Here are the seven quickest ways to ensure a web site totally fails to deliver any significant return on investment.
If you want to lose money on the Internet, here’s how to do it.
I had fun writing this… enjoy! Ed 🙂
Money-sucking Tip #1) Spend all your budget on graphic design and ‘features’.
Find a designer who wants to focus all their attention on how the site looks rather than what it actually says.
If you want to waste money on the Internet then all that really matters is for your web site to “looks better” than your competitors.
Pouring all your online marketing funds into graphic design is one of the fastest ways of ensuring it’s a resounding failure.
If you’re able to deplete all your cash Internet marketing budget on having a pretty site designed, then you won’t have any budget left to actually promote the site. Excellent! Failure is almost guaranteed. (It’ll really help you when you get to tip # 4 below.)
Money-sucking Tip #2) Adopt a ‘Limited Content Because Nobody Reads It’ policy.
Let’s face it. People who visit your web site are only interested in your company, your branding, and how long you’ve been established.
(You’ve been in business 20 years and won loads of awards? Wow! That’s REALLY interesting.)
So why waste all that valuable web space with useful content, when you can instead fill it with a larger company logo, sterile lists of product features… and no mention of how your products and services actually benefit people.
Also, don’t provide detailed case studies. Make sure product photography is poor quality and too small to be useful. And avoid genuine testimonials like the plague. (Why not just make some up like everyone else does?)
Make sure your company logo is the largest and most obvious element on the page — and if your homepage features a compelling headline, replace it with the standard “Welcome to our web site” message instead.
That’s important — if you have a compelling headline on your home page you run the ‘risk’ of differentiating from your competitors, and it may also keep visitors on your site longer… so make sure you only have a “Welcome to our homepage” message instead!
For your web site to lose money it’s critical you site ignores the fact most people surf the Internet for information first… before they buy.
Yes, it’s enough to simply expect visitors to part with their cash the moment they land on your site.
After all, who actually reads web pages?
In a nutshell, make sure your site leaves lots of unanswered questions in your prospects minds — and you can be certain that most of your potential customers quietly pass over your site.
Money-sucking Tip #3) Don’t bother capturing visitor’s names & emails.
You may have heard ‘the money is in the list’ … so it’s essential to make sure your web site has NO facility for capturing visitors details.
Avoid building a list of prospects at all costs.
If your site does have a facility where visitors can volunteer their name and email address, make sure the headline above that facility is something weak, like “Join Our Newsletter”, and with little or no additional explanation of why they should join. (In other words, don’t give visitors a compelling reason to sign up.)
If you can keep your list of prospects as small as possible, the road to Internet failure is clear.
Money-sucking Tip #4) Don’t promote the site.
This really is a critical tip: Forget that you actually need people to come and visit the site.
After all, you spent all your marketing budget on a website that looks so much better than your competitors websites, so who cares if no one sees it?
Don’t test Google Ads.
Don’t form any strategic alliances.
Don’t build or promote lead pages using perform any offline campaigns using traditional methods like print ads, highly responsive direct response sales letters and postcards.
Don’t submit press releases either online or offline.
Don’t do any blogging.
Don’t use social media marketing.
Don’t optimise any pages for the search engines.
In a nutshell, don’t tell anyone, anywhere about your web site, and you can be sure you’ll get less than a measly trickle of sales every week. If any at all.
Money-sucking Tip #5) Don’t optimise the site.
This is one of my favourite ‘money-sucking’ tips.
If you or your web developer installed any statistics capturing code… remove it at once.
The goldmine of information that online statistics facilities (like Google Analytics) provide would surely help you optimise your site and make it highly profitable.
Of course we don’t want that, so get your developer to strip that out without delay!
If you can’t strip out the statistics capturing code then try hard to never check your statistics and see what’s happening on the site.
Make sure you always remain blind to the fact that no one is actually visiting your web site — or if they do — that only a very small percentage of people are actually ordering or responding in any way.
Also make sure you don’t have any landing pages for each category of product or service you offer. And definitely don’t perform any AB split or multi-variate testing on those.
(That would make your web site far too profitable.)
And if you absolutely positively must capture and analyse your site statistics — use the information to determine where the most people are going on your site — then, update those pages to ensure they are as least compelling and unresponsive as possible.
Money-sucking Tip #6) Leave it alone!
Once your new site goes live… forget about it.
If you keep changing it, Google may take an interest, and you could end up in their search results. If that happened you could get a windfall of visitors and maybe even some sales.
So whatever you do, leave your site well alone!
Also if you keep changing the site your customers and clients may get the impression your company is progressive, and give them a reason to keep coming back to your site in future.
This could have a positive impact on sales also. Yet another great reason to leave your site alone!
Money-sucking Tip #7) FORGET ABOUT THE BACK-END.
This is the most critical tip of them all… if you want to waste money on web sites then this is the golden key.
If you do manage to accidentally sell anything on your web site, or if any visitors somehow manage to respond via your web site or complicated contact form and become a sales-lead — don’t worry, all is not lost!
Simply forget about them.
That’s right. Forget about them.
Don’t send them any form of ongoing communications. Don’t start e-mail marketing. Don’t blog. Don’t use push notifications. Don’t send any letters or catalogues. And definitely don’t make any phone calls.
Keep very, very quiet.
Then, hopefully in a few months or less the customer will have forgotten all about you, and will be looking elsewhere… (hopefully at your direct competitors!)
By not performing any type of ongoing back-end marketing you can be assured that any significant business growth you experience is virtually nothing to do with your web site.
Well done!
Follow these instructions and I can guarantee your site will be a money-sucking waste of time and web space.
P.S. Or, if you’re one of the few site owners who actually wants healthy ongoing profits then simply make sure you do the EXACT OPPOSITE of every single one of those items listed above. ????