Increasing (blog radio) The Conversion Ratio Of Your Website
No commentsBy Clemente Oliver
According to the so-called experts, a decent conversion ratio is right around one percent. In other words, one out of every one hundred visitors to your website converts to a sale.
Personally, I think you should ignore what the experts say, and strive to achieve as high a conversion ratio as possible. You should never be satisfied. You should always be looking for ways to improve your conversion ratio. My website consistently converts anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, and often converts as high as ten percent!
Unless you’re selling a big-ticket item and making 200 or more per sale, it’s extremely difficult to make any real money with only a one percent conversion ratio.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and if your website is attracting hundreds or even thousands of visitors a day, then obviously you can do quite well with a one percent or lower conversion ratio.
But what if you don’t have that kind of traffic - and most websites don’t. Then what? What if you’re selling a 20 e-book and you’re only attracting a hundred visitors a day to your website? With a one percent conversion ratio, that means your website is making a measly 20 a day. And believe me, that am much more common than you realize.
However, what if you could improve your conversion ratio to 3 percent, 5 percent, All of a sudden; you’re making 60 to 100 a day with the same amount of traffic. Improve your conversion ratio to ten percent and viola, that 100 a day turns into 200 a day!
So, how do you go about improving your website’s conversion ratio? Here are some tips that should help:
1. Make sure your visitors know what you do, the instant they land on your website. Don’t make them have to guess. Tell them right up front with a benefits-laden headline.
2. Make sure the design of your website is up to par, Make it easy to navigate. Get rid of distracting flash or stupid, meaningless graphics that are a waste of everybody’s time and take forever to load, Simplify your website. Get rid of the flash, graphics and pop-ups!
3. Use psychologically effective colours. The colour blue suggests quality, trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness - the perfect choice for sales pages. Avoid purple, which connotes uncertainty and ambiguity, and only use yellow to highlight key words and phrases. In addition, try to have as much white space as possible. This makes for a much cleaner looking, easier to read website.
4. Get your own domain name. URL’s that contain names like, “Geocities”, “Angelfire” or “Tripod” have amateur written all over them.
5. Prove what you say. Back up your claims with cold, hard, indisputable and verifiable facts
6. Put your name, telephone number and street address on your website
7. Use authentic customer testimonials, complete with first and last names. Just make sure you get your customers permission first.
8. Offer a fair and reasonable money-back guarantee. Thirty days is good. Sixty or ninety days are better!
9. Make it easy for your customers to pay. And offer a variety of payment options. I can assure you, if you’re using PayPal only, you’re losing sales. There are a lot of people out there, I included, and that just won’t do business with PayPal. It’s too much of a hassle!
10. And last but not least, make sure you have a powerful sales letter. A strong and effective sales letter can blast your earnings into the upper stratosphere!
If you aren’t capable of writing that type of sales letter yourself, hire a copywriting expert to write it for you.
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The New World of Digital Video Cameras
By Leopoldo Pennington
With your trusty digital video camera by your side you can capture all those special moments, such as your child’s first steps, your birthday or wedding, or your vacation with family and friends etc.
With so many manufacturers and models available in the digital video market, you may find it confusing trying to choose the perfect one for you. Your choice will, however, depend on the features that you want and how much you are willing to spend.
The most important thing to consider is the format in which your videos will be stored, as the video format determines the video quality. Digital 8 otherwise called D8, Mini-DV, DVD and HDD are the main types of video format that digital cameras offer. Both D8 and Mini-DV are tape-based formats, with the Mini-DV currently offering the highest quality video format to consumers. The DVD format allows direct video recording onto a digital disk, while the HDD type uses internal hard drives where the video is recorded. As the tape format is slowly being phased out by major manufacturers, it is a good idea to invest in disk or hard drive based digital video cameras.
Digital video cameras also come with charged coupled device or CCD imaging sensor. Digital video cameras come with 1-CCD or 3-CCD features. Cameras with 1-CCD suffer from poor video quality, whereas 3-CCD cameras produce much better quality videos. Most professional camcorders use the 3-CCD technology, thus making them more expensive than the other models.
The optical zoom feature of the camcorder lens generally ranges from 10X to 20X. The choice of zoom depends on how close you want to get to the action. Some digital video cameras also allow still photography at various resolutions, and some camcorders offer both video and still photography features. Some digital video camcorders have in-built flash for low-light photography, while some video cameras come with a ‘Night Shot’ feature. Other popular options include external flashlights, external microphones and external storage devices that can be attached onto the camcorder.
Camcorders with longer battery strength is also recommended. Digital video cameras have battery life ranging from 4 to 8 hours of continuous shooting. However, using the zoom or any external devices reduce the battery strength.
All cameras nowadays come bundled with a digital video editing software. But if you are not satisfied with the one provided, you can always buy a better and more expensive editing software from Adobe or any other reputable brand.
