How Many "Artists" Do You Know?

How Many of Them Are Good At Making Money?

I rest my case.

  Don't get me wrong - artistic design can be a good thing - but chances are your present website, if you have one, has design problems that are hurting its money-making results.

  If you are considering having a custom website made for your business this, right now, is important information which can save you thousands of wasted dollars invested in a website which won't make you money.

WebSite Design

  I take an interest in the esthetics of web-design, but from the viewpoint of a direct-response marketer, not a maker of pretty websites.

  A lot of website designers do beautiful work, but they don't know squat about how to sell stuff - typically we  see confusing,  hard-to-discern navigation menus, excessive eye-candy, and worst of all, too many choices for your visitor.

  A good-looking site can be a useful thing. It can help you make sales if it is done right. A site  designed only to look cool, to boost the designer's ego and portfolio, will usually suck at making you money.

Do You Want Bragging Rights To A Fancy Website or A Website That Actually Makes You Money?

  Many brick-and-mortar businesses have websites which are essentially worthless as marketing tools.  Here's why:

  A beautiful, over-designed site may give you bragging rights, like:

"We spent over $15,000 on our website, we are quite pleased and people are very impressed."

  or,

"We were lucky to get our designer. Did you know he worked on a site for Disney?"

  An image-heavy site may build a mystique around your company and impress your friends and colleagues.  But unless it emphatically steers visitors through a process, like rats in a maze with only one way out, it will under-perform and  not bring in the business.

  Unfortunately eye-popping graphics and elegant design alone don't bring in buyers. They may set a mood, but even if the mood is wrong it can harm buyer response. There is a lot to it. Few designers will have any knowledge whatsoever of the psychology of direct-response marketing - because designing to sell products is generally looked-down upon by artists, it's not something they tend to study with much diligence.

  With websites beauty IS only skin deep - it is the substance of your communication which will convert browsers into buyers. Graphic design and visual appeal is an integral and important part of direct-response web-marketing.... but only a part, and when the other parts are neglected in favor of design whimsy, unprofitable and often-costly websites are the result.

  I do in fact handle web design. It's an interest of mine - but more than I am interested in pretty websites I am interested in the elements and factors that increase response, user comprehension, and sales. 

  I am particularly interested in the proven design-for-maximum-sales techniques used on cereal boxes, tabloid magazines, and comic books. Not what you would call "high art", but it's a living.   I have personally made a lot of money with some websites that are very ugly - other marketing-pros agree;  what works to sell products is often counter-intuitive to artistically-minded people.

  I can work with your designer, though he or she may not like what I have to say - which is why I recommend you allow me to handle the design-aspect of your website - because I can get an artist to do the graphics and things, but when I handle the artist as a strategist it is a far better arrangement than having the artist trying to call the shots.

  I write from experience because I have artistic talents myself and appreciate artistic people a great deal... and also understand first-hand how resistant, irrational,  and difficult they can be to work with when the objective is not to make pretty pictures, but to sell stuff.

 Bottom-line advice:  Get a web-salesman helming the design for your website.  Save the fine art for the wall.

Template Web-design

  Templates are fine and can be highly-effective for most business websites.  There are all kinds of reasons to invest in a sophisticated custom-designed site but if just making money, getting leads, the simple endeavors of building a business is your goal, chances are a template-based website will be just fine.

  "Branding" your business with an elaborate website is over-rated as a marketing strategy.  Really.  I'm not saying your website shouldn't look good, just that for most businesses it's one component above all others which will inspire visitors to become customers....

  ...Your OFFER!

  As un-techno-geeky as it may of me to say so  the truth is the words on your site will do the lion's share of the real work of converting browsers into buyers.  Today we can use video on websites as easily as text, but it is still the content of the message that gets action.

  Again, I want to remind you, I personally have made surprising amounts of money with embarrassingly-ugly websites.  I don't have those sites anymore, because my skills improved and the market for what I was selling with them changed - but beyond a doubt I learned  it is communication of value that matters most in producing sales.

  We can now work with an astounding variety of templates today - some of the ones I prefer for money-making sites are shown below - and they can be modified fairly easily just as the site you are looking at right now is a template site which follows conventions web-visitors are accustomed to seeing:

 - navigation menu on the left where we are used to seeing it

 - a header that tells what the site is about, and in this case makes a "cereal box" type offer every visitor cannot ignore.

