I recently blogged about how having Adsense or other affiliate advertising on a business site can lead to reduced sales – see Adsense Kills Business.
One of the people who visited mentioned that they wanted ‘to get something from the people who came’ and didn’t buy. This got me to thinking about the many sites I’ve seen where they have quality content that is well-written and informative, but fails to do it’s job.
Along the way to building and growing their sites, they learned that content is king. Their sites have a nice variety of informational and well-written articles relating to their product or service. However, the only ads on their content pages are for other sites or they have no advertising at all.
Let me say that again, the only ads on their content pages are for other sites. There are no words, images, or ads that tell a visitor that hits that page from a search engine that they are on a site that sells a product or service.
Let me explain this a bit. Let’s talk examples; we’ll create and call a fictitious site Today’s Widgets. On Today’s Widgets homepage there’s a great introduction to the website and it is made quite clear that Widgets are being sold from this website. There’s an About Us page, Contact and even a FAQ page. The website has a nice number of articles all about Widgets – their history, how they are made, how they can be used, etc. Each of the article pages may or may not have Adsense, Amazon, or any of the affiliate sales programs’ advertising on them.
Where’s the missed opportunity? On every one of those articles! Well-written articles will often rank better on the search engines for their keywords than the same website’s homepage will. That means those articles will frequently be the entry point for first time visitors to your website. Is it clear to those first-time visitors that Todays’s Widgets is simply an informational site about Widgets, or are visitors presented with some sort of image or promotional text that clearly indicates Today’s Widgets actually sells Widgets?
Does having a menu with Home, About Us, FAQ, and Contact Us get the point across that this is a sales site? Not really. Think about how those pages are often used…About Us = why we are qualified to talk about this topic; FAQ = frequently asked questions about the topic of the site; and Contact Us = let us know what comments and suggestions you have about our site. Those menu items alone fail to convey to the first time visitor that the site is anything more than informational.
A lot of explanation to get to the point, but here goes…When creating a sales website, make sure that every page has an advertisement for your own product or service and one or more of your menu items clearly identifies that you are selling something.
Otherwise, all that content simply turns you and your website into a King of Missed Opportunities.
Thank you to everyone who found this article interesting and voted for it on Digg.
It’s so very tempting; selling advertising or using programs like Adsense, TextLinkAds, or any of the many others to boost revenue. Sure those pennies, nickels, and dimes add up over time and may even bring in a somewhat sustainable income. If you work at
Good point.
But a lot of web sites are there ONLY to make money from adsense OR they would exist anyway and merely use adsense as a way to help pay the hosting fees.
Thanks again for a fresh look at this subject.
You’re welcome Russ.
You do bring up a good point that many sites are designed for Adsense or use Adsense and the other revenue programs to fund the site. Both are valid monetization strategies and the site owner generates all or most of their income from those clicks.
It’s such a shame when people work so hard to write useful content to support their business and make such a simple mistake as forgetting to mention their business on those informational pages. It’s an easy mistake to make and fortunately just as easy to fix.
Great post – I have to admit while I was reading, I was thinking to myself, “Uh oh… Am I guilty of this? Am I doing enough to sell and promote my own business? Am I missing out on fantastic opportunities?”
Now I’ll have to take a close look at my own content again! 🙂
This is obvious ! I am starting to think that the retardization of the human specie is unstoppable. What kind of people need an advice like this ? How can you invest a lot of time and money in writing quality articles and then forgetting to emphasize the selling page in some way ?!
This is like saying: if you want to walk then you need to push your legs in front of you one leg at a time. However, you should not push the leg to far away because you may loose your balance.
Actually, I don’t remember seeing any sites like the ones that you described in your article. Perhaps you should provide some links to prove that there are webmasters needing advices such as these, otherwise people might think that the ultra-stupid webmaster is just a myth.
Regards,
Razvan
Razvan: You might be interested in spending energy towards improving your own website and professional image instead of wasting it on name-calling, condescending language and insulting other people’s intelligence. What a wonderful business image you’re portraying (not, in case you missed the sarcasm).
I also think you completely missed the point of the article as well. It wasn’t saying people don’t emphasize their sales page (as you so quickly assumed) – it was saying there are far more opportunities to promote sales on a website than we realize.
However, promoting sales starts with a professional attitude. You may want to go looking for yours…
Unfortunately there are sites that are doing this. I am not putting links to their sites as I feel they have enough problems without someone pointing them out to the world as an example of what not to do. I wrote to the site owner that truly inspired this article and we have talked a bit about their site and ways it could be improved. This blog is about helping small businesses learn about marketing and using the web – not destroying those who most need that help.
This article and several of the others I have written and that have done well on Digg are somewhat of Marketing 101 topics. There are many business people that do a wonderful job of running their business, but are not good at marketing or how to make their websites really work for them.
Those of us who have been in the field for a long time and see this as old news forget that we didn’t always know as much as we do today. Not knowing how to market yourself on the Internet does not mean they don’t know their business, it just means they don’t know ours.
The only thing good on ur site are the google ads
It’s too bad you feel that way. I can only guess that your comment is based on the concept that you think this topic and the others (assuming you went further than this post) are too low-level for you.
While there are many who feel as you do, you might consider that you did not always know as much as you do today and learned either by doing or through someone else sharing their knowledge.
Your title is well conceived. Like all bloggers, we heard the mantra “content is king�. But we realized it was not instructive. For one thing, content is left undefined and there was no mention of PRESENTATION.
HOW the content is presented is as important as the content itself—whether you call it your voice, your style or your personality, it’s essential.
MetaTags
Title Name
URL Name
Content
All must be related in order to achieve well in search engines
a webmaster