By Erum Zehra

Every website should be created with a goal in mind. This ensures that the website is focused and can help you achieve your business goals.

Start by asking yourself: “Why am I building a web site?” Is it because everyone else is doing it too? Do you have a specific purpose in mind for it?

Clearly defining your web business goals ensure that your web site is optimized to achieve them. After all, you can only meet your goals when you know what they are.

Of course, defining a web business goal may not be as easy as it sounds. It comes naturally to some of us while it is a lot harder for others. Here is a list of common web business goals:

1. Product Sales

You want to sell products to online shoppers. These products might be your own or you might be selling them as a sales representative of a company. But why would people visit your web site and not thousands of others selling products similar to yours? What makes you different from your competitors?

To create website traffic you need to promote your site. It may also help to offer something useful to your website visitors. This could be special offers or bonuses etc. For example, most web sites selling software offer a free trial download.

One good way to draw visitors to a web site, is to offer unique and useful product related information to them. For example, Amazon.com offers a number of customer reviews for each book it is selling. This serves as useful information for people who might be thinking of buying that particular book.

Observe the sites of your competitors closely and see what they are doing to draw visitors to their sites and make sales.

2. Brand Awareness

Some web sites are built to create awareness for a brand. Lets take the example of Cokes web site. Is it there because the Coca-Cola Company hopes to sell coke bottles on the web? No, it is there to create brand awareness and assert its brand identity.

You may decide to bring your business to the web for the sole purpose of reassuring your customers that your company is willing to evolve with the changing times. The web site that you build will center on the purpose of enhancing and reasserting the image of your company.

3. Cost Reduction

Another business goal for building a web site can be cost reduction. A web site can result in cost reductions for you in a number of ways. You may reduce

• your customer services costs by having an online customer services system,
• your order processing costs by having an online ordering system for distributors and retailers, and
• your printing and paper costs by having brochures or product manuals online.

If your business has no offline presence, building a start up business on the web will involve minimal costs as compared to building a brick and mortar store. This is a major reason why many start up businesses are emerging on the web.

4. Providing Information

A web site can be created for the sole purpose of providing basic information about your company. Such a web site can take the form of an online brochure. It will result in cost savings from advertising for you and will be easy to build.

5. Facilitating Communication

You may build a web site to make it easy for your customers or prospects to communicate with you. A lot of television channels and periodicals have web sites where they conduct online surveys on different topics. An online survey is very easy to conduct and compile in comparison to an offline survey, and is a good source of eliciting customer opinions about a product or idea.

Moreover, traditional mediums of communication like fax, telephone, snail mail etc are expensive and time consuming. Through a web site or email, your customer can easily get in touch with you.

6. Affiliate Commissions

Another reason for building a web site may be to make money through promoting affiliate programs, which offer you a commission on sales. If you plan to build a web site for this purpose, do keep the following in mind:

• Choose a program that offers useful and legitimate products/ services.­
• Promote programs that cater to the same target audience.
• Offer information in the form of articles or compiled links that this target audience would find useful.
• Do not try to over stuff your web site with banners and popups. Visitors find them very irritating.
• Informative articles and reviews get more attention than a usual ad.

7. Revenue from Advertising

You may want to earn money by advertising other businesses on your web site. However this is not as easy as it sounds. The foremost concern of advertisers is the amount and quality of traffic your web site is drawing. You need to promote your web site well to ensure that it has a high amount of traffic. Moreover, you need to offer information similar to the advertisers products to ensure that they are getting the audience they intend to target. A good way to make money is to sign up for Google Ads.

No matter what the purpose of your web site may be, make sure that you keep track of the visitors of your web site. A traffic tracking system like Google Analytics gives you valuable information about your web site visitors. It also enables you to make important decisions related to the optimization of your web site.

About the Author

Erum Zehra is a mom, a digital entrepreneur and the founder of MuslimMoms.Ca, an online platform for moms where they get to share their experiences, of raising Muslim children in the West. In the year 2018, Erum decided to leverage her more than a decade long expertise in e-commerce and launched her own digital communications agency named Prestige Interactive. Prestige Interactive serves as a one-stop solution for all digital communication needs for businesses including web design, graphic design, SEO and web content.