How To Create Websites That Sell

Welcome To My Website! That’s what all the websites used to say when the Internet first got started. Do you remember this?

Very quickly marketers like Terry Dean began to see the real potential of the Internet as they started to apply the principals of direct response marketing. In fact Terry was one of the first true pioneers of creating websites that sell and he did this with a huge amount of success as a result.

As I’m sure you know already direct response marketing had been around for many, many decades before the Internet even emerged, but the problem was people back then just didn’t know what the Internet was or even understand how to use it as a way of marketing their products or services.

The first thing Terry did was NOT to use “Welcome to my website” at the top of his websites, instead he took those battle hardened and proven direct response marketing techniques and tactics and applied them. What did he do? He wrote advertising headlines that gave people reasons for reading his website and buying his products. He wrote sales letters instead of welcome messages which made him a fortune and turned him into one of the worlds first marketing “gurus”.

All those direct response marketing techniques and tactics Terry applied back then still apply today. In fact if you’re not using them you’ll be under serious threat from your competition who no doubt are.

So where do you start with creating a website that sells?

The first place is always with copywriting starting with an attention grabbing headline, the headline then leads into your sales letter, which leads people into the sale.

But great copywriting isn’t enough without also setting the stage through website design that supports this. When these two things are working in harmony it’s an amazing site to behold, you’ll find yourself wanting to buy whatever is being sold!

Everything I’ve just mentioned above is just the beginning because there are many more parts to this you need to consider. Getting started is actually the easy part. Because once you’ve got your headline, sales letter and website design in place you also need targeted traffic. Once you’ve got the traffic you next need to be looking at how many people visit your website before they buy anything from you. These is your conversion matrix.

When you know what your conversions are you can work out the dollar value of every person visiting your site. When you know this you can start buying advertising on other websites with greater confidence and certainty. After all if you know that every person visiting your website is worth $1 you quickly get to know what your break even point is which tells you how much you should be spending on your advertising. From this point everything become much more scientific and predictable.

From a design point of view creating websites that sell follows a simple set of rules or principals which just like copywriting are based on proven direct response methods. These principals never change, you simply apply them to whatever the niche is for the website you’re designing.

The easiest way of getting started with creating a website that sells is simply to write a more compelling headline for your website. If your website says “welcome to my website” then shame on you! Immediately replace this with a headline that gives people the biggest benefit from visiting your website. Remember this your headline is your ad for your ad! So your headline gets people to read your websites introduction, which then gets people to read the next paragraph and so on until you reach the order button.

Don’t just stop at one headline, write as many as you possibly can then pick the best. Put the best headline at the top of your site then see if you get any more sales or subscribers. A great way of doing this is to use Google Website Optimizer because you can equally split your traffic over several different headlines you write. Google Website Optimizer then tells you which one made you the most sales or got you the most subscribers.

Headlines are always great places to start when you’re looking at creating websites that sell so with that said here’s a PDF of an ebook you can download for free that’ll help you write all the headlines you need.

The next components to look at are your sales letter and your website design.