by Nariko Yamata

Created on: January 21, 2007   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

Getting $$$ Out Of Your Website

Everybody wants to have a website. It is just good clean fun. However, if you want your website to generate cash, the fun quickly disappears as it is replaced by that phenomenon called work. If you sell a product, whether it is a CD, your used book collection, or a litter of puppies, you should have a website designed around selling that product.

Many of us are either design or sales challenged, especially me. I have done what I can to design my website around a few key selling points to market my CD, Queenie. I have seen my sales increase dramatically since redesigning my site in early January of 2004, and the current purple redesign utilizes the power of CSS Style Sheets. Of course I want to share the advice that got me a ton more traffic around the world, plus surges in CD sales.

Tip 1 Modesty is a wonderful thing, in other words, don't Flash your customers
The truth hurts. A totally Flash based site is still a nearly sure way to drive customers away from your site. The first mistake is the beloved Flash intro. I have a fast computer because I am a computer ADDICT running multiple PCs and Macs. Most people are not computer geeks! Flash intros clog up AOL and Earthlink faster than you can say, "dial-up." Yet it amazes me how the big "superstar sites" of music are saturated with lavishly designed Flash movie intros that even take my computers a minute or two to load. A little Flash is great though, just confine it to assets like music players, short movies embedded in your site, and photo galleries, stuff like that. Case in point: a good indie friend of mine has a Flash-based website that I CANNOT view on my Macs, which all run Safari. Major Label artists almost always have Flash-based sites. File the Flash Website under Reason No. 5782 Why Major Label Artist CD Sales are Declining at a Rate of 5-7% Per Year.

Tip 2 All roads point to product
Make it redundantly, pathetically, moronically easy to get to your product. Put a link to the "purchasing" part of your site on every page 2-3 times. Make it virtually impossible to miss. If it is something for sale on eBay, then put a link to the eBay listing right in the middle of the index page. One of the reasons I chose CDBaby as my CD retailer was because they make it ridiculously easy for customers to buy CDs. They can and do ship my CDs anywhere on the Earth, including Japan, and reliably. My future plans include extending my site with versions in German, Spanish, and French as I have

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