Content, the King of Missed Opportunities

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.

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