Video camera prices today vary from $500 to $4000, with Sony, JVC and Canon being the more popular brands.
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What You Need To Know About Building Your Website
By Clemente Oliver
Last week we talked about how a bad website can do your business more harm than good. That column brought several emails asking what is the key to building an effective business website. I replied with the same answer I always give: building an effective business website is a simple matter of definition.
Before the first graphic is drawn or the first line of code is written, you must define the website’s budget, purpose, target audience, design, navigation, and content. And when that’s all said and done you must define the marketing that will bring visitors to your site.
It sounds easy, but you’d be amazed at how many really bad business websites there are out there. Yours might even be one of them. If so, listen up. For nearly ten years now my company has been building and rebuilding websites for every kind of business you can imagine: from mom-and-pops to multinationals. We’ve designed (or redesigned) a couple hundred websites and along the way I have come to the conclusion that most business websites do a pitiful job of working for their owners.
What’s that, you didn’t know your business website should work for you? You think it should just sit on a server somewhere taking up digital space and collecting digital dust?
Wrong. Every website, business or otherwise, must serve a purpose, and that’s usually where most websites falls short. They serve no purpose because the website owner never gave much thought to it. It’s not the website’s fault. A website is inanimate. It is only what you make it. The only life a website has is the one given to it by its designer and owner. If the human element doesn’t do a good job of defining the building blocks, the website will serve no purpose and eventually die a digital death.
Building an effective business website isn’t brain surgery, thank goodness, since that’s how I make a nice percentage of my living. Building an effective, well-designed website that works for its owner, that actually serves a purpose, is all about definition.
Define the Budget
Every website, no matter how large or small, must have a realistic budget, with “realistic” being the key word. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with a potential client as they listed off the eight million cool things they wanted their website to do, only to find out that their budget was just a few hundred dollars. I always feel like saying, “Well you just wasted three hundred dollars of my time, so here’s your bill…”
Define the Purpose
Every website must have a purpose. Purpose drives everything: the audience, the design, the navigation, the content, and the marketing. I could do an entire column on purpose, but suffice it to say that there are five categories of purpose under which most websites fall: the purpose to inform, to educate, to entertain, to generate leads, to sell, or a combination thereof. If you fail to define the purpose of the website, all else is just wasted effort.
Define the Target Audience
Your target audience refers to that segment of the public that you hope to attract to the site. For example if you sell shoes, your target audience would be anyone with feet. Taking it a step further, if you only sold women’s shoes, your target audience would be women (with feet) Why is defining your target audience so important? If you have no idea who your audience is, how can you expect to design a website that will appeal to them? Your target audience could be customers, investors, job seekers, info seekers, etc. Define your target audience, then figure out how to serve them.
Define the Design
Website design theory has changed over the last couple of years, primarily because the search engines now ignore graphic heavy websites and give preference to those that take a minimalistic approach to design. If you look at some of the big boy websites like GE, Oracle, Raytheon, HP, and others you will see that in many cases the only graphic on the homepage is the company’s logo. Search engines now give higher preference to websites that offer keyword-rich text over flashy graphics. Don’t fight the design trend. You will lose.
Define the Navigation
Bad navigation is the number one reason website visitors abandon a website. Navigation refers to the chain of links the visitor uses to get around your site. If your site has an illogical navigational hierarchy or too few or too many links or is simply impossible to get around, you’ve got problems. We live in a microwave society. We stand in front of the microwave tapping our foot and glaring at our watch wondering why it takes so damn long for a bag of popcorn to pop. Why can’t a three-minute egg be done in thirty seconds? If it takes a visitor more than 3 clicks to get to any page on your site, your navigation needs improvement.
Define the Content
Content refers to the information on your website, be it graphics, text, downloadable items, etc. Since the top search engines no longer use HTML Meta tag data to index websites, it is vital that your website content be text heavy, succinct and well-written to appeal to the search engine spiders.
Define the Build Method
Next, who will build the website for you? Will you do it yourself using one of the point and click website builders or will you hire the kid next door? Will you hire a freelance designer or a professional firm? Budget usually dictates the build method, but be warned, when it comes to website development, you get what you pay for. Sure, the kid next door will throw up a site for you if you buy them a pizza or make your daughter go to the prom with them, but you will end up a with a website that looks like and performs like it was designed by the kid next door.
Define the Marketing
If you build it, will they come? Not on your life, at least not without a good marketing campaign. Your website should become a part of all your marketing efforts, online and off.
Put the website address on your business cards, brochures, letterhead, and all collaterals. Include the address in your ads; print, TV and radio. If you prefer to do online marketing, figure out where your target audience surfs and advertise there.
If marketing is foreign to you, do yourself a favor and call in an expert. Many businesses fail because they simply do not know how to market their products and services effectively. This is also the downfall of most business websites.
Here’s to your success!
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Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 7:05 am and is filed under internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
