Most businesses fail to plan for online success. Knowing your purpose, audience, and uniqueness are the first steps to developing a successful web site. Follow these three steps to position your web site for Internet profits.

Step 1: Determine Your Web Site's Purpose

The first step in planning a Web site is to determine what you want to accomplish. Do you want to sell products and services, find new prospects or clients, generate leads, provide information or resources, gather visitor information in a database, establish credibility, or improve customer service?

Depending on your goal, you may want to provide the following on your Web site: an email form to capture your visitors' email so you can follow up on leads, a free consultation, articles to establish trust and credibility, a compelling sales letter to convince prospects to buy, product information and pictures, a catalog, a secure online order form, a shopping cart, or an excerpt of your book.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience, Their Needs and Concerns

Many Web sites are too general, trying to attract everybody. Don't make that mistake. Your Web site will be more profitable when focusing on your ideal prospects who are likely to buy your products or services. Ask the following questions to create a profile of your ideal customers.

After defining your ideal customers, target your Web site's content, message, and design directly to them. Here are some examples of how your audience affects the design of your Web site. If you are targeting seniors, make your text larger. If your prospects are accountants, use a conservative design. Make your design colorful for children. If your clients have a slow computer and Internet connection, avoid movies, sounds, Flash animations, or Java programming.

To target your content to your ideal customers, tell right away what your Web site is about and what's in it for them. If they don't read further they were not prospects . Attract your target audience with a benefit-oriented headline. Create a content-rich site that provides valuable, useful, and interesting information your prospects are interested in.

Step 3: Demonstrate Your Uniqueness

Emphasize your uniqueness to make your Web site stand out and set you apart from your competition. Attract your audience with a benefit that is different from other Web sites.

What is your distinct advantage? What separates you from your competition? What is distinctive about your offer?

Visiting competing Web sites will give you ideas about content, design, and features you may need for your Web site. Then, develop a site that's better than your competition.

Here are some questions that will help you formulate your uniqueness.

Plan your web site for profits. Determine what you want to accomplish with your web site, who your ideal audience is, and what makes your online business unique. Only after implementing these steps are you ready to start developing your web content.