It is common for businesses to field a host of questions from our prospects who might be:

• evaluating whether we are the best person for the job
• looking for an inappropriate solution to their problem
• doing background research with no intention to purchase

These enquiries are not genuine propects: enquiries such as these which do not lead to sales take time away from your engagement with customers who want to pay you.

Qualifying you customers means answering the entry level questions once on your site, whilst allowing you to make reference to more detail than you could convey on the phone.  It means promoting the appropriate solution to a client’s problem, which may even be directing them elsewhere to a service that you don’t offer.  It means giving away silently and instantly the information that a “product researcher” would otherwise suck out of your working hours.

In this respect, developing the content on your website falls into what Stephen Covey calls “Quadrant 2 activity” in “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”.  He oulines four areas of activity characterised by an intersection of Urgency and Importance.  Quadrant 2 is an activity which is important, but not urgent.  There is no deadline for this task, rather it is an investment in passively grooming your prospects.

By publishing this type of content,  you are sorting through your prospects en masse, so that those enquiries which pursue contact are highly motivated customers.

How do I get more serious customers?

Simple! Write a of articles posts specifically to your best customers!  Be really clear about what you offer, and be generous about publishing what you know.  If you’d give this information to an anonymous prospect on the phone, then you should give it to your readers, too.

• Write highly targeted content which provides detail about your product or service.  If a prospect is undecided as to whether they’ll buy from you, you may ‘tip the balance’ in favour of a purchase if you deliver enough reasons they should buy.
• Address Benfits rather than Features: this is about presenting a case which is deirectly relevant to your customer.  A feature list is about your product; a benefit list is about the outcome for your customer.
• Create a Frequently Asked Questions page and carefully answer the queries which waste your time.
• Ensure that you link content on your website thoroughly so that related material is presented prominently – this is known as making your page ‘sticky’ – enticing readers to stay on your site rather than browse away.

Wordpress Training Melbourne

There are a multitude of very similar sounding plans available online, so once you’ve found a few hosts which meet your basic requirements, the choice comes down to reliability and expense.  Here as elsewhere it is very true that ‘you get what you pay for’.  That is to say that if you are creating a mission critical website which absolutely must be available without fail, you should handball this whole process to your IT department / webdesigner / pet geek.  If you want to get the ball rolling without the associated (significant) expense, read on.

For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

• Provides PHP, and MySQL (required for WordPress)
• Fantastico WordPress installer (completes a vanilla install of wordpress in about 4 minutes!)
• Unlimited Addon domains (you can host multiple different sites with different domain names for the one cost)
• Unlimited Subdomains (you can create subdomain1.mysite.com.au)

I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.

Wordpress Training Melbourne