The Diagram Explained - Closing the Golden Cycle with a Website
Using an effective website to close sales and gain a return on your investment
In "The Diagram Explained - The Golden Cycle" we look at the process whereby your resources are combined with an attraction process to draw people to your product so that an exchange takes place. In this section we are going to look at how we close that loop using a website.
To end up with a more valuable resource when the cycle is over you need to be as effective as possible in completing transactions with the attracted people. Whatever else you might be doing online you need to have at least a simple website. This website has to work and it has to close the cycle in a profitable way.
A website that works for making money online is a website that does something with the visitors you get. That might be sell them something, get their email address or sign them up for "site membership" but you need to convert the traffic into some form of action.
In this article for "how to make money" we will explore how to make make a website that is able to make you money. We will focus only on making sure the website is effective. Concerns such as fancy designs, getting traffic or even font type are not even worth considering until the site functions as it was meant to.
You need to know what you are doing
More precisely you need to know what you want your visitor to do. That might be click and advert, sign up for a product, join your mailing list or buy your ebook. Whatever it is you want from your visitors you need to provide them with a few things
- A reason to give you what you want
- An easy way to give you what you want
- Clear instructions explicitly saying what you want
- Confirmation that you have what you want and they can now have what they want
Making money is not rocket science
While it might not be the most simple thing in the world making money is not complex even if we like to make it seem so sometimes. Making money with a website is even less complex because a large number of variables are removed and you have one of the richest opportunities to add clues to the research cycle.
If you have not read "Make Money by Getting and Keeping Attention" yet then you might want to do so before you carry on. The reason being is that making money with a website requires that you put the article's simple lesson into action. You need to engage the attention of website visitors up to and past the point where they give you what you want from them.
As is examined in "How to Make Money With Content" the best way to engage your visitors is to give them something to engage with. That means frankly bothering to write something that other people are going to bother to read. It's called content and it is what makes your site better than any other site.
But content alone is not good enough. It must be focused and it must be going somewhere (the checkout ideally) and leading the visitor with it. The more simply you can present the message of what you want and what is in it for the visitor the more likely you are to close the cycle and make that sale.
Remember you are looking to end up with a greater value of resource that when you started. The better the increase the better the next cycle can be. The product and exchange is the bottleneck in the cycle where the greatest amount of potential is lost.
Remove obstacles
Anything on your website (for example "click here to enter") that stands between the visitor and their ability to respond to "click here to complete the transaction" is bad. It does not mater how much you paid for the animation, sound file, flash interactive movie or whatever else you put on your website - if it blocks sales it is bad.
That's why the best place for adverts is at the top before the content. It is why doorway pages and content-less landing pages are for losers. It is also why anything that confuses or is surplus to the aims of the site must go.
Keep the mark-up clean and the content focused and then you are ready to try and draw people in with an attraction process. If you bring them to a building site they will not thank you but if you introduce them to a completed super store they will happily reach for the credit card (assuming you have stock on t e shelves and that stock is interesting).
The system that powers this site is fantastically simple and towards the end of June 2008 it will be available from clue42.com. It is a "need to know no HTML at all" design and works smoothly. However, understanding HTML is good because it helps with the understanding of things like SEO that you will come to after the site as a sales system is ready to run.
Pick a platform that gets out of your way
Whatever system you choose to use to make your website it must be a something that does not get in the way. The more time you spend tweaking your back end the less time you have to carry out things that earn you money. This means that if you are fixing some small part of your site then it is costing you money.
That's why the clue42 system was created because it allows one to focus on the content and not on the process of delivering the content. There are many other systems your only aim is to find one that meets your needs as quietly as possible so that you can meet the needs of your potential customers with your product.
Go make some money.