Are You Profiting From Your Whole Website?
by: Douglas Titchmarsh
You have a sales page or pages, opt-in pages, and thank you pages on your website, as well as any articles and news on there. You have made sure there are links to your subscribe forms on all the pages, so you have just about covered your whole site right?
Not quite, ignoring the fact that you probably have tons of spare webspace left unused, there are more places to make profits on your exisiting pages right now. We're not just talking selling banner impressions or placing Adsense either. The unused, lost profit sections of your website are making those people who know about them a whole heap of extra profits, so where are these places?
We can start straight away with your thankyou pages. Each time a visitor gets to one of these, it means they have placed some trust in you. They have taken on board your advice, and signed up or bought something from you. So while your new customer or subscriber is in this trusting mood, offer them something else. An upsell, a complimentary product, or a free gift for subscribing to another of your lists. Whatever you do, make the most of this chance to make a little extra from someone who knows you offer good advice, but don't insult them with any old offer, or you lose the trust again instantly.
Another place for increasing your profits by using dead webspace is your error pages. You know, those ones which tell your visitor the page can not be displayed, go somewhere else. Instead of that, you can customise these pages, and make an offer to the people who see the page instead of losing them. Don't just send them back to your home page or sales page either, offer a compelling, super bargain on your error page, and capture a customer immediately.
Want to see how much potential just one of your error pages has?
Just look at your stats for your website, and you may be surprised how many people are seeing just the 404 error page, the one that usually says.
"Page cannot be found, this page may have been deleted or moved" or some variation of that message. I checked, and in August 2006, on just one of my sites, that page was seen over 4000 times!
When you started your website, you would have sold your soul for 4000 hits to a single page right?
I know I would, and when I saw this huge waste of potential, I did something about it. It's not even difficult if you can build a webpage.
All you need to do is login to your control panel, (this is for cpanel based webhosts but others may be similar) and click the "Custom Error Pages" icon. Now choose to edit the 404 error page, and replace the message with your own offer instead. Save the file, and go and check your sites new error page by typing in a url you know doesn't exist.
Now you have a brand new page pulling in potential sales without any extra work. We don't suggest you do this to all the error pages, as some can be used to help debug scripts which aren't working, but there's nothing to stop you from looking around your site for other places you aren't using to maximise your profits from your website.
About The Author
Douglas Titchmarsh writes about Internet Marketing on his weekly newsletter at
http://www.cashinonline.info/blogAnd recommends 404 Secrets to finally discover how to bring your dead web-real-estate to life.
http://www.cashinonline.info/recommends/404.php
