Starting a supplements web site

If you do a search for supplements on Google you'll get over 163,000,000 results. On MSN.com it's over 23,000,000. So starting a business selling supplements through a website is not going to be a walk in the park. But it can be done.

Your best chance at success in this field is to target a specific segment of the supplements business. You could focus strictly on muscle building supplements or weight loss supplements.

Usually when a business decides to start a web site selling a product, they determine the products they intend to sell, and then figure out how to drive traffic to the site. So for a business selling supplements they would research the term supplements. Using the various tools on the internet you find that the term, supplement is searched about 200,000 times per month. But you would also find that nutritional supplement is searched over 400,000 times.

Your initial reaction upon seeing this may be, "Great, all I have to do is rise near the top on all of the search engines for the term nutritional supplements and supplements and I'll have the chance to sell to 600,000 people every month. If I only get 5% or 30,000 and make $3 per order I'll make almost a million dollars every year." The logic is sound, but it's a little more difficult than just putting up a supplements web site and having a successful business.

Because the term is such a high frequency key phrase hundreds of people are already trying to capitalize on it. That means the competition is going to be tough. You can be successful with the high frequency words, but it's going to be tough and it's going to take a least a year or two.

So what's the solution? Instead of only targeting the big terms like, nutritional supplement, supplements, and herbal supplements, you focus your initial energy on what's called long-tail searches, and less popular words. Then you build your business and the importance of your site around these searches and products.

Not only will you get business faster, your chances of converting a search to a sale are also higher. Why? Because you're offering exactly what the customer is looking for. Let's compare two lists. The first list are the keywords most people would focus on, and they'd have the smallest chance for success starting out. The second list is our long-tail, and less popular supplement searches, cut we can actually get much more traffic, better targeted, and in shorter time frame.

List 1
nutritional supplement
supplement
herbal supplement
diet supplement
weight loss supplement
body building supplement
vitamin supplement

List 2
nutritional weight loss supplement
herbal diet supplement
herbal nutritional supplement
herbal weight loss supplement
natural muscle building supplement
herbal vitamin supplement
herbal anti aging supplement

Both lists are for just 7 terms. The first list would generate much more traffic if your website were at the top of the search engines. The second list is much more specific, will generate thousands of visitors and you could attain a good position within a couple of months on most of the search engines. The first list could take years.

But that's just with a one to one comparison. You'll notice that all of the searches on the second list are composites of the first list. You can, and should, create a list ten times bigger than the first. This has two benefits for your supplements web site business. The first is of course you target more words and thus more customers. The second is your site has more pages. The more pages your web site has with related terms, the better you're going to do in the search engines.

Starting a successful web site for any type of business is a complex task. You should focus your energy on the specific pieces your best at. If you want to attempt marketing the site yourself there is an article on affordable search engine optimization here. But we recommend starting the process with a professional firm. This site is optimized by intralink. They are a web marketing firm and specialize in long-tail searches.

Other important factors when starting your supplements business

Once you've picked your targeted supplement products and keywords you should start to research your competition. Look at some of the other supplement web sites and see how well they perform in the search engines.

When you build your site, make it easy for the customer to buy from you. A few things come in to play. First you'll want to add information about the specific supplements you're trying to sell. Instead of just adding a page with a picture of the bottle and the price, offer the customer a reason to buy it. For each product create or find an article you can post on the page with 300-750 words explaining what the supplement does and why it's a benefit to them.

Make sure your fitness or supplements website is clean and easy to navigate. Every page should have a link with your contact information, and a very easy to find link to buy the products. Because you're going to have potentially thousands of products you'll want a data base driven site to quickly add and edit new products. That's fine but make sure the home page, and the informational pages are done in clean html. No flash, java, or .asp buttons. Certainly don't use frames in your site. Each page should be different in terms of content and each page should have a different title that is related to the product your selling.