Independent professionals often have a lot to tell their marketing coaches about who they are and what they do. With a little prodding from their friendly copywriters, they quickly recognize their features and benefits.

But the toughest website marketing challege for most professionals comes when they have to come up with an answer to the question, “What do you want your website visitors to do? Do you want them to sign up for your ezine, set up a consultation, or join a group? And once you know what you want them to do, you have to (gasp!) ask them to do it.

That’s right. Try to be bold. When it’s time to ask for the order, you can’t be shy. You have to come right out and tell your visitors what you want them to do. Your Call to Action is probably the most important factor in converting browsers to buyers.

But surprisingly, many websites skip this step altogether. They tiptoe around the topic but leave their visitors waiting for the other shoe to drop. What they should do is include some Calls to Action, such a ‘Buy now,’ ‘Don’t delay,’ or ‘Every day you wait, you are losing money.’

I argue, “When you create a strong Call to Action, you are actually helping your buyers.” Here’s why:

(1) We are all distracted. We’re bombarded with all kinds of information. Two minutes after we see a sales letter, we’ve forgotten it. So you have to create interest, enthusiasm and maybe anxiety. And you have to get the customer to take action right away.

(2) You make it easy for buyers to make a decision and get what they want. They don’t have to scrounge all over your website to find a form.

(3) You protect your buyers from the consequences of their own procrastination. When buyers hear of a new career,
most common first reaction is, “Maybe later.” You have to give customers a reason to say, “Better do it now.”

And here’s where you are probably helping them, if they really fit your target market. For example, I was invited to attend a special event. I went to the event page. And like everyone else, I said, ‘Maybe later.’

When I finally go around to signing up, I found I had just missed the deadline. I wish the event promoters had highlighted the deadline and warned me. I wish they had created a sense of urgency. Instead, I missed an evening and an event I would have enjoyed immensely.

Don’t treat your buyers like that!

Recently I’ve received several emails with questions like these: “I’m revising my web site. The web designer wants my copy next week. I’m still figuring out my niche.” Or, “I can’t talk about content because I don’t have a web designer.”

When I read these comments, I remember the very first time I needed a web site. I too began by searching for a web designer. He created a design that looked very professional. But when I finally created (and re-created) my content, the design didn’t communicate my message.

Here’s what I didn’t know. Your web site is a direct response marketing tool. It’s not a brochure or even the kind of ad you’d find gracing the distinguished pages of the New Yorker magazine. So before you hire a designer, you need to work through these 5 steps.

(1) Recognize whether your market is hungry…and where they go to buy food. Do they buy on the Internet? What motivates them to hit the buy button? Are they feeling pain, passion or both?

(2) Make your web site sticky, not memorable. Give readers a reason to leave their names and email addresses. So set up your “subscribe” page and giveaway first.

I you have a speaking date and no time to put up a whole web site, set up a professional looking subscription page. Give away an e-zine, e-course or single 10-tips download. Then when the rest of the site is ready, send out an email to your subscribers.

Setting up an “under construction” page is like wearing a scrunchie in the 21st century (or opening a restaurant and serving stale bread and water while you promise “Gourmet meals served as soon as we finish the kitchen”).

(3) Your message and target market dictate your design. Your graphics, layout, color scheme, navigation and menu will all be influenced by your decisions about market and message.

How will visitors move through your site? What sequence of pages will motivate them to buy? What metaphors will capture your message vividly (so visitors “get it?” Will they respond best to a mood that is soothing, moving, inspirational or flamboyant?

Most important: Will visitors read your message easily? Will they skim over your best testimonials because you didn’t highlight them in the design? Will they see your subscription box as soon as they arrive on a page?

One of my clients buried her glowing testimonials in a sidebar. She used green 8-point type on a yellow background. They’re beautiful but who’s going to risk eyestrain to read them?

Bottom Line: Web design and development will be critical to your project - -but not as the first step. Experienced web developers have told me, “I prefer to work with clients who have content in hand and know what they need.”

And your logo? Great idea…after you’ve worked with some clients and have a clear idea what you stand for. Nearly everyone I know wishes they’d waited to choose a logo and create expensive visuals.

If you want to get more clients, you probably have an ezine with a subscriber list. But what if you are just starting up your ezine and your list is small? Or what if you have alway done face-to-face networking and now you’d like to expand to online marketing?

When you’re starting a new website or targeting a new audience, an e-course might make more sense. For example, suppose you are not sure if your market will be responsive enough to invest time in an ezine. And once you promise an ezine, it’s hard to cut back and decide not to publish.

Or maybe you want to go on vacation or deal with a personal challenge. Your website will still be attracting visitors. Some of those visitors will be potential clients. There’s no need to let all those visitors disappear without a trace. You can capture their names and email addresses with an e-course.

An e-course is a series of emails, each containing a short piece of information. You call each email a lesson. You set up a system to deliver these emails to those who opt-in with a specific request for your e-course.

But you have to follow a few guidelines.

1. Begin by writing a sales letter to promote your e-course. Why will readers want to sign up?

2. Choose a straightforward topic that addresses a specific, painful challenge. “Never be afraid of cold calls again” will probably draw more readers than “Introduction to sales.”

