If there’s one thing that I’ve been paying closer attention to over the past 6 months, its conversions. In this post I’ll be sharing some of the things I’ve learned that have helped me make more money from my sites and some of the thing that do just the opposite!
Conversions is a strange thing in the internet marketing world, it seems to be that most people are too busy trying to get as much traffic to their websites as they possibly can, that they neglect to pay much, if any, attention to the conversions.
I need to say that I was guilty of being like this too, until more recently that is, when I started to test a few things and realized the power of conversions. To put it simply, if you get good at converting traffic you need a heck of a lot less of it to make good money!!
Causing Confusion
Perhaps the most common thing that people make the mistake of is confusing the visitor to their site. You really don’t have long to engage the visitor to your site. If they don’t like what they see because they don’t know what to do, then you lose!! You’ve got about 2-3 seconds for a person to go through this procedure of deciding to engage or leave.
So what you need to do is ask yourself, what is it that you ideally want the visitor to do when they arrive. If its not obvious what that is, then you’re going to confuse them. Classic ways to confuse people are having double and triple column websites, where the visitor simply doesn’t know where to place their eyes! Or having more than one call to action on the page trying to get their attention.
If you want them to opt in to an email list, then make that very obvious and not hard to find. If not then leave them to engage in the content you have. Don’t have all sorts of other things trying to distract them or they will not engage at all!
Also make sure you have VERY easy to find and use website navigation. Use dynamic menus so you only show the visitor other relevant content to what they are currently viewing.
Call to action
I recently spent some time with a friend and went over her site, and one of the things I noticed straight away was the lack of a solid call to action. We soon established what the primary goal of the site was meant to be, and also realized that the way the site was at that moment was not doing a great job in achieving that.
The sites purpose was to gather a lead that would hopefully turn into a consultation for this person. The problem was that the lead capture process was weak. So we overhauled the site, and made the top center section of the home page totally dedicated to this ‘call to action’. The result was that when someone landed on the page it was very obvious what they need to do.
I made a mistake with my call to action recently on my eCommerce store, which I am in the process of fixing right now. I have a beautiful slider on the home page, it rotates 5 slides, each showing different products I sell. However I noticed that although the graphics were brilliant, I failed to place a button in the slider that the visitor could click!!! How silly, I show them the product but then leave it to them to find it on the site. Needless to say I am fixing this today….(continued on page 2, click link below).
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Good point Matt.
I think the biggest problem is too many ads and links on pages.
I notice people adding more and more banners as if it will give them more clicks, nah.
Thanks for sharing
Matt Carter Reply:
February 6th, 2013 at 5:35 am
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Hey Darnell,
Yeah too many distraction of any sort are not great!
Thanks
Great tips as always Matt, Ive gotten to the conclusion that a website is just like a store or restaurant, you go in and if it`s nice and and all that you stay a bit longer. If its dirty and cheaply designed, I`ll look fast for what I`m looking for and if it`s not there I`ll leave in a bit of a hurry making sure never to come back.
Matt Carter Reply:
February 6th, 2013 at 5:35 am
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Well said!
I think the hardest thing in conversion optimization is to keep things simple and stupid. Most of the times you want to ad a lot of bells and whistles which makes things confusing. My best advise is if you want to offer everything is to make a niche site for all your offers so you can keep it simple for your visitors and the will know you are the expert in that particular niche.
Matt Carter Reply:
February 6th, 2013 at 5:36 am
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I agree
Boris C. Reply:
February 6th, 2013 at 8:12 pm
Yes, better to keep it simple in order to cater to most audience because when you make things complex, only web-savvy audience won’t have problems with it while less web-savvy audience will probably be more confused.
Great points Matt. Regarding the slider on the home page of the eCommerce website I ended up removing it completely. This is my personal experience; I tried with a product, a brief description of the offer (like “get 20% discount on blue widgets until February 10”) and a big bright yellow button with written inside “I want one” and then I changed it with “Add to Cart” but in both cases the bounce rate decreased significantly every time I removed the slider. So, I let the slider off.
Matt Carter Reply:
February 6th, 2013 at 5:36 am
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Thanks for sharing, will have to test this myself
good points about the ecommerce store. I will have to add buttons to my sliders on the homepage after reading this too! thanks
Thanks Matt
Great tips! I am going to be updating my current sites with these helpful tips.
