By Jeff Watters

Before beginning this fascinating article, be advised, this is about promoting your business using your existing website!  In order to do that you will need your user name and password  and a way to upload documents to your site.

Improving sales figures in your retail store or from your web site is easy to do with this effective method that brings qualified buyers into your retail store via the Internet. Whether your business desires to use a retail store or online "shopping cart," to snare customers, this skill set teaches you how to build "Internet Landing Pages" using visitor specific criteria.

I developed this back in the ninetys when I specialized in Internet consulting with customers in the hospitality industry.  Then customers would tell me they wanted a million hits to their web site; I would responded, don't you mean a million customers? It is important to distinguish exactly what your goals are before you begin. This method worked then and it works now - so there is no need to pay a high priced Search Engine Optimization company to get you more hits!

Returning to the million customers - I would say, be realistic and set goals in steps. Make a plan and work the plan and in ninety-days we will make significant progress. Then you can move on to improving your results and setting new goals. If you have a retail store you should sell a product from a web site or furnish information about your product built on getting people to your store.  If you don't sell a product from your web site you have to ask yourself what it the primary function of the web site?, then build around that function.

There is only one reason, which is to drive traffic into your business location.  One million hits to your site does nothing for you unless you are making sales. So how do you get those sales? First you have to get qualified customers to your web pages, then convert them into buyers. This conversion process takes place if you get them to the site and then offer them a reason to buy from that site or get in the car and drive to the store.

Business Model

We will begin with establishing a business model we can use as an example for this article. It must  represent several product lines or offer various services, which most businesses do to discover the easiest way to capture a large audience and then convert them to customers. So for the purpose of this article we will use a streamlined example of a Carpet Store. In order to keep it simple I will use only a few products and services. However depending on your business model it can be unlimited and completely detailed.

To make it simple please understand I am limiting the criteria so it can be learned and understood in just a few short minutes. However you should not limit your criteria when following this model.

So look at what a carpet store sells before we dive into the material.

Products: Carpet, Padding (thickness and density), finishing pieces or trim, wall base, transitions, plus you can publicized the brand names your company represents.

Services: Installation, carpet cleaning, repairing carpet, inspections of installations, plus the qualifications and certifications of the technicians.

Related Products: Vinyl flooring, hardwood, laminates, specialized products such as cork, linoleum, ceramic tile, composite materials, etc

You have a web site. If you don't have one then you need to get one right away. You can buy one for less than three hundred dollars a year. On your web site there is a main page usually called a home page. In the early days of the Internet these pages were normally labeled "index.htm" or "index.html." Once you had this page you would add more pages and link them together, add your images, etc.These pages were then cataloged by the search engines.

Then something happened with the indexing software that catalogs content on the Internet. They no longer just followed links, the accessed every document on the server regardless of its name or type. This is to the domain owners advantage as she/he could now develop specific landing pages and do geo targeting. Even if the page was not linked anywhere on the site.

What is a landing page and how do you use it? Here is what I teach my clients. Copy your home page and rename it to anything you wish. If you need help with this send me an email and I will help you. Change it so it only represents one product, from our example above, that product is carpet. So name it carpet.html or whatever extension you are using (html, htm, asp, php, cfm, etc). Now do the same for padding.html, finishpieces.html, trim.html, wallbase.html, carpetinstallation.html, carpetcleaning.html, carpetrepair.html, installationinspection.html and the brand names also.

People will search for brand names in their home town, so use the brand names of the companys your business represents. Work on one page a day making it product specific and writing detailed information about that one product. The more information you add that is product specific the better and it will eventually be listed in the major search engines. Be geo specific too, even if you have to use another copy of the page to make it local to your store.Remember, each page only deals with one subject, so eliminate the material dealing with the other products on this page, then customize the text so it deals with the product (product specific) you are advertising on this page.

So here is how it works. Assuming you have your name, address, zip code, phone number and contact information on the original page, you have just created a targeted marketing piece for each of your products. Search engines like this! The people that run Yahoo!, Google, and all the other search engines don't like having ten thousand search engine result pages (called SERP's in the business) when you are only searching for one. That is why you narrow down your pages to "one subject" for each page as much as possible.

The question arises, won't that interfere with my home page? No, it stays the same. Don't delete that page, just rename it on your local machine in your office and upload the second page to the server. Again, if you need help with this email me and I will assist you.  Use the renamed pages to be the product specific pages. Second question, won't this eliminate the need for home page? No, you don't delete that content ever! Keep it and only upload the new, product specific, enhanced pages to your server. These product or service specific pages will rank higher in the search engine results pages, the SERP's, if you have good content at the beginning and end of the page.

Since you copied your home page the new pages will still have the links that existed on the home page. These landing pages will only be different in the wording or content and the images. People will still be able to navigate your site. Best of all, within a few weeks the new landing pages will be cataloged by the search engines and you will have many more entry pages into your web site and your business. The more entry pages the better the chance you have at capturing the business.

I mentioned geo targeting above, this is important, you should include zip codes and the names of the towns you serve with your retail store on your geo targeting web pages. This could include customer testimonials, shipping charts, branch locations, etc. This idea captures people that search locally for your product but don't use the exact town your store or where your branch is located.

This is a very brief explanation. If you have questions or need help send me an email and I will help you. Feel free to leave a comment or establish a connection on this site  to get all the updates to this page and others that will be online soon.

Last thing, get the domain hosting service to set you a " .htaccess file" to allow all robots in your root directory. They will know what this means.  It helps with the catalog in the search engine.

Jeff Watters is the Group Organizer of the Delmarva Merchants Association, author of How to Sell Anything Easily and a professional sales manager for a retail chain in Delaware, a former CEO of two Internet companies and Internet Programmer.

PS: Bonus tip: Always keep a copy of your web site content on your computer for safe keeping.