 - Layout that mimics a printed page - longer than it is wide, with a hierarchical structure of written content, kind of like a newspaper article. Also it has a right-hand column with testimonials.

  This is a familiar layout to web-visitors.  Nobody will gasp at how original the site is...the objective  is not to impress with it's beauty or originality, it is to communicate a sales message.  These templates, as familiar-looking as they are, are ideal for selling your products and services.

  An added bonus is they are inexpensive and not difficult to set-up.  No re-invention of the wheel is necessary with each new site - and within some restrictions templates can be changed easily, new graphics can be added and so forth.

The Hidden Truth About Search Engine Optimization: How Doing It Can Help Your Traffic, and Harm Your Sales

  In terms of search-engine traffic these websites are "optimized" so the search engine gets to find quickly the information it wants: the written content of the site.  While animated "flash-heavy" websites are nice to look at, the written content in many sections of flash sites is not even readable to the search-engine programs. 

  Here's a great example:  I use audio and video content a lot... but I don't expect the search engine programs to watch my videos or listen to my audios nor give me any credit for having them on my site. 

  Search engines can "read" only content in non-graphics format - which is why flash websites often do poorly in terms of search engine rankings.  This is changing and eventually search engines will be able to "watch" your video content and "listen" to audio recordings and transcribe the content so searchers can find it, but for now let's make it easy for everyone by sticking with text, shall we?

  SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to get traffic to your website.  It can be effective.  It can help you establish some credibility in your "niche market".  In general however, SEO is over-sold to the public as a magic-bullet for internet wealth.

  SEO anything but a magic bullet. 

  In fact, SEO is a lot of work to do in competitive niches... and if you optimize your site only to get top rankings you may get more traffic... but make less sales.

  Here's why: what the search engines like to see in order to rank your site highly runs in fairly direct opposition to how your site needs to be WRITTEN in order to elicit a buying response from your visitors.

Just A Few Samples (You can select from 1000s of available templates, and change the graphics to suit - so you can see that putting-together a nice-looking site is no big deal these days - it's your message that really counts)

Dynamic Websites and Content Management Systems

  These templates above are for "static sites" - meaning sites that aren't expected to need frequent updating. Static sites are quick to set-up, are not vulnerable to hacking, and choosing and modifying templates is fairly straightforward.

  You may have heard others singing high-praises for WordPress, Joomla and other "dynamic content management systems" - and while they have definite benefits they also have weaknesses and drawbacks. Among these I work with WordPress and Drupal.

  The major advantage of going with a CMS or dynamic site is you can log-in and add or edit content with no coding knowledge whatsoever. The drawback is this "login" feature also makes the sites vulnerable to security problems... hacking.

  Hacking issues shouldn't scare you away from using a dynamic site for your blog or even your main website - they really have a lot of advantages.

  There are 1000s of templates (called "themes") available for Wordpress and other CMS systems. Where it gets hairy is if you want to change the appearance of the site in any way not allowed in the "control panel" for the theme - then you get into extremely involved coding procedures which require a fairly involved knowledge of CSS (cascading style scripts).

Thoughts on Direct Response Websites

  I'm primarily a writer and developer of marketing SYSTEMS - I'll use whatever tools I feel are appropriate to achieve my goals. You can learn how to edit your website with either a static HTML system or a dynamic CMS system - it's not too hard with either type of system on the most basic level;  where it gets crazy is when you implement additions to these sorts of basic sites.

  Add-ons, Javascripts, Plugins - all terms for little programs that  cause a website to do cool stuff, often things the visitor can interact with.  

  I would steer you clear of getting involved with implementing these additions if it weren't for one thing:  some of them can boost response like crazy!

  Because people are getting used to a "rich" web  browsing experience your plain-jane website may not stick out and get attention.  While it's a good idea to be as simple as possible, you still need to adapt to the changing, evolving marketplace - and adding gadgets to your website can help.

  You can do this all yourself up until you realize you have no interest or aptitude in doing it yourself.  Same thing with writing, actually.   While this site is all about getting clients for my services I must make one glaring admission:  I just put in the time to learn to do the stuff I do - and the only factor preventing you from becoming  a masterful web-marketer with lots of technical skills yourself is your commitment to investing time in training yourself to do it.

  On the other hand, you may have a business which needs an effective web-presence, but you simply don't have the inclination to prioritize your time to do it yourself:  education, research, testing... all that stuff.

  In a nutshell, when you hire people like me to work on your business for you you're investing in giving yourself more time to work on the things you are already good at.