This is a guest post by Ray Wilson from Recipe4Marketing.com
Oftentimes we get so obsessed with traffic that we completely forget to improve the conversion rate of our website.
The reality is simple: you’re wasting your time if you don’t properly monetize your website.
[note]You could have a low conversion rate like 0.5% and make a few sales, but why not maximize the conversion rate to something like 5% and make a ton more sales.[/note]
That’s why I’m giving you a few principles to think about …and I hope you’ll understand how important they are.
Your job is to put these principles into practice and see more money in your bank account.
Here’s what I like you to think about…
Make It Easy For The Reader
Too many people make huge mistakes here.
They usually put way too much on their website. Doesn’t matter if it’s a blog, or a squeeze page or a niche website or whatever.
The problem is that they turn their website into a promotional material, an advertisement.
Don’t assume that if you put more advertisements and more links on your website, you’ll make more sales. Quite the opposite, you’ll make much less money.
Therefore what I suggest is to keep it as simple as possible.
It doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice the cool design of your website, it just means that you need to be a minimalist.
A good practice is to remove all the clutter in the sidebar like links to other websites, archive, recent comments, latest tweets, etc.
Instead, add 2-3 links or add as a click-able image to your very best articles or resource pages. You can leave the popular articles too.
Of course, you need a optin box too.
Write For Customers
Another biggie.
In general, nobody cares about your business and what you have to do to make money, all they care about is themselves.
Because of this reason, you need to write your content targeted specifically to help your readers. That’s all.
Don’t even think about bragging or adding too many details about yourself.
When a new visitor comes to your websites, he/she wants to know what’s in it for them. They want to know if you can help them somehow with their problem.
And they don’t need your story or your achievements, they want the solution to their problems.
If you can give the solution, then you have gained their trust. Now they can become your potential buyers.
Deliver Your Promise Immediately
Even though you may have the greatest solution to their problems, you really need to deliver on the promise immediately.
If you don’t deliver immediately, then you risk to lose the customer.
Why?
Because people on the internet, especially today, are very impatient, very, very impatient. They want instant gratification. Like – NOW!
Therefore, it’s your job to give them what you promise on the homepage or on any other webpage as soon as possible.
A great mistake most internet marketers make is that they make their potential buyers work. Yeah, they make them work …which is a bad idea.
You definitely don’t want to do that because every obstacle you place between the customer and your solution costs you big time.
The simple solution: if you’d like to give your readers something for free, then give it fast, and don’t make them work for it.
Copy Needs Emotion And Passion
Boring doesn’t sell well.
Your writing needs to consist of something more than plain words. You need to package it with emotion and passion.
Unless someone is absolutely desperate for a solution to their problem, you need to write interesting and entertaining content.
Everyone has a different approach; their unique selling point; but if it sounds like something copied from a college textbook, then it’s really bad.
Include A Valuable Free Bonus
You could offer your readers anything for free, but it definitely should be of high value.
And even better if it is of high perceived value like a video or an audio. Just adds to the credibility more.
But, if you share your strategies in a report that you offer free, it doesn’t mean the content must be poor. No! the e-book must be so valuable that you could potentially easily sell it for money.
It depends on the price of the products you sell, but if you, basically, sell $100 products, then you could write a $27-$37 ebook which you offer for free.
The advice really must be golden. The better the free advice you share with others, the more willing they will be to buy your products and pay higher prices.
I am acknowledge that mess is a big issue. I almost always convert away from a site if there happens to be bazillion banner ad campaigns in the sidebar or if the webpage has so much things on it that I do not even know where to start??? Thanks for sharing me..
Great summary of conversion rate optimization! I’m an SEO guy, but CRO is becoming more and more important, working in tandem with search engine optimization is now absolutely critical. I’ve become much more interested in A/B testing, because a #1 ranking doesn’t mean anything if you don’t convert!
Nice work!
Tommy
One other area to think about – what are the competitors doing, particularly folks who either:
1) are the top guys in the niche – I’ve spend a couple of evenings reverse engineering the customer experience, marketing, and advertising placement strategy for my top 5 competitors and learned a bunch from them. Particularly about advertising placement; many good insights there are counter-intuititive (less is more , etc.)
2) may not be the top guy in the space but you can get really good information about their performance from a source like flippa (due to a recent sale). For example, my wife told me someone in an adjacent niche was clearing $X in adsense per month (which was an order of magnitude over our statistics). A couple of hours later, I was able to isolate the top 3 – 4 things they were doing to get this result (mix of placement and traffic targeting) and am already sketching out some A/B testing for our site.
There are a lot of moving parts to building a good converting website; the story about the three blind men and the elephant is applicable. I’ve seen players with great SEO but lousy conversion, good conversion but lousy pay-per-click results, and so-so front end results but great value per sale due to partnerships. The more competitors and folks in adjacent spaces you look at, the more parts of the elephant you will see…
I agreed with you Ray, the five points you mentioned were very important. Beside these, we should add more content and write for the reader, not the search engine. We can also offer free gift to the reader, like a free and unique ebook.
Totally agree with the whole ‘delivering a promise immediately’… People aren’t willing to go searching for this promise – hit them with it as soon as they hit the page. If they can’t find it on your site, they will on someone elses 🙂
Thanks for the great tips. I first started looking at conversion rates on my sites a few years ago and the impact that some small changes can have is huge. I always ask myself “would I buy this?” and if you can answer that question honestly, you will know if there is work to do. Keep making the content better quality, more targeted, play with the wording and layout and soon you will answer “yes” every time!
Hi Ray,
Thanks for this amazing tips on fixing leaks on your website. Totally agree about keeping a cool-looking website with less advertisements. Honestly, I hate seeing tons of Ads on a website. It’s very annoying. Ads aren’t bad but not to the extent that’s too much in the eye.
-Drew
Yes you should never have a lot of advertisements on your websites. It is also very irritating when there are too much floating e-mail subscriptions forms on your site or blog. Always make sure that you have more content than links to other sites and affiliates. That way even the search engines will know that you have a good blog.
Its so true that people are reading for themesleves. The more value you can create for others the more people are going to click on your links.
While improving your conversion percentage is important, too many people try to focus on it too early. While improving your conversions from 1% to 2% is great, if you only have 10 visitors per day then it’s not really much of a gain compared to if you have thousands of visitors. The other benefit of waiting until you have a steady stream of readers before focusing on conversions is that you’ll have a bigger sample size to determine what actually works and what is just coincidental data.