Increase your profit through effective entry and exit strategies.

By Robin Porter

It is amazing that so much time goes into building great looking
websites, promoting them, yet most webmasters pay little attention
to how their visitors will actually use them. You could be throwing
profits away, if you don't pay attention to entry and exit strategies
- that is, looking at how your visitors enter, walk through and
leave your site, and how you can steer their course to increase
your profits.

Let's look at entry strategies first. Where can visitors enter
your site? Check your website statistics for more information
(you are doing this anyway, aren't you?). Often, many visitors
enter through a "side door" unintentionally left open. By this
we mean they enter at a page, which was not designed to be an
entry page, and they are left floundering around lost, not knowing
where to go next – a bit like wandering into an office building
through an open fire escape door!

This often happens because of search engine indexing, where a
keyword rich page gets an unintended good ranking. Remember,
any page can become an entry page (unless you use the Meta robots
tag to avoid indexing), so ensure visitors who appear in the
wrong place are efficiently & easily lead to the "front reception".

Once in, what do you want your customers to do? Read content
and gain exposure to advertising? Read sales copy and make a
purchase? Sign up for a newsletter/ezine? Often, it's a combination,
so make sure it's not all screaming for their attention at once.
A visitor who becomes overwhelmed, will soon dash out the door!

Lead them through, one thing at a time. I particularly cannot
understand websites, which, as soon as you enter, request your
email address, via a pop up box, and I suspect many others feel
the same . I like to get a feel for a site first, experience
their subject matter and see if their expertise fits with what
I'm after, before I sign up for a newsletter, or other communication.
So, lead them through, reassuring them that you can be of great
assistance, becoming their friend, stating the advantages of
keeping in touch , before gently requesting their details.

Now to exit strategies – I see many puzzled faces here! Like
it or not, every visitor is destined to leave your site. They
can do one of two things :

1) Stop surfing and go and do something else

2) Continue surfing and visit another website.

You can influence them in both instances. By channelling them
to a partner site, via a banner or an affiliate link, you can
profit. You must do it at a logical point – identify the points
where customers are likely to leave, and provide an "emergency
exit" for them. Analyze your own "surfing" habits, and those
of your friends and colleagues.

For instance, if I'm visiting a website which I find is not
for me, I always subconsciously scroll down to the bottom of
the page before I leave. I don't know why - perhaps it's because
I don't want to feel I'm missing out on something – they could
be giving away $20 bills at the bottom –you never know! One or
two attention arousing links to affiliated sites could be placed
tastefully there, tempting a "lost" customer to visit and perhaps
earn you some commission through an affiliate scheme.

What about purchasers? Where do they leave? Most usually through
an order confirmation page, where there's only a link "back to
home". Well, let me point out that people usually purchase after
they've gleaned all the information they can from your site to
make their decision. They've decided what they want and purchased
it .Why would they go back immediately? Give them a place to
go – links to affiliate sites of related interest. Make the links
provocative; arouse their curiosity to click through. Text links
are usually more effective than banners, particularly when they
are in the form of an endorsement or personal recommendations.

In short, analyze where your visitors go and are likely to go.
Ensure visitors entering through "side doors", get speedily directed
to the reception foyer. Position strategically placed "emergency
exits" which lead to partner sites. Join some affiliate schemes,
do some joint venture deals, and get profiting from those "lost"
customers that leave your site.

copyright 2000 : Robin Porter. Discover the tricks, tips & techniques
of those who have made their fortunes online,and get two superb free
  E-books at http://www.theinternetmarketingwizards.com/index.htm?j3