Sometimes venturing won’t gain you anything

Remember the old adage – “nothing ventured, nothing gained”? I think it should be changed to: “planning is required to get the most gain from your ventures” (ok, perhaps that doesn’t quite flow as well as the original, but you get the idea).

Sure, venturing is a very crucial step and without venturing you will never achieve anything, but often the simple act of venturing will get you no where unless you have a plan as to where you want to get to and how you anticipate getting there.

Chances are, the journey will take you down different paths than you had originally planned and your destination may even change as your plans evolve… but without a plan you probably wouldn’t have ended-up getting anywhere.

So why am I placing my philosophical views about an old adage on an SEO blog? Because creating, maintaining, promoting and marketing a website is a very big journey for some businesses and it’s a venture that can bring much gain – if done properly.

The first thing that most businesses, bloggers or any other prospective website owner should do is clearly decide what the purpose of their new website will be. Perhaps you already have a website but can’t concisely describe its purpose or intentions. Don’t be dismayed, you would not believe the number of people who are keen as mustard to get a website setup, but have no idea why.

Most websites will have at least one (if not more) of the following goals:

• To help sell a product / service or simply ‘make money’
• For branding and awareness purposes
• To demonstrate or improve ones ‘authority’ in a given area
• To streamline customer interaction (by having FAQs, address and directions, case studies etc.)
• Or in the case of a personal blog it could simply be for fun

Having a website ’simply because everyone else has one’ may be a good catalyst to taking the plunge into the online world, but it certainly shouldn’t be the sole reason you have a website.

With each of the goals mentioned above, comes different types of content; different ways of structuring the information; will require information to be updated more or less frequently; and most certainly will require very different methods of promotion and marketing.

Once you’ve established the purpose of your website, the next thing to determine is: who is the site designed for?

Even though many businesses believe that their product is perfect for anyone and everyone, in reality, most products have a very specific demographic that they are perfect for. Not identifying what this niche or demographic is, will end-up costing you A LOT of time, effort and money because you’ll be trying to push your products / services / brand / reputation to people who couldn’t care less.

So hopefully once you’ve reached this point, you have your goals and target audience defined. Building the website, writing the content and promoting your services online should be much easier… but there’s still one final crucial element to having a successful website and that is testing and measuring.

Like I said earlier in this post – the journey and even your destination may change. Perhaps you thought you had a product designed for single women aged between 18 and 28 who work in a professional corporate environment, like to go to the gym during the week and enjoy a night-out with the girls drinking daiquiris and dancing till the sun comes up on the weekends (yes, when you profile your ideal clients, it should be as specific as this).

But after a few months of measuring your conversions, you discover that these aren’t the people making the most purchases – change your approach so you’re marketing to that newly discovered demographic.

Without testing and measuring you probably wouldn’t have discovered this and would still be scratching your head wondering why no one is buying anything even though you now have a new spiffy looking website.

So to avoid conversations like this:

Client: “I setup a website a year ago because everyone else had one so I thought I should too, but it just doesn’t seem to be working”
Me: “What isn’t working about it?”
Client: “I don’t know… I just thought that by having a website something would happen”

Make sure you plan; then do; then test; and repeat… until you have the most productive website that transforms all your goals into reality. It will take a fair bit of planning, a lot of hard work, more time than you ever anticipated and testing till you’re blue in the face, but if done well, the results will be well worth it in the end.