I often get asked by small businesses how they can improve the results that their website is getting if they don’t have a significant marketing budget and any specialized design or programming skills. It’s a great question, and I’m going to share the answer with you right here. The expertise I’m about to share comes from over seven years designing, developing, and marketing hundreds of different websites.

1. Benefits not Features

Rewrite your content to be focused on your customer, not on you. This focus on your customers has increased the percentage of visitors taking action in every case that we have seen. But how do you turn this somewhat vague concept into something you can implement? Simple: check out this tool provided at Future Now Inc.. It will measure the percentage of “me-focused” content (features) and “customer-focused” content (benefits) on any website URL you provide it. Rewrite your content on your homepage and key pages to be over 60% customer-focused and watch your sales rise.

2. Don’t Make Your Visitors Think

Visitors online do not read, they scan, As a result of this, they are not interested in trying to understand complicated writing that is getting in the way of what they are trying to accomplish. Check out this helpful tool provided by Added Bytes, and rewrite your content on key pages to a 6th-grade level. You will see your number of confused support calls drop and results increase.

3. Make it Easy to Contact You

Add your phone number (and maybe your address) to the top right corner. A significant number of your visitors are driven purely by convenience, and will be turned off if they cannot immediately find your contact information. Check out this answering service website for a good example of what it will look like to add your phone number to the top right corner. An example of using your address in the top right corner can be found on my website design company’s homepage. Make this change and watch as your prospects start contacting you instead of your competitors.

4. Add Something for Your Visitors

Many of your visitors are not in a “ready to buy” state right now, and they will not feel comfortable contacting you directly or giving you their contact information. Create something of value for them that they can download or read on your website and this will keep you top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Not sure how to create something like this? Make a list of the top 5 ways that someone can achieve some sort of benefit (save money, save time, make more money, meet new people, improve their home value etc.) without spending money. You can create this in Microsoft Word, add your logo, convert to a PDF, and just like that you have a valuable resource to share.

Now go start improving your website!

When I’m talking to people about what I do, one of the most common misconceptions I face is that there’s still a strong belief that running a website is easy to do. Running a successful website is far from easy, it’s blooming hard work!

So I’ve put together a list of the top 7 problems and issues you’ll soon discover when running a website. My goal is not to put you off, but to highlight that it takes experience, skill and bucket-loads of effort to sustain a great website.

1) Web hosting downtime and poor response times

Your web hosting will go down at some point. Forget those claims of 99.9% uptime guarantees from your hosting company, which mean nothing anyway. Sometimes the server might still be accessible, but the page loads so slowly that your website becomes unusable.

Just accept it. When you least want your website to go down, it will go down. The trick is to find a web host who is proactive about their server management, namely that they’re already working on fixes by the time you’ve noticed your website is not working.

2) Random drops in visitors

Any seasoned website owner will agree with this problem. At some point your visitor levels (and/or sales) will just drop for no apparent reason. You’ll spend hours looking over the statistics trying to work out why. Sometimes you might be able to determine that you’ve had a a random drop in rankings in the search engines.

Get up, dust yourself down, and move on. Often it’s better to spend time getting more visitors rather than establishing the actual cause of the drop.

3) You get demotivated and bored

When you’ve been running a website for a while, you do lose interest. Perhaps your earnings aren’t increasing as quickly as you’d like? Perhaps you’re not making any sales? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas? It’s usually people who persevere through the low periods that become successful.

Try to find ways to inject new ideas and inspiration into your website to give you fresh motivation. I recently wrote a great article on how to come up with fresh ideas.

4) You’re being sued

If you have a website that allows visitor-generated content, such as reviews, comments or forum posts, then there’s every chance that you’ll end up with something offensive on your website. Offensive remarks, in their various guises, can lead to law suits.

Moderate all visitor-generated content. No exceptions. If the content sounds as if it might be an issue, remove or reject it. Moderating user-created content is hard work, but it’s cheaper than being sued.

5) You have no time to update your website

Updating your website includes many aspects, such as moderating comments, adding new articles, adding new products, adjusting the site design, etc. Great websites are constantly evolving and growing.

If you don’t have the time to update your website, then hire someone, be it by outsourcing, via a contract or an employee. If your time is worth more focused on other tasks, then it’s worth spending a little money to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.

6) You need to promote your website

If you want your website to grow, you need to promote your website. However, promoting a website is easily one of the most time consuming aspects of running a website. You need to spend time getting links to your website, you need to create a presence on social networking platforms, you need to establish relationships with other individuals in your community, you need to spend time on marketing materials, etc. The list just goes on.

Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get visitors. Promotion is hard work, and there are no quick solutions either.

7) Competition and copycats

Once you have a great website, it’s not long before someone copies you or starts doing something that’s very similar to you. It’s often because someone wants to replicate your success for themselves. However, they usually don’t realise that they’d be better off doing something different and unique.

Don’t resort to childish behavior (as tempting as it might be to throw a tantrum)! Sometimes you might have a legal case if there’s a copyright dispute. However, I’ve found that working with the competition can yield some great results. This includes advertising exchanges, selling adverts on your website, possibly selling your website to the competition, or even buying the competition!

Any more challenges?

These are the challenges that I’ve personally faced with running my portfolio. What challenges have you encountered with running a website?