A little bit on driving, providing and converting

I recently spoke at the Southampton Chamber of Commerce April networking lunch on the importance of driving, providing and converting high quality website traffic for local businesses.

Now, my original talk was to a room full of businesspeople eager to get away after a delicious lunch and back to their desks, so for the purpose of this blog post, I will lose the awful jokes I included to hold their attention and stick to the key facts – namely, why these three areas are so important and how you can best take advantage of them.

Drive high quality traffic to your website.

Driving relevant, interested visitors to your website is at the very core of all online marketing. If no-one visits your website, it can be the most beautiful, functional website in the world but it will never be successful. The more relevant and interested your website visitors are, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Great ways to drive such traffic to your website are: Search Engine Optimisation, Pay-Per-Click advertising or Digital PR.

Provide relevant, useful content to your website visitors

It’s no use driving traffic to your website if when they arrive at your site, the content they find is irrelevant, incorrect or worse still, not present. The provision of great content will keep your visitors coming back again and again for more.

Using a Content Management System (CMS) allows you to easily update your website and create new content every single day, ensuring you provide informative, up-to-date information for your site visitors.

Convert website visitors into sales

Now that you have driven visitors to your website and provided great content, all that remains is to convert them into sales. Do this by making your website as usable as possible, and be sure to follow-up their visit with emails and information about your latest products and services that they might be interested in (provided that they have opted-in to this!).

Posted April 29th, 2010