Read 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee for Free Online

Fire!” he simply fires … but what is he firing at? That’s not an effective way of tackling that turkey.
    If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my ax.
    – Abraham Lincoln
    It is this aim that I am talking about. We have established that your website is nothing more than a tool to help you build a profitable business. In your particular industry, what must you aim at if you want to become, and remain, profitable? Here are some additional questions you should consider when you’re determining your website’s purpose:
What kind of business are you in?
What kind of customers do you have, and are they looking for your product or service online?
H ow are your prospective customers going to purchase your product or service?
Is your market local, national or global?
    Once you answer these questions, you will be closer to determining what, exactly, you are aiming at.
    In a website project, we sometimes spend more time helping the client map out their marketing strategy than we do actually building the website. Yes, it’s that important.
    No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
    – Harry Emerson Fosdick
    The lighting designer
    Many business owners go about creating their websites without thinking very deeply about this; for example, we were consulting recently with a woman w ho has a lighting design business. After asking her several questions, we learned that in her business model, she works almost exclusively as a subcontractor to general contractors —and we know that these general contractors are typically not searching for their subcontractors online.
    Does this impact how we should go about developing her website? Absolutely. This woman’s customers will indeed visit her website and evaluate her brand based on the image she projects and the influential information she offers on her site … but they are not likely to be searching for her online. Therefore, she should focus much more on the visual design and user experience than on any technical considerations related to driving traffic to the site. H er purpose is to convert clients who already know where to find her website, by presenting a strong brand on her web pages.
    E-commerce with a purpose
    We had another client that came to us to have her e-commerce site rebuilt. Through the initial consulting process that we bring all our clients through, we discovered that her dream was to get distribution in the major retail chains.
    We built an e-commerce site for her that did in fact sell a lot of product, but that wasn’t the goal of the site. The real goal was to get the buyers for the major store chains interested in her product.
    With a clear goal and the right team working on it, we launched a website that got more than $100,000 in orders from national retailers within two months , and eventually landed her a licensing deal with Walmart.
    Selective SEO
    We had another client —a contractor—that had been spending money on SEO for two years…and had not gotten a single lead from his website. (Unfortunately, that’s a common story that we hear all the time.) We were able to show him ( and clearly explain ) several “under the hood” technical issues that were preventing his web pages from showing up in search results.
    However, during our initial consulting process, we discovered that he had a very specialized, niche service that he was offering, and one of the big costs in his business was filtering through the wrong leads that were generated from trade shows and advertisements. For him, five good leads were better than 100 unfiltered leads.
    Hence, we crafted a very targeted SEO campaign to bring in a select number of well-qualified leads. Within 2 months of our starting to work with him, he had gotten dozens of good leads from