In a traditional online commerce model, expanding your product line is simple. All you have to do is develop all of the materials you need to effectively market your product, expand your website to include those materials, and promote your new product in much the same way as you promoted the old one.

But adding a new product when your website model is based on direct response is more complicated. Remember our basic rules about direct response marketing: don't distract customers from your product with unnecessary information or external links, don't attract unnecessary traffic to your page, and keep your website simple by putting no more than three clicks between your front page and the start of the purchasing process. A new product on your existing site makes it much more difficult to follow these basic rules: your new product will necessarily distract people from your old product, will raise the bandwidth cost for your existing product without converting that higher traffic into sales, and will make your site more complicated to navigate.

So in order to expand your product line, you need to get creative and think about investing a bit more money. (Fortunately, the successful marketing of your first product should mean that you have that money to invest.) There are two basic options:

• Build a new direct response site for your new product.
• Build a new front page (at a separate URL) for your business and link to both of your products from that front page.

Whichever of these you choose, you'll need to build a new direct response site for the new product in order to achieve the same results. If you choose the latter option, you may need to do some work on your existing site as well in order to preserve the three-click rule: a front page, whatever its merits, adds an extra click to your total before the customer can purchase a product. What all of this gives you, however, is an easy way to promote all of your products while promoting your overall company as well. You can promote the link to your front page in order to promote your entire product line and raise awareness of your company, while you can still promote your existing products directly to targeted markets. If you're willing to do the work, it can be a win-win situation.

Ultimately, how you expand your business is up to you. And that's the beauty of direct response website marketing. The ability to convert viewers into sales gives you an excellent revenue stream--which gives you a decent stake of money--which gives you the power to decide whatever you want to do in your life and with your business. And if you follow our advice, you'll have that power--and you'll be a success at direct response website marketing

Sean Mize