How To Research Your Next Possible Website

Take a look at the image below:

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Website Research

As an online marketer, your objectives should ALWAYS be the first thing you should consider when planning your next website.  Your websites are, after all, your storefronts.  If you were to have a bricks-and-mortar store, you would want it not only to look good, but you’d want it in the right location; that is, where potential buyers are.

Web Traffic

Get traffic (potential customers/visitors) to your site is, of course, critical when building your site, but it’s not nearly as critical as get THE RIGHT visitors.  Just getting a flood of visitors isn’t any good if you don’t offer them the solutions they want when they arrive at your site.  So, doing research FIRST is the most important thing you can do when planning your site.  Making it look good is secondary (but still very important).

Website Planning

As you can see from the image above, it all starts with your OBJECTIVES.  If your objective is simply to get a mailing list together, then your site is going to be very different from the Wikipedia site.  So, firstly, you need to plan what TYPE of site you will need.

The four basic types are: Sales Letter, Squeeze Page, Mini-Site, Content Site.

Keyword Research

Then you MUST do your keyword research.  This can be as simple as going to Google’s Adwords Keyword tool and typing in the seed word that you THINK will be what people will search for.  You’ll then be given a list of words to use.

Other Research You Should Do

Finally, you have a choice of various types of research you can do.  Some should DEFINITELY be done, and others are optional, but this will depend upon the type of site you’ve chosen to use.

The optional research subjects are: Qualitative, Traffic, Customer and Competitive.

I’ll talk more about these in my post on Wednesday.

Luke.