Planning Your Web Site is the First Step to Developing a Successful Web Site

Knowing your purpose, audience, and uniqueness are the first steps to developing a profitable web site. Most businesses fail to plan for online success. Follow these three steps to position your web site for Internet profits.

Step 1: Determine Your Purpose

The first step in planning a web site is to determine what you want to accomplish. Do you want to sell products and services, find new customers, establish credibility, or improve customer service?

The purpose of your web site will influence its content and design. Depending on your goal, you may want to provide articles to establish trust, provide a compelling sales letter, a catalog, product information, a secure online order form, and a shopping cart.

Step 2: Define Your Ideal Customers, Their Needs and Concerns

Many web sites are trying to attract everybody. Don't make this mistake. Your web site will be more profitable if you focus on the ideal prospects that are most likely to buy your products or services.

Target your web site's content and design directly to your ideal customers. Attract your target audience with a benefit-oriented headline. Tell right away what your web site is about and what's in it for them. If they don't read further, they were not prospects.

Make your text large for seniors. Use a conservative design for accountants. Make your design colorful for children. Avoid movies, sounds, and Flash animations if your clients have slow computers and Internet connections.

You can dramatically increase your web profits by focusing on your customers, providing information they want, and solving some of their problems.

Step 3: Demonstrate Your Uniqueness

To be successful with your web site, you must stand out from your competition.

The competition is tremendous on the Internet. How many web sites are you competing with? How do you make your site stand out from those other web sites? And more importantly, how can you get your prospects to buy from you instead of one of your competitors?

You do that by emphasizing how you're different and better. Marketers call it "USP" or "Unique Selling Proposition."

Instead of copying everyone else, separate yourself from your competition and develop a web site that distinguishes you from all the others. Focus on what makes you unique; attract your audience with a benefit that is different from everyone else's; and provide a distinct advantage or offer.

But first, determine what makes your business unique. After determining what's unique about your products and services, you can emphasize this uniqueness on your web site and set yourself apart from your competition.

Give your prospects a reason to buy from you instead of a competitor's web site. Study your competition and then be different, look different, and give them benefits the others don't.

Plan your web site for profits. Determine what you want to accomplish with your web site, who your ideal audience is, and what makes your online business unique. Only after implementing these steps are you ready to start developing your web content.