Heather, my understanding is that you want some advice about how your website can capture and sell to your target audience, correct?

Here’s a simple guideline that may help: It’s about: Building the Website That’s Right for Your Business

There are basically three marketing reasons to have a website.

You want to make sure you understand which one is best for your business:

1. To provide information about a product or company in order to establish a presence online

2. To stimulate sales through direct marketing

3. To develop a list of prospective buyers

Each of these reasons is valid and each dictates a different sort of website.

Let me give you a little more detail about each:

The Information Site
A site built to provide information about a product or company — and adds to its credibility — must be comprehensive, beneficial, and easy to navigate. It should be rich in useful free content: articles, photos, videos, news, and advice.

The Direct-Response-Driven Site
A website built for marketing purposes and has all the important elements of a direct-response promotion. This includes a strong call to action. The call to action could be in the form of an offer or a subscription sign-up box. It’s best to have two sign-up opportunities on EVERY page — one in the upper right hand corner and one centered at the bottom. The site should also be constructed to gain high rankings on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

The List-Building Site
A website built to develop a list of prospective buyers must be engaging, interactive, and constantly changing — with a prominent, easy-to-fill-in e-mail sign-up box. It should also offer a free bonus, such as an e-report or e-book, in exchange for signing up.

I think you’re looking at this style.

Each of these websites is different. Each requires different copy, graphics, and technology. But all of them should have plenty of free, useful content. And all should load quickly and be accessible to people with older computers and slower Internet connections.

And most important, it talks to your target market. Who is it that reads your content, loves your advice and wants more? Who’s the ideal niche?

Good luck, great job and Happy New Year to all,

Patricia Ogilvie
http://www.patriciaogilvie.com

There are some basic things to consider:

Capturing and selling to people online requires lots of testing to see what works for your product/site.
To test requires quite a bit of targeted traffic to have a large enough sample size to come to valid conclusions.

There are many ways to get traffic to your site but first and foremost is to start or continue networking face to face in your community and make a special offer to get people to your website. What can you give them that they would find attractive enough to compel them to visit the site?

People are reluctant to give out email addresses to just anyone these days. They don’t typically “join an email list” they give up their email address for something. If they sign up for your ezine that comes on Monday, how will it affect the rest of their week? What overwhelming benefit will they get from it? How will it make their life easier or better?

Lead people through the site by suggesting a page that they go to next to find out more. Don’t use “click here” as the text for the hyperlink use a keyword phrase that people would use in searching for help related to your services that relates to the topic of the page you are sending them to.

Your site could benefit from unique meta titles and descriptions on each page.

Moving up in the ranks of search results is about more (follow) links from other sites back to your own site (from higher ranked or authority sites).

Become part of other conversations on line without trying to sell anything, comment on blogs, contribute articles to niche sites related to health, exchange articles with colleagues for website and ezine use with live links back to your/their site. Establish trust and you may be surprised at the unsolicited response to your products/services.

I hope some of those tips will help you Heather.

Good luck!