Ali Tavanayan

Date: May 13, 2015

Name: The art & science of money making website for entrepreneurs

Presenter: Ali Tavanayan

With successful and effective websites, entrepreneurs can generate and expand their client base and awareness through internet market. Moreover, entrepreneurs must pay attention to their websites to maximize their customer conversation rates and online sales. Dan Lok, the Founder of Vancouver Entrepreneurs Group, invites Ali Tavanayan, the Founder of TEI Web Solutions inc, to discuss his success insights and secrets of creating powerful website to attract online customers. Entrepreneurs can learn the skills and tactics that are required to operate successful online store and understand the business model behind e-commerce sites.

Insight from Dan

Dan Lok strongly believes the purpose of a website is to contribute to the profitability of entrepreneur’s business. If website does not serve that purpose for entrepreneur, the website is considered to be ineffective. Entrepreneurs focus too much attention on personal design; however, Lok suggests entrepreneurs to learn the tool of Google Analytic to help determine if website is creating values for their clients.

Lok believes websites can be categorized into six types. The first type is authority site. Authority site uses deep content to connect with the voices in certain market. The second type is membership site. Membership site provides premium content for a monthly subscription. Lok indicates the idea behind the membership site is to build a community that connects audience with common goals and interest.

The third type is Niche Blog site. This type of website is to share blog information for a specific market niche. The fourth type is called Lead Generation site. Lead Generation site can direct entrepreneurs to potential sales and opportunities. This type of site requires user opt-in and fill-out forms to build relationship with audience. The fifth type is Personal Brand site. This is the kind of site where entrepreneurs can use to demonstrate their skills and abilities to differentiate from others. The last type is e-commerce site, which is to help entrepreneurs to build and expand their small business.

“Nothing is more than understand the market place”

Turn your site into a cash machine

Ali Tavanayan founded his company, TEI Web Solutions inc, in 2008. With over 12 professional web developers and designers, the team is creating values for local small business owners. Tavanayan has passion with website designs, and he has successfully founded Vancouver Joomla and Magento User Groups to help people understand the value of online platforms. In addition, Tavanayan connects small business owners to implement POS system with their online ecommerce stores. Currently, Tavanayan has helped over 45 different industries.

Tavanayan believes a killer website can kill the customer resistance for taking audience’s actions to go to next marketing. With the right marketing system, website will only use 1/7 of the effort to attract customers.

Tavanayan illustrates the car concept to demonstrate the importance of website building. Without driver and gas, a car will be functionless. This concept applies to the website. If a site has no administration and process to run the site, the site will be useless. Many entrepreneurs prefer to find quick solution by hiring the wrong website designers; however, the site will not be effective in the long run.

The style of any website consists of the right hosted platform, cloud, hosting, open source and mobile function. Many entrepreneurs focus too much on choosing the best platform, but Tavanayan suggests entrepreneurs to pick any platform that can provide the necessary outcome.

There are 3 major rules for creating effective site.

• Clarity in purpose
• Clarity in design
• Clarity in navigation

Tavanayan emphasizes it takes only 5-7 seconds for customers to decide to stay on the website; otherwise, they will initiate the default action, which is to close the window browser. If the website has poor value proposition, which means customers do not understand the purpose of the website during that 5-7 seconds, they will leave immediately.

Clarity in purpose

Entrepreneurs need to understand the website’s target market. The website needs to lead them to the landing page and provide the necessary benefits. Website can use success stories, product features and testimonials to retain potential customers.

Tavanayan shares the top 8 mistakes for making website.

Mistake #1: Call to action

Sometimes entrepreneurs forget to include call to action in their websites. Tavanayan suggests entrepreneurs to use 80/20 rules to figure out the primary target audience by gender, age, education, wealth, and prize. Next, entrepreneurs will use 80/20 rules again on the remaining 20% to figure out the secondary target audience. Finally, entrepreneurs do it again to find the other audience.

Tavanayan suggests the website to use slider to market the website with call to action. The formula is stated as below:

Primary -> Secondary -> Primary -> Secondary -> Other

Mistake #2: Bad/low quality photos

Pictures can attract attentions. Entrepreneurs need to control the quality of the pictures from lighting, resolution, scaling, direction, materials, consistency and performance. Tavanayan wants entrepreneurs to think about their competition to determine whether or not if the information is sufficient enough.

Mistake #3: Ease of use

Customers do not like to insert or register too many similar platform systems. Therefore, Tavanayan wants all websites to integrate with popular or commonly use platforms for registrations to keep it simple and straight forward.

There are 7 ways to find the information on website. Tavanayan suggests website to fully use navigation, search, type, special offers, best sellers, products and bread crumble. Only use 5-7 items in the navigation list.

Mistake #4: Analytics

Entrepreneurs need to learn how to use the analytics and collect the data.

“Numbers never lie”

Entrepreneurs can compare the current content with the data to figure out strategies to increase traffic.

Mistake #5: Social proof

Publicity is important. Entrepreneurs must understand that traffic is the asset of any website. By scoring top google rank, publicity will increase. Moreover, the website can increase number of visitors and number of members as well.

Mistake #6: Marketing

Tavanayan shares several tactics to help entrepreneurs on online marketing. They can upsell related products to promote their website. Share recommendation of product information to help customers choose the right products. Provide newsletter, promotions, special offers, package, and gift cards to attract customers’ attention. Tavanayan believes entrepreneurs should fully utilize the landing page, and use A/B testing to figure out what is working on the website.

Mistake #7: Updates

Many entrepreneurs forget to audit themselves on the website. Tavanayan recommends entrepreneurs to monitor site speeds and site updates. They can review the site to check if there are any redundant slides. Moreover, understand the target audience trend, new content, product updates and shipping is important to keep the site on track.

Mistake #8: Standards

Entrepreneurs need to ensure the category and product listings are correct. They need to check if the product detail view is showing the right information. Update the terms and conditions, monitor the search result and create logos are ways entrepreneurs need to spend time on. Moreover, the website must look trustful and forms must work correctly.

Tavanayan believes many entrepreneurs are not implementing the right system in their website. Without the right system, the labor costs will increase and there will be duplicate efforts and human mistakes. Right integration is the solution to synchronize the data flow from different fields on the website to the right management system. Therefore, Tavanayan suggests entrepreneurs to spend time on their websites to maximize the result and outcome.

“The website that kills your customers’ resistance and sells your products”