Are your Site’s Conversion Goals Clear?
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Praying for Sales
It’s Internet business definition Monday again and this week we are going to tackle conversion. While thinking about writing this post I realized that before I became an Internet business guy the word had a religious connotation: as in converting someone to _________ [insert religion here].
Conversion online is the same thing!
My simple definition would go something like:
Getting a visitor to your website to take an action that benefits your business
Conversion is the essence of everything in your business. There are a lot of tools, tactics and metrics that you can use to track and improve conversion rates, but that will be for the advanced discussion, for now I just want to get you thinking about conversion as it applies to a website.
The biggest mistake that I see on the web is websites that don’t have a clear conversion goal.
Q: What is the thing that you most want someone who visits your site to do?
If your answer has the word “and” or the word “or” in it, make a big buzzer noise and visualize a giant red X on your screen. WRONG.
You only get one thing as the primary goal for your site. Actually you can have secondary conversion items, but they should be distant in priority or advanced conversion items. More on that in a bit.
Can you guess what my answer is?
Do you see any AdSense on this site? No.
Actually it’s a trick question, because there are levels of conversion. You have different goals for first time visitors and repeat or return visitors. They should form a path. A pleasant journey from a complete first encounter, to a member or subscriber, to a customer, to a repeat customer and finally to a loyal evangelist for your business.
So the answer for me is that I want a first time visitor to sign up for my newsletter so that they can receive communication from me in a more intimate environment. To turn that benefit around to the point of view of my business, I want first time visitors to surrender to me their email address, as in invitation to continue the relationship in another form.
There is an element of trust in a conversion it is a significant accomplishment to get someone to surrender their email address.
For repeat visitors, the stakes go higher. I want them to buy my products or, since my selection is very limited, one of the products that I pimp via affiliate links. If your business is immature, like mine, you probably won’t have the more advanced conversion items in place yet.
All this is a long winded attempt to raise awareness about your website. What is the primary conversion goal for a new visitor? Is it obvious to a new visitor? Really obvious?
Layout
The most influential element in conversion is the layout of your page. Prime real estate should be given to the most important elements. And they should stand out, buy having white or blank space around them…that indicates importance.
Remove Distractions
Conflicting agendas are the primary killers of conversion. Decide what are you conversion items for first time visitors [you only get one, remember] and put it in the most important place on your page. Ideally your conversion item for return visitors would go in the next most important place on your page, but you get a bit of slack here, since return visitors like to discover things, so hiding them in your posts can be very effective too.
Summary
To improve conversion you must:
- Get clear about the ONE goal of your site [newsletter sign-up, AdSense clicks or sell products]
- Design your page layout [and everything else] with this in mind
- Remove distractions
- Remember your primary goal at all times when writing content or making changes on your site
And yes this is just as true for a blog as it is for Amazon.com. Your conversion items could be: have a visitor leave a comment, bookmark my story on Digg etc.
If you’ve been paying attention here, you should be getting the power of having the conversion intention at the top of your mind at all times while working on your site and your business in general.
Jon Symons
Making the connection between religion and Internet business, so you don’t have to.
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
[...] This is where a lot of businesses start to get things wrong by trying to convert traffic to customers. There is an intermediary step…prospects. On this site I convert traffic to prospects, by having them sign up for my newsletter. [...]
Building a Business in 5 Steps | Art Of Money added these pithy words on Sep 14 06 at 5:14 pm