People are busy.

They won’t always feel like they have time to read your whole site. Most people skim the Net, they don’t read it avidly as often as we’d all like to think when we’re creating our entralling content.

So how can you make this fact work to your advantage?

In every traffic campaign you begin, whether it is free traffic or some that you paid for, you want to set up your site to meet at least one of three objectives concerning your incoming traffic.

(Ideally you want to meet them all, but realistically, that doesn’t often happen.)

First, you want to provide enough value to create a return visitor.

Why?

Because the majority of the time they aren’t buying on that first visit - they’re likely still in the research phase. If you don’t give them a reason to come back, you’re risking not being around when they make their buying decision.

Second, you want the person who comes to the site to sign up to be contacted again. This can be to subscribe to one of your feeds, sign up for the newsletter, or purchase a product or service.

If they buy once, they may buy again. If they don’t buy, keeping in contact may help them come to a decision. Some people will remember to visit you on their own, but many won’t. Or they may mean to, but lose your site in a sea of bookmarks.

Third, you want to spark some form of on-going interaction between them and you or your site, i.e. having them return to make another purchase, come back for more information, or to subscribe.

It’s easier to keep an existing client or prospect than it is to find a new one. New business is important, too, but the clients you already have can be where your fortune is made.

What helps me measure whether my campaign has this focus is the following exercise.

Think of your site as a beautiful garden with treasure hidden within that you’d like to share.

If the garden is just a busy twist of green and flowers, with no defined direction, how would a visitor know how to get to the treasure?

To help your visitor get to the good stuff, make sure the page they land on has a clear path through its splendor.

I like to call this concept "the garden path".

When creating a campaign, you can lose sight of the fact that having them land on your home page may  not get the results you desire.

You might have a good reason why they should end up at a particular location. Perhaps you’re having a sale. Or you’re looking to convert prospects to subscribers very quickly.

Yet the best place for visitors to land is often not the sales page.

With the garden path in mind, every time I promote or market, I create special pages at my site. The target page (the page they land on) itself gives them the opportunity to chose to come back. It’s an informational page with subscription options, be it a subscribe box or a link to the RSS feed.

The confirmation page of that step will let often let them a product I am offering, with incentive to decide now, targeted to the specific market I’m pursuing.

Normally this is a sales page for a special package offer.

If they reject that opportunity, that’s fine. They’ve already said they’d be back. We’ll find out if I can help them later.

If they accept, I want them to be engaged, I want them to get as much value out of their decision as possible. Then we’ll both be happy - I made a sale, they made an investment in their business that will produce the results they desire.

So when you set up a campaign, you’ll want to create a template of a target page that you can use again in the future.

With each you can make adjustments to the target page so that that it’s focused on the action you want them to take.

If you want them signed up to your newsletter, the only thing that should be on that page is information they want to know, with quick, easy sign-up at the bottom.

If you’d like to make a sale, in my experience, the page they land on should capture their information (double-opt in if you use email) and then lead them to your product.

This is because conversions for getting a newsletter sign-up are typically much higher than they are for making a sale.

So instead of converting, say 3% to a sale immediately, you can get that 3%, plus whatever percentage of the 30% or so that signed up for the ezine or subscribed to the feed to buy later.

There’s a special advantage that an RSS-capable blog can give you that will help you make every single page of your blog an opportunity to create a subscriber or make a sale.

If you blog every week day, this time next year that would be 260 more chances to convert a prospect to a subscriber, or a return subscriber to a buyer.

And if your pages are set up to draw search engine visitors with your valuable content, those pages can work for you all day long every day of the year to capture a person’s attention and lead them to make a sale.

Does this happen for every single page, for every blog post, every day?

Of course not. But a properly configured blog can be used as an indirect marketing tool - you can market through information with your expertise and knowledge of your field. We’ll cover that in the next post to Successful Business Blogging.

For the moment, as you set up your next campaign, think about this: what do you want your prospect to do when they get to your site, and how can you set up your pages to lead them to your desired course of action?

Taking a few extra steps to customize the user experience just might maximize your promotional efforts.