Website Sales Strategy - Worth Thinking About?

We're coming across more and more companies who are developing second and third websites to compliment their "main" site. The purpose of these subsequent sites is to focus on specific product groups or categories. As an example, one of our customers has launched 3 websites to promote their range of fitness equipment:

http://www.treadmills-fitness.co.uk/
http://www.exercise-bikes-fitness.co.uk/
http://www.cross-trainers-fitness.co.uk/

The domain names make the purpose of these particular sites self explanatory - the aim is clearly to focus each site on a particular type of fitness equipment. It's an interesting approach to the traditional one - where all of your products are loaded onto a single all purpose website. There are both pros and cons of adopting this multi-website approach, and we've highlighted a few below, but the key question is does it work? The short answer to this is "Yes - of course it does", providing that your website is optimised correctly and you have good quality inbound links.

So what are the pros and cons? Well, here are a few:

Pros

• You are likely to be able to buy domain names that relate to what you're selling - this is more likely to lead to better positions on some search engines
• Your site is full of content that is related to a particular product group and therefore is more likely to be of interest to people who are looking for that type of product. There's nothing quite like buying something of a specialist.
• You can more easily show your products in different groups - such as by brand, price, rating and so on. It's more difficult to do this if you have multiple types of products on your website. The advantage is that your customer can more easily find products that suit their needs.

 Cons

• You have the costs of developing, hosting and maintaining a website multiplied by the number of sites that you have. Actually, it's not quite that bad - there are economies to be had if all of the sites share the same look and feel.
• ....hmm...we're sure that there are more but we haven't come across them yet. Let us know if you have experience of this type of online sales strategy and if you've found any real disadvantages.

As we said at the top this type of website sales strategy is becoming more prevalent - it's one reason why we introduced our Commission based payment option because it gives customers a route to implementing multiple sites for a small investment and therefore very little risk. We'll be monitoring this type of strategy closely and will provide more information in the future.

Find out more at Website Options.

Abacus Fitness Bikes focusses purely on promoting their range of exercise bikes and indoor cycles



Welcome to the Website Options Blog

OK, here goes. It's been a long time coming but we've finally got round to creating our own blog. You know the old saying - 'All plumbers have leaky taps' - well I guess that this applies to us. We've been so busy creating sites and blogs for everyone else that we've neglected our own. However, we're putting that right and from now on we'll be posting on this blog with all of the news, events, promotions and stories related to our company.

We'll keep all of our customers (old, new and yet to be) up to date with all that is happening at Website Options. Come and visit us at http://www.website-options.co.uk/ for full details of what we do and how we do it.