The Number One Thing Your Website Needs and It’s not What You Think

I have a confession to make. I’ve made some mistakes over the past couple of years with a few of my clients.

This is what would happen. Every now and then a client would hire me to write copy for their Web site. I would do so. A few months later, they’d contact me.

The site isn’t working. We haven’t gotten any sales or leads from it, they’d say.

I’d get on the phone with them and we’d talk about it. And invariably, I would hit upon the problem.

Traffic. Or, more specifically, lack of traffic. (Traffic is defined as visitors coming to your site.)

Now, I KNOW how to drive traffic to a Web site. However, even though I would tell these clients exactly what they needed to do to drive traffic to their site, they wouldn’t do it. Either they didn’t have the time or they didn’t have the money to pay someone or (more likely) both.

I would end up walking away from those encounters feeling like I did a disservice to the clients.

What I should have done (and what I do now) is make sure my copywriting clients have a marketing strategy in place to drive traffic to their site BEFORE I start working on copy.

Copy or traffic. It’s the whole chicken and the egg thing. You need strong copy (the words) on your Web site to convert people - get your prospects to purchase your products or services or even give you their email address. And if you have weak copy, that isn’t going to happen.

However, if you have little to no traffic going to your site, then it doesn’t matter how persuasive the copy is, you still aren’t going to make a lot of money from your site.

(A caveat here, if you have other things in place, such as strong joint venture partners or a very responsive list of people who subscribe to your newsletter, you can make money with little traffic coming to your site from the Internet. But just imagine how much MORE money you could be making if you also had good Web traffic?)

So, after not only being in my business myself but watching my clients’ businesses over the years, I’ve decided that for most people, the best place to start is NOT by rewriting the Web site with strong direct response copy but by putting a plan together to make sure there’s traffic going to that site.

(Bet you didn’t think I was going to say that, did you? After all, I AM a direct response copywriter so you’d think I’d put copy over everything. Alas, if it was only that easy. The best direct response copy in the world won’t do you a lick of good if you aren’t getting eyeballs to look at it.)

So why did I pick traffic over copy? Here’s why:

If you have no traffic to your site, and we redo your site so it converts, there’s no way to fully test and tweak what we’ve done. Depending on your traffic, we could be waiting months before enough people have visited to know if your site does or does not convert. Then, if we have to do more tweaking, we’re stuck waiting months again to test those tweaks.

Now, compare that scenario to this one. You have a lot of traffic coming to your site. Your site isn’t converting, but that’s okay because we can put up new copy and design and know in as little as a week or two if it’s working or not. Still isn’t working? We’ll do some more tweaks and wait another week or two. Before long, you have site that’s making you money effortlessly.

The other reason why I like to focus on traffic is this: Let’s say you have a site that DOES convert, even though you don’t have much traffic. We increase the traffic and your business grows. It’s that easy.

So, if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur whose Web site isn’t doing as well as they would like, I’d suggest the first thing you do is sit down and put together a marketing plan to drive traffic to your site.

Make sure you tune in next time where I’ll discuss the basics of putting together a marketing strategy to drive tons of warm traffic and leads to your site.