Archive for March, 2008

The answer is you need to double your conversion rate.

What’s your conversion rate at the moment 0.25% or 0.5%? Don’t know? Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that perform a desired action. In a case of an E-Commerce website that is a purchase, in a case of a traditional business it can be downloading a whitepaper or filling out a contact form. A 1% conversion rate means that out of every 100 visitors that your website gets, 99 walk away empty-handed. Look at it in another way: to double your overall conversion rate, you just need to increase the conversion rate in 4 other parts of your website by 25%. If we take an E-Commerce website as an example to double your conversion rate you would only need to:

- Increase the number of people reacting to your ad by 25%
- Increase the number of people getting past the landing page by 25%
- Increase the number of people that add a product to a shopping cart by 25%
- Increase the number of people that make a purchase by 25%

To make these improvements can be very simple to. To increase your landing page conversion rate by 25%, you would just have to make a 2.5% improvement to ten of the following things:

- your headline
- your introductory text
- your guarantee
- your pictures
- your usability
- your navigation
- your products
- your pricing
- your offers
- your testimonials
- your “call to action”
- your site layout
- your returns policy,
- etc…

Start testing today! To start optimizing your most important web pages you need to include the following things in your online marketing arsenal:

- Usability testing – allows making your website’s content more accessible and more friendly to your audience.
- A/B testing – allows you to test two landing pages against each other in real-time. For example, you can test two different headlines and choose the most effective. A/B testing benefits: rapid, simple to design, inexpensive to produce, easy to understand results.
- Multivariate testing – allows you to run the equivalent of thousands of split tests simultaneously. In one test, you’ll be able to test many variables at the same time, and learn what changes have the most impact.

Technorati Tags: conversion rate, double my sales, website optimization

1. Is your software/website developer promising you an unrealistic project end date? If you make your plans around that date, what will it cost YOU if they do not deliver?
2. What is the project end date based on and what are the major time constraints? How many people will be assigned to the project?
3. Has your software/website developer set aside time for gathering detailed project specifications? If not, you are building a house without building plans – don’t be suprised if your bedroom does not have a window you wanted.
4. Has your software/website developer set aside enough time for testing by quality assurance team?
5. Has your software/website developer set aside enough time for LIVE testing by small group of actual live users?
6. Will your software/website be tested by INDEPENDENT quality assurance specialist(s)? If the same programmer/programming team is also testing their own work you will end up with a software/website full of bugs. Will you be ok with delaying the launch of your project for months while waiting for bugs to be fixed?
7. Will your software/website developer be willing to fix these bugs after completion?
8. How quickly will they be willing to fix these bugs? Is it spelled out in the agreement? Don’t get stuck waiting for 6 months waiting for a fix while they are working on another project. How much will this cost your business?
9. How long have they been in business? You may get stuck with a software/website that needs fixing or updates and your software developer is nowhere to be found.
10. Will your software/website developer provide training? If so, have it spelled out in the agreement exactly how many hours of training will be provided and where.
11. Will your software/website developer provide help files, tutorials or manuals?

Well, the first question is why not do it myself? The best reason is the same one that causes you to use a mechanic to fix the pinging in your car engine and a plumber to redo the kitchen faucet: experts do a better job.

Second question is what is the purpose of your website? If you don’t know what you want your website to do you are not going to get what you want. Always document your requirements and make sure to outline what you absolutely need and what is nice to have – this will allow a web designer to scale proposal accordingly.

Now that you know what you want your best option is to try to find a company that already built what you want and just has to slightly tweak it to meet your needs. The truth is some people don’t realize how long it takes and how much it costs to build a website. If someone already built what you want you are going to save a lot of time and money.

If you failed to find an existing solution to your problem you will need to have it custom built. You will want a company who built something close to what you need or has the expertise to deliver what you need. There are different flavors of website designers: there are technical specialists who specialize in more complex systems; there are graphic artists that offer website design as one of their graphic design services, there are marketing specialists that offer web design as part of their marketing services, etc. When hiring a web design company make sure that they have an artistic vision as well as the technical and marketing expertise to make your project a success.

The best way to find new customers is to make sure they can find you.

It’s the million dollar question – how do you get people to find your website when they’re actively looking for a business like yours? The reality is, there are hundreds of millions of people searching for products and services on the internet every day and there are many businesses competing for these customers. The best way to ensure your business is seen on the internet is search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the traffic to a website through natural search results. Getting high rankings with search results is essential for maximizing your visibility online and increasing traffic to your site. That’s why more and more companies are realizing that the best way to reach prospective customers is through search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

So what’s the secret to winning at the search engine game? One significant factor is time. More and more businesses are realizing how valuable it is to be seen on search engines. In the US alone, spending on internet advertising including SEO has increased by over $5 billion in the last year. The faster you start doing it the less expensive it’s going to be. But the most important step is to partner with a reputable SEO company.

A lot of companies use what’s called ‘Black Hat’ SEO to bring their customers immediate results, but eventually their website gets banned from search engines altogether. There are also fraudulent companies on the Internet that promise you everything for just $99, but all they do is collect your contact information and then sell it to telemarketers and spam lists.