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Every once in a while I stumble onto an analogy that just sticks in my mind. The analogy illustrates a concept or technique so well I can’t help but constantly refer back to the analogy.

For a perfect example, Seth Godin’s analogy in The Big Red Fez did the trick. I can’t think about internet marketing without instantly thinking of his illustration that demonstrated how you can get your visitors to do exactly what you want them to do.

So what was this amazing analogy? Before we discuss it, let’s do some internet marketing 101 for a refresher.

Back to the Basics

We’ve heard the basics a billion times and there’s a reason: mastering internet marketing is found in mastering the basics. Internet marketing tricks and “secret strategies” can be helpful, but they must never be seen as anything but compliments to the two “make money online” basics: writing great content and building links. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

Building the links is for generating traffic. Writing great content is for getting your traffic to take the actions you want them to take. Traffic without content that convinces your visitors to take action is simply a waste. Unless your visitors click ads, sign up for newsletters or check out your sales page, you might as well have never had the traffic. Unless your traffic takes action, you can’t make money.

Keep it Simple, Stupid!

So, what’s the easiest method of getting your traffic to do something? By making it hard to not do it. Your website/blog design should be showcased around the fundamentals of what your visitors should instantly do.

Remember, this is a business. Any page that doesn’t directly make money through readership is nothing more than a “squeeze page,” with its entire purpose to:

1. Build Trust
2. Funnel Traffic

This brings us back to the analogy by marketing genius Seth Godin. How should you organize your design and content? Simple:

Think of your visitors as a bunch of monkeys. These monkeys are at your website for a reason: they want a banana. If you want them to find the banana, just give it to them. On every page it should be obvious what the banana is.

So What Do You Do?

The Internet provides marketers with the greatest opportunity ever known to marketers: the ability to literally hand an eager audience information that they can monetize. They’re coming to you, so feel free to offer them relevant information that you can monetize.

If you want your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, consider putting the opt-in at the bottom of every post. (Better yet: think about having your website store special cookies so that only those visitors who haven’t already signed up for it will see the opt-in field.)

If your main monetization strategy is AdSense, put it up under the left-hand side of the title, with the text wrapping around the ad.

If your main monetization strategy is an affiliate program, wrap up every post and article with a relevant affiliate link.

In the end, just think about what you want your visitors to do in an ideal visit. Now make sure they can do what you want them to do. Give the monkey a banana, and make money while you’re at it.

This is a guest post written by Shaun Connell, the webmaster behind the free internet marketing resource “Make Money“. That link is the banana. Click it. You know you want to.

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