The best website is a profitable one. Or at least a website that meets your objectives. Do you have a profitable website?
A website can be profitable because you earn money directly from it via a web shop. How much does your website generate in direct financial income?
If you use your website to promote your offline services, the website stimulates your turnover for those services. How much does your website generate indirectly?
Maybe your website is not for profit. But your goal is to inform as many visitors as possible free of charge. Does your website meet your educational objectives?
You can only determine whether you have a profitable website if you set clear objectives in advance. Have you specified the purpose of your website?
You specify the objectives of your website in an Internet Project Plan. What is the purpose of your website? When do you consider your website to be a success? Can you quantify that?
An unquantified goal is "the website is a success if it attracts many visitors". Quantified (and therefore measurable) "the website is a success if there are 100 new visitors to the website every day who view more than 4 pages".
With an Internet Project Plan you make clear what your website strategy is, how you implement it and make it measurable. It is a kind of marketing and communication plan for your website.
The goal of an Internet Project Plan is to:
With an Internet Project Plan you make the purpose of your website concrete and its success (e.g. profitability) measurable.
With a profitable website, the conversion of potential customers to actual customers is optimised. In marketing this is referred to as sales funnel. A funnel is an imaginary funnel that describes the conversion process from visitor to customer. How is the conversion of a large number of potential visitors to a number of actual buyers done?
You want to motivate the visitors of your website to take a certain action. You want them to make a purchase in your webshop. Or you want them to contact you. Encouraging your visitor to behave in a certain way is called call-to-action in marketing.
Successful profitable websites make optimal use of call-to-actions. You can recognise CTAs by buttons and texts such as "Order now", "Read more" or "Contact us".
Use CTA's on your own website to motivate your visitor to do what you want to do and thus achieve the objectives of your website.
If you have a physical shop you can increase your turnover by offering your products online. Some customers of your physical shop will buy their products at your online shop. If the online revenues are greater than any decrease in turnover of the physical shop, then the online shop may be profitable.
From your sales you can deduce fairly quickly whether you have a profitable website.
At a web shop you can immediately see what the revenues are. If your goal is to attract more customers via your website, it is less immediately visible what these new customers will bring you.
The costs of a website consist of several elements:
Profit is the result of your revenues minus your costs. Regularly evaluate whether your objectives (in Internet Project Plan) are still in line with reality. And analyse the extent to which you are achieving your objectives. Remove the costs from your website. With a positive result you will have a profitable website.
Do you have a profitable website?
* according to Peter Martin
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