc....but those are not my most important stats.

My most important stats are:
- My product sales
- My affiliate sales
- My testing data
- My Adsense income

....and I can easily see those from email notifications or logging into the appropriate accounts. Cpanel doesn't offer me that kind of info!

9:11 PM  
Blogger Angela said...

Thank you for this Alice! Lots of great info in your blog always!

I kinda have my sites all over the place.. and about some different topics. But I think my newest task is going to be to get a site just for an opt-in offer to see if I can get it to grow my list :)

9:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh my goodness, Alice ~ I think that's a hurdle for alot of us. I only just recently stepped away from my main site to start developing some niches. Not comfortable with a full blown site...somehow it's been easier setting up blogs that search engines like but I'm still working through your Affiliate Marketing Sweetie program but it motivated me to follow your lead! Great post. Tammy

3:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Alice,

Many people are terrified of building their website when that is not even the beginning.

It all comes down to taking the steps to build brand loyalty. e-zines, articles, viral reports, ppc, newsletters, email campaigns.

I love what your teaching and hope you create many successfull infopreneurs.

1:58 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home