Are you about at the end of your internet marketing rope? You’ve had your slick Flash website up for more than five months. You upgraded your site so you could point it at your own domain and take advantage of the Google Analytics and shopping cart features and you simply are not making the kind of money you had expected.
What else do you have to do to turn those visitors into a source of income? What are you missing?
Well for starters it’s a jungle out there. The very reasons that you decided to go into this business is what drove millions of others to make the same decision and thousands of those are direct competitors. Now you’ve fought that battle fairly well and have a number of pages that are ranking on the first page because you’ve spent so much time making your site attractive to the search engine.
But you’re still not converting.
The first thing you probably looked at was your offer. Is it priced too high, did you make a compelling argument for its value or is it placed on the best position on the site? Maybe you even played with the numbers or rewrote the sales copy but nothing changed.
If you have Google Analytics installed you probably poured over the statistics looking for some clue.
Well here’s a tip and also an indicator of what the problem may be. On your Google report there are some very revealing statistics that say volumes about the way your site is perceived by the visitors. Check out the average pages viewed, time on site and bounce rate.
If your page views are under 2 per visitor, if they are staying less than a minute and if your bounce rate exceeds 65% one of a couple of things is happening but it’s safe to say that the visitor’s need isn’t being met or they would stick around longer.
The secret of conversion.
You’ve spent a great deal of time as a website builder optimizing everything for the search engine bots. You know if you don’t appear on the first page you are toast. So you’ve met the needs of technology but have you met the needs of humanity.
That click that you recorded was the result of a human brain deciding that its needs could further be advanced by clicking on a link. It’s a human brain that decides to plunk down plastic and it won’t make that decision if it doesn’t think the cost is worth the benefit.
Are you trying to sell too hard? People don’t like to be sold. The key to conversion is to give first then take. When we say give we mean give them what they want. Make sure the content on the page is relevant to the keyword phrase and it talks to it in depth and not just about your product. Don’t use an in-your-face landing page.
Make some new best pals
What you want to get from them is their permission for you to contact them later via email. You want to build a list. Studies show that unless you get an email address, the chances of that visitor ever returning to your site are less than 3 in 100. How much time and money do you waste if a visitor only comes once, stays 30 seconds and then leaves never to return?
So how do you get them to give you their email address…give them something for free? If you’re selling an eBook offer to send them the table of contents and the first chapter free. All they need to do to get that is enter their name and email address (use an autoresponder). If you sell garden supplies how tough would it be to develop a five page report on “5 Best Gardening Tips for Fall” and offer that up for free?
Once you have their email addresses you can now go visit them rather than relying on them visiting you. Keep giving good stuff and you will develop a relationship based on trust and value. When that’s established, pitch your product and watch your conversions shoot up.
It’s not an overnight process but it’s one that works both online and offline. Just remember that when you make a website that it’s not about you, it is all about the needs of the human being that pays a visit to that site.