So easy to get distracted and miss the ‘call to action ‘ – as you rightly say Matt !
If it’s too busy, people get confused and leave .
Love your posts – thanks !
Thanks for the tips. Those flashy banners can be really annoying.
That is so true ! There was studies that if you give your perspective buyers too many choices to choose from they leave without making a choice, but if you give them two options to choose from or click they then will make a choice and click threw.
Great post Matt thanks ..
Good website design is hard. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Like all things, for some people it comes naturally and it’s like an afterthought. Don’t listen to those people.
I have a MS in computer science, and I took a couple courses on writing to web, and human-usability on sites. I thought it’d be CAKE making a site that’s great looking and easy to use. NOPE.
I can analyze a site decently – “This is bad because of XYZ” but I often have a great deal of trouble coming up with specific solutions.
Small bite-sized tips like this are a big helper that lets you figure out the worst parts.
I am now going through the long process of laying out what pages/sections my site should/will have, and how they should be organized. A step I should have done a year ago.
Live and learn!
Great post Matt always great content on your site I have learned ways to improve my conversions from this post.
I have another question, since you are an experienced product creator and have released very good products on click bank in the past and still to this day, I was wondering if you could create a post or some info on how you get affiliates to promote your product right from the launch of a new product?
I see your new ewealth blueprint is top in its category with high gravity since its release, how did you do this so quick? do you have a list of affiliates on hand whenever you release a product?
It would be great if you would come out with a course or something of that nature on how to do a successful product launch. I guess your list as something to do with it because you always pit out quality products if you could fill us in on info like this that would be amazing!
Thank Matt.
Matt – some interesting points here. I have a couple of questions though:
1. I’m not clear what your free videos cover – would it not be a good idea to state this?
2. I can’t seem to find a contact phone number on your site, nor address. Am I missing it somewhere?
I have never left a comment anywhere. But now.
Thanks Matt for putting some thought to this.
I have immediately changed the PAGE NAME and the CALL TO ACTION on the subscribe page (the button was already perfect).
I see, on your own site, you haven’t quite implemented your own tips though… 😉
Great tips Matt as usual, it seems the more we test the more things we need to change lol.
Thanks.
.Andrew.
Matt,
A lack of call to action is a major problem on most websites. This was a good wake up call for me. Thanks
Hi Matt,
That is truth without conversion you don’t have business… that I learn 6 month ago when I was doing some consulting for a brand new company… It was very though since I figure out why conversion is so important!
thanks
As always, I value your helpful tips Matt!
It’s uncanny how you write your blog posts at just the right time! Almost always I need a wake up call (i.e. a reminder how to do things even better) or need to learn a few more new SEO and conversion techniques.
Thank you once again.
As usual great article, thanks Matt
The points that you have mentioned in this article are very useful in engaging visitors and improving website conversions. I believe that a website should have a specific objective and all the different elements in the website should try to fulfill that objective.
Awesome tips!!!
Great points Matt.I have learned ways to improve my conversions from this post.Thanks for the share.
I’m just here to say you always deliver such great content. I love your products too… Keep it up Matt!! I bet you have made lots of money hehe 🙂
regards from Argentina…
A bit off topic Matt but wondering about the thought process behind splitting your articles between multiple pages now. Is it purely to increase CTR / visitor engagement for the search engines or some other purpose I’m not aware of? Are most people clicking through to the next part of the article?
Thanks Matt, absolutely love your stuff.
Matt Carter Reply:
February 10th, 2013 at 8:05 am
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Yeah it is to increase Page views, which helps with SEO
Hi Matt,
I always pick up great points and something I didn’t know or think about from your content.
Aside from the SEO, I like the way you have split your post into two sections by leaving the link to the next part at the end of the first post. I’ve been putting Part 1, Part 2 in the heading, but I think your way is much better!
Regards,
Jude Banks
Thanks Matt for such great content! Awesome Post!
Matt,
Great article! Unfortunately, I have been guilty of a lack of “call to action” too many times in some of my posts and pages. This is usually just as easy as setting up a plugin with some coding in it for a clickable image to my subscriber page. I set this up on all of my blog posts, and it has been quite a dramatic change. Basically, it comes down to walking people through your content and keep them engaged.
Thanks again.