Is My Website Ready for Traffic?

Q: I just finished your Truth about Traffic and LOVED it! It left me wondering though… you mention that before you send traffic to your site, you have to make sure it’s ready for it. What’s the best way to find out if my site is good enough? Thanks for all your help! Crystal

A: I guess I’d better qualify what I said, so you don’t think I’m suggesting your website should be perfect before you get started. Absolutely not. Your website will never be perfect and as you drive traffic to it, you will be able to make improvements over time through split-testing and other methods. If you aren’t sure how to test and track, you’ll want to read this article and listen to the mp3 on How do you test and track your marketing?

Still, I do believe that you should have a good sense of creating an effective website prior to launch. Here’s some quick pointers:

1. Do you have attention-getting headlines? If your website says, Welcome to MySite.com go back and find something that will immediately grab your visitors attention and make them want to stay and read more.

2. Avoid distractions and excessive navigation: When a visitor hits your website, you want them to follow certain actions and if you give too many choices with a ton of links, they’ll end up going elsewhere on your site or just leave altogether. When people are presented with too many choices, they often make no choice at all. That’s not good for your website.

3. Make sure you have a call to action: Each page of your website should direct your visitor on what to do next. Whether it’s to buy a product or join your mailing list make sure they know what to do next.

4. Study copywriting - it will be one of your most powerful sales tools: You can’t interact with all of your website visitors personally, so your website needs to do the selling for you. I recommend join me at Copywriting Sweetie where I’ll teach you how to write sales-producing copy.

But again, perfection isn’t required before getting started. You just want to have some sound marketing strategies in place before you start spending money on traffic.