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Goals

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Goals for Website-In-A-Weekend

Every effective website has goals.

A great way to keep your goals in focus is to write them down, then refer back them regularly to ensure your efforts stay on track. You can write your goals down anywhere.

For websites, it’s convenient to write the goals out on a webpage. You will always know where to find it!

You may want to password-protect your goals page for your website, and “hide” the link to the password protected page. This goals page for Website In A Weekend is public to provide a working example for all Website In A Weekend customers.

The following list of questions you should ask yourself when operating a website was blatantly copied from Drayton Bird. Mr Bird is a very successful direct mail and direct response marketer, and cheerfully distributes a wide range of extraordinarily useful information.

The following lists the Website In A Weekend answer for each of Mr Bird’s questions:

  • What is my website for?

    The Website In A Weekend website helps people new to the Web very quickly build a simple, WordPress-driven website. The flagship or “pillar” content of Website In A Weekend is the 25 lesson WordPress eCourse.

  • What am I doing to get people to go to it?

    Website In A Weekend plan for getting blog readers:

    1. Public and private forums
    2. Blog comment URL fields,
    3. Personal emails as a signature link.

    Future promotional activity will include guest posting and article writing.

  • What am I doing to get people to stay on it for as long as possible?
    1. Website In A Weekend provides useful, easily digestible content allowing people to install, build and maintain WordPress-driven websites.
    2. I answer most comments left on articles, and often followup with the commenter via email.
    3. Many articles have opportunities for audience participation, which results in a contextually appropriate backlink for the participant. The results of this participation is mixed, but encouraging.
  • What am I doing to collect names?
    1. Collecting names and email addresses the Website In A Weekend email list.
  • What am I doing to turn those names into money?
    1. Offering a hands-on seminar to help people install WordPress.
    2. Offering small, low priced information products.
  • What am I doing to measure what happens on my website?
    1. Using Google Analytics for goal setting.
    2. Using WordPress.com Stats plugin for short term and daily tracking.
  • Is the copy in English or is it pretentious jargon? (Drayton notes he spends a lot of time rewriting website copy; starting by asking people what they actually mean by some of the phrases they use; many [he notes] find this quite taxing.)

    My copy is pretty good.

[First published February 8, 2009. Updated: April 3, 2010]

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