Our first rule forbids the use of external links. Therefore you can eliminate any links pages, sidebars with site affiliates, advertising banners, or such things from your site map. Although selling advertising space on your website may seem like a good idea for building revenue, it distracts your viewers from your central goal: selling the product. So keep it simple, and leave the advertising off.
Our second rule dictates that content on your site should be limited to only that which is essential for persuading people to buy your product. The policy that goes along with this rule is to consolidate most of your site's information onto as few pages as possible. This reduces the chance that viewers will come to your page, click a link that takes them to another page on your site about your product's features, and then forget to come back to your main page to actually buy the product. Of course, there are situations where you'll want to divide your content among several smaller web pages on your site as opposed to putting everything in one massive index page--if you have a wide variety of technical data about your product, as well as photos and testimonials, you run the risk of boring your viewer long before he gets to the crucial "Buy" link.
So follow this guideline: if your viewers don't have to scroll down more than one or two times in order to read all of your product information, put everything on a single index page. If you have to scroll down too often to read all of your site content, then split the content into separate pages--but make use of pop-up windows in order to keep your main page open, or make sure that there's a link to your actual "Buy" page in a prominent place on every one of your sub-pages.
Above all, remember our third rule: keep it simple, stupid. One easy guideline for doing this is to follow the three-clicks rule:
• Upon arriving at your site, your viewers should never have to click more than three links in order to buy your product.
One way to implement the three-clicks rule might be this: your viewers start at an index page that describes the product information. They then click a "next" link to take them to a page about prices and ordering information. They then click a link to start ordering the product. That's two clicks in total. Another way to implement the three-clicks rule: your viewers start at an index page that talks in general terms about the product. They click on one of your subpages (features, testimonials, pricing, etc.--whatever best suits your specific product) to learn more about the product. They then click on a "Buy Now" button to learn about pricing, and then they click on a button to begin ordering the product. Three clicks. There are any number of other possible configurations--experiment with your site map until you come up with something that gets across all of your information while maintaining this same simplicity. Your customers will thank you--and you'll thank yourself when you see the sales figures.
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Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.
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