Many things have been written on what a successful commercial website should comprise; what it should look like; the kind of things it should say; and how it should say it. Now while many things have been said on the subject, there are four essentials that absolutely need to be considered among all the other recommendations you may find out there. These essentials are capital to deliver a commercial result, and ensure your website durable recognition.

So what are those four essential things?

- Content

- Traffic

- Pre-selling

- Monetization

I’ll go over each one of these one at a time. So let’s start with the first essential: content. Building information-rich site is at the same time obvious, but also crucial. High quality, unique and relevant content on your site are must haves. Why? Because you want not only to attract visitors, but you also want to generate long-term search engine based traffic. And  quality content is regarded as highly priced by search engines. Beyond these two facts, you need to realize that people look for solutions when searching the web. And INFORMATION leads to SOLUTIONS. Therefore your site needs to provide good quality information that will deliver solutions and keep visitors interested. Satisfy a visitor’s needs, and you’ll reap the rewards. Remember to regularly add new and fresh useful content to create pages valued by your visitors and search engines.

The second esential I want to talk about is traffic. It is what we all want for our website, and there are a few ways to get it:

- You can pay for it

or

- You can optimize it

Paying for it (with PPC campaigns) provides an immediate traffic stream of targeted visitors, but if not well understood it can quickly become quite costly.

The way of optimization means optimizing your site to get organic results. This can be defined as intelligent website construction or SEO. Optimization must be built during the creative process. Hence, the site is built accordingly with the principles that make it search engine friendly, resulting in high natural positions in organic search results, leading to a free traffic flow to your site.

You might consider doing both, but SEO is a must.

The third essential is a very important concept to consider. Don’t sell, but rather pre-sell. You have a site, and you know it has great quality content, and pages that are optimized for indexing. Your going to start getting some traffic and hopefully get an exponential growth of visits. But now an important task lies ahead of you. And that is to convert your visitors into customers. Pre-selling is a warming-up process where you develop trust in what you have to offer. People are more likely to buy from a source they can trust. By over-delivering relevant high value information, without forcing a sale, you will create an atmosphere propice to lead to sales. Remember, you are providing the very information that is the solution the visitor is looking for. Pre-selling creates an open to buy mind set that smoothly brings your visitors to what you have to offer.

The final and last essential is about monetization. This is where you make your offering enticing by introducing and highlighting the many benefits of your product/service, and where you detail exactly how it offers the solution the visitor is looking for. Bring in a strong and consice call to action, tell your visitors how to order, and tell them how they will benefit if they order from you.

In the end these four essentials come to generate targeted free traffic, providing quality information that delivers solutions, hence warming up and pre-selling your visitors, with a strong and concise sales pitch. The perfect combination of implementations to apply for obtaining a succesful website is not wrritten in marble yet, but these 4 concepts introduced above should at least be written on post-its (a different colour post-it for each essential), and glued to your monitor.