Marketing For Kids, Part 5: Website Basics

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A website used to be a very complex, technical affair in the old days. Today, with WordPress, it’s relatively simple to build one. In the previous post, we set up the foundation for the website; in this post we will explore the content of the website.

Purpose

The purpose of a website is to attract people to our business and convince them to purchase one of our items. Everything we do should be with that focus in mind.

Message

Everything we write should be for the benefit of our customers, the people who might buy something from us. Think about all the clutter on regular websites. How much of it doesn’t help us when we’re on their sites? We don’t need to put those things on our site.

What are the common questions we would have as customers? What are things we’d like to know as customers?

What’s for sale?
How much does it cost?
How did you make it/what’s in it?
Does it solve a problem for me?
Can I trust you?

If we think back to our white chocolate candy horses as an example, what pages would we need on our website to answer these questions?

A page featuring our product
- How much our product costs
- How to buy it
A page about how we made it and ingredients in it
A page of testimonials

Front Page

The front page of our site should feature our product and how much it costs; this is the principal use of our website. On this page we should feature a picture of our product, how much it costs, and how to buy it. If we’re using a back-end like Gumroad, Etsy, Selz, PayPal, Amazon Payments, or Square, all these services provide us with codes we can copy and paste into our page so that our customers can buy.

How We Made It Page

Our page on how we made our product is our chance to show off what’s in the product, any allergens in it if it’s a physical product, and why we made our product. If we’re selling digital photos, for example, we might explain that we got great feedback about our photos and wanted to give people a chance to re-use them. If we’re selling white chocolate candy horses, we might explain our love of horses and candy, and how we chose which molds/patterns.

Testimonials Page

The testimonials and tastes page is our chance to show how other people – people like our current customers – like our product. This is the essence of the public relations profession; other people’s words about how they enjoy our product are seen as more trustworthy than us telling people how wonderful our product is.

Analytics

One key ingredient to add to your website is a free account from Google Analytics. In a subsequent post in this series, we’ll examine how to read your web analytics and set them up properly, but for now, make sure you’ve signed up for a free account and added the tracking code to your website.

Here are three tutorials for getting started:

Getting started: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en
Creating a Google Analytics website property: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1042508
Setting up the tracking code: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080

What About…?

Resist the temptation to add anything to our website that our customers didn’t ask us for. What will help us succeed where adults fail is focusing solely on how we can help other people with our products or services. Most adult businesspeople, especially marketers, tend to add all kinds of junk to everything they do, junk that makes them feel better but makes their customers feel worse.

Keep things simple. Focus on how your product or service helps other people enjoy life more, do more, earn more, save time, or whatever the principal benefit of your product is.

In the next post in this series, we’ll take a look at what to put in your social network.