Window Dressing

More about the monetization of your website. That is, more about the actual setup or layout of your store’s floorplan.

One assumes you are using your main websites as more permanent “stores” of some kind, and are using your blogs as “funnel sites” to these stores. Your stores--your regular websites--probably have much more permanent content than your blogs, in that you are not making drastic changes to them frequently. Insead, you are either adding or deleting specific products, or you are freshening the wording in your sales brochures.

These website stores usually consist of either an online mailorder catalog of your products that you want to sell and ship, or they consist of colorful, interesting, and informative “brochure pages” which describe and promote the features of the products of others, one product per page. In the case of the former type, there will also be included a checkout counter.

In any case, you will want to use your blogs as a much more informal meeting place where you can sit down and have coffee with your customers and passersby. Here you can discuss the issues of the day, anything that is dear to your heart, anything at all you want to share with your friends. Obviously, the conversaton often turns to what you do for a living. It is only natural, in the process of this friendly social discourse, that you invite them to visit your store.

But the blog, in my humble opinion, is not the place for the hard sell. People are there to relax and get to know one another. Indeed, you should leave some business cards on the table of your blog, but don’t use your blog to beat people over the head.