3. Keep courses short. Most readers tend to tune out after five to seven days.

Once you are established in your market, your readers will welcome longer courses.

4. Time your message for every day or every other day. Readers have short memories. They’ll forget you if you wait too long between messages.

5. Use copywriting strategies to hold reader interest and motivate them to view you as a resource when they’re ready to take stronger action.

6. Aim for one take-away and one action step in each message. You’ll give readers a taste of what to expect if they sign up to work with you. Most won’t actually take these steps but they’ll understand where you’re coming from.

7. Sign up with a mailing system that hasn’t been universally banned for overzealous mailings. There’s no way you can manually track who’s on which lesson. And you’ll want an automated record of subscribers so you can follow up.

Independent professionals often struggle to develop landing pages that convert browsers to buyers. Many fail because they don’t realize that landing pages are not the place to display your creative talents. They follow formulas that are have been tested over and over again. They use very specific copywriting and design techniques. And they are completely open about their purpose: getting visitors to take one specific action before leaving the page.

(1) Decide exactly what ONE action your visitors should take. Do you want them to sign up for your ezine? Buy a product? Call for a free sample consultation? Develop the page to motivate readers to take that one action.

(2) Help visitors resist temptation to click away to another page. If you have a traditional website, your home page is designed to motivate readers to click away to other pages. If you are a service professional you want visitors to go to your “about” page and your “services” pages. But your landing page should be completely self-sufficient.

(3) Create an invisible design that readers won’t notice because they’re so busy reading the message. Choose black type on a white background. Use images to direct readers to follow the message you create in your text: arrows, underlines, big exclamation points. Handwritten marginal notes have become trendy.

(4) Create headlines and copy to solve the visitor’s painful problem. People browse for fun stuff while they’re sipping cappuccino in a live bookstore. They go online when they’re lying awake all night, wondering how they’ll ever get answers to their toughest challenges.

(5) Make the copy easy to read. Use bullets, lots of white space, colors and headlines. On the web, most readers will scan your copy. Some readers will just skim through the bold and highlighted copy, all the way to the end. So apply bold type to the phrases you want your readers to notice. Then read through the copy to see if your bold text makes sense without reading anything else.

(6) Force your readers to choose. They can leave the page but if they click on anything, they’ll go to your shopping cart. Period.

Independent professionals often want to include a link to their free ezines or even another product. If you do, then create an exit pop-up with the message, “Not ready? Then sign up here…”

(7) Direct traffic to your landing page. Whether you use Pay-Per-Click, article marketing, press releases or any other traffic building technique, send readers to your landing page, not your home page.

Domain names and hosting have become cheap. So many savvy marketers create keyword-rich domains for every product they want to promote heavily. Then they create 1-page web sites with just the landing pages.

In case you need another reason to learn copywriting: The whole idea of creating a website or ezine is to attract clients, right? But I’m constantly surprised to find websites that not only fail to attract clients. They actually insult their readers.

Example 1: Writing for his ezine, a self-styled marketing expert compared troublesome clients to a serious fatal disease, which he named. Get rid of the disease and restore the health of your business, he advised.

He acknowledged that he could be criticized for bad taste. No kidding.

The author has a good point. it’s important to screen clients and your website can actually do this for you. But you can frame the challenge as skimming the cream, cherry-picking or some other metaphor that suggests you love your wonderful clients. No need to insult those who are all wrong for you. Maybe they’ll be just right for you someday.

Example 2: Writing in her ezine, a well-known consultant vented her frustration with audiences who moan about advertisements on her complimentary calls. As she moved from presentation to conversation mode, she heard some loud groans along with, “Do we have to listen to this?”

Hopefully we all realize these teleseminar calls always come with a brief promotion. Otherwise why would anyone offer them? My own audiences have been gracious and friendly, so I never hear so much as a whimper of complaint.

But this consultant treated her ezine readers to a rant. “Would you rather see me on the street begging?” she asked.

Gimme a break. I would just share my announcements, ignore any complaints and maybe keep the call in organizer mode a few minutes longer. There’s a good reason most of us mute our participants these days.

Chances are the moaners are also alienating their fellow audience members. And while they’re loud, I bet only 1 or 2 are doing all the talking. The rest loved the class and want to hear more.

Example 3: One copywriter’s home page sneers, “You think you can write your own copy? No way.” And a web designer’s email advertisement warned, “If you are like so many other coaches you need every last cent to build your business and keep food on the table.”

Okay, we want to target a target market’s pain. But we can still honor them.

“Sure, you can write your own copy,” you can say, “But are you ready to invest countless hours and thousands of dollars to learn from the pros? And is copywriting the best use of your time?”

And if you’re worried about putting food on the table, you probably need to grab a job or find a business that attracts clients faster than catnip attracts cats and peanut butter attracts dogs.

When we catch ourselves grinding our own axes, it’s time to review the basics. Why did we want to do this in the first place? Do we need an energy boost?

I have to resist writing this way myself after I’ve had a bad day or week. At those times, I find I’m better off escaping — walking the dog or reading my favorite murder mystery — instead of writing articles, ezines and website content.