Copyright 2006 Joe McVoy
Most web site owners who say they want more traffic don’t
realize they’re not ready for it and the more money they spend
to get it, the more they’ll lose!
Is that you?
If you haven’t done the four things on this list, the traffic
you bring to your web site won’t do you much good and the more
you spend to get it, the more money you’ll waste.
Here’s the list:
1. SET UP TRACKING FOR EVERY STEP OF YOUR SALES PROCESS
You need to be able to test and improve the effectiveness of
your landing page, your sales letter or home page and your “call
to action” whether a sale or an opt-in to a newsletter. You
can’t test what you don’t track.
When you split-test each step of your sales process, your web
site is the worst it will ever be right now. Since you’ll always
be testing against something new, you’ll only make changes to
your headline, copy, offer or other aspects of your site if they
beat what you have now.
2. DESIGN YOUR SITE TO CREATE A VISITOR ACTION
To get your visitors to take the action you want, you should
consider a few things in it’s design that many businesses don’t.
They are:
- Design your site so that a visitor knows what your site is all
about in second. Have only one goal per page - multiple goals
and many choices lead to inaction. If you have several goals,
just use a different page for each.
- Use a headline that tells your customer what you can do for
them (NEVER use your company name as a headline!)
- Have a “call-to-action” that asks them to do something. In
most cases, you’ll do best by “selling” them on opting in to get
something free instead of asking for the sale right away.
- Make sure to capture your visitor’s contact info so you can
continue to market to them until they are ready to buy. Not
everyone is ready to buy now and they may need to develop more
trust in you before they buy. And, that’s not all…
Your web site should not be about you but tell your visitor what
you can do for them. Answer these questions from your visitor’s
point of view for every page: (1) why should I come to your site
- what problem(s) will you solve for me? (2) why should I take
whatever action you are asking for? (3) is there any reason I
should ever come back?
It’s critical that you do NOT let your web designer make changes
to your sales page for search engine optimization. Save that for
other pages. Your sales page should be optimized to get your
visitor to take the action you want, not for SEO.
3. OPTIMIZE YOUR CONVERSION RATE BEFORE YOU SPEND MONEY ON
TRAFFIC
You can get visitors in an hour using pay-per-click with Google
or Yahoo). Get your conversion rate from visitors to
sales/opt-ins to a respectable level through testing before you
spend a lot of money on traffic.
I’ve changed a headline on a Google ad for a client and had it
increase the results by a factor of 10. Going through the
testing process can make the difference whether you make money
or not. Google provides the tools to track your pay-per-click
campaigns and their new “Google Analytics” system lets you track
everything you can think of - and, on top of that, it’s free.
(It’s still in beta testing so type “Google Analytics” into
Google to find the link.)
4. KNOW YOUR VISITOR VALUE
Before you pay for visitors with any substantial traffic
generating program, you need to know what a visitor is worth.
This is a combination of what your average sale or lead is worth
divided by how many visitors it takes you to get a sale/opt-in.
If your visitors are worth $1.00, it doesn’t make much sense to
pay $3.00 to get one, does it?
Once you know that number, you will want to continually
split-test and work to increase your visitor value.
Now that your site solves a problem(s) for your customers, is
easy to navigate and you know what a visitor is worth, you can
buy traffic because you’ll know which traffic sources are
profitable and which are not.
DON’T BE MISLEAD
The Internet offers a wonderful opportunity to do scientific
marketing. Since everything can be tracked, you can make
marketing decisions based on hard facts instead of opinions.
If your webmaster doesn’t know how to do this, find one that
does. The capability to improve your web results is readily
available and is not expensive, so why not take advantage of it?
Most small businesses don’t even know about this, so use it to
get an advantage over your competitors!