Did you know that in advertising, every ad--and yes, a website is an ad--should contain the following elements? These elements are remembered through the acronym AIDA.

A = ATTENTION
I = INTEREST
D = DESIRE
A = ACTION

Now what does this mean, and how can you apply it to your website to help you increase your sales?

ATTENTION
When you are thinking about the website you want to have, don't forget it has to do more than convey information or make a sale. In order to do those things, it first has to get the visitor's attention. Is it boring and all white? Is all the text centered and spread from side to side? Or have you taken the time to create some functional and supportive graphics, with well formatted text? If it doesn't look like it's worth taking the time to read, then maybe it isn't!

INTEREST
Is your "voice" in your content, or does it sound really boring. Do your words read like a spicy novel, or like a calculus text book? Rev up your writing with testimonials, adjectives, anecdotes and personal experience. Make the reader feel like he is a part of what you are writing about.

DESIRE
Well, if you're not interested in what's in the website, you really won't have any desire to investigate the product, person, or service any further. What does build desire in advertising? Making a product or service personal, learning the benefits--not the features and applying it to your customer's needs, desires and wishes...and you can do this through the power of words and images. For example, if you're selling pizza, you may think people will buy it because it tastes great. So maybe you put "Great tasting pizza" on your website. Wrong. People need more descriptive, tantalizing images to work with. Remember the old Wendy's commercial where the folks would bite into the burger and all the juices would squirt out? Now that said, "Our burgers are the juiciest, mouth-wateringest burgers ever." And people went out and bought them.
Sell the benefits of buying your product--not the features of the product. What does getting your product mean to your customer? Will it make them thinner, richer, solve a problem? Remember the saying, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

ACTION
This, I think, is the most important element of advertising design. Even if you can't get someone's interest or cause them to have a great desire for your product, you can still ASK them to do something. Sometimes, all it takes to make a sale SOMETIMES is to ask for it. So on your website, the one thing you want to make sure you have in there, is the call to action. "Buy our widget now by June 1, before this offer expires forever!" "Email us for a free estimate." You get the idea.

About the Author

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