by: Mark Flavin
What This Article Shows You:
Traffic conversion is the single most important factor to the success of your business.
That is not a question - it is a fact, and I can prove it.
What exactly is conversion?
Conversion is turning lookers into buyers. It is taking visitors and making them paying customers.
If you don’t have customers - if no one buys your product or service - then your business is a failure.
Evidence: Look at all the "DotCom" (some called them 'DobBomb') companies of the early 2000's. Many of them had plenty of visitors & offered a great service - but most did not have an effective way to turn those visitors in to satisfied paying customers - so they failed.
FACT: You will fail too if you can't convert.
Sorry, but it is the truth - the point of business is to exchange a product or service for money. That is how it has worked since the Ancient Egyptian days - and the Internet did not change that at all. Everyone - no matter if you are online or offline - everyone must convert their visitors into customers - or they will wind up just like the infamous Pets.com (down the drain).
But don't think that we will not continue to provide great traffic creation tips just like we always have.
We will always provide 5-10 traffic creation tips. But additionally, we are going to push the envelope into the just-as-important area of traffic conversion, and also give you many different ways you can use your website to convert those visitors you've worked so hard to get into happy customers.
Think of it this way, your Free traffic Tips Newsletter just got an injection of steroids... and is now even beefier :-)
I would like to share with you some shocking conversion facts that Bryan Eisenberg recently presented:
FACT: "50% of Visitors are LOST because visitors can't easily find content" - Gartner Group FACT: "40% of Repeat Visitors are LOST from negative experience" - Zona Research FACT: "85% of Visitors ABANDON a new site due to poor design" - cPulse FACT: 70% of people who are ready, willing and able to buy online - don't complete the sale.
Remember that last fact from Lesson 1? (It is unbelievable.) It was that 7 out of every 10 people who have their credit card out, know what they want to purchase and want to make the purchase online - CAN'T!
Think about it. If you can improve your website's conversion rate, you have the potential to increase your sales by over 233% - without spending any more money on advertising or working any harder to draw traffic to your site.
How do you improve conversion on your site?
Just as there are many different ways to increase traffic, there are many different ways to improve conversion. Today we will cover copywriting - what your website is saying to every visitor.
What is copywriting and Why is it important?
Copywriting is the process of turning words into cash. Selling your product through words.
More specifically, web copywriting is the process of developing the wording of websites that sell something.
The job of your website is to: 1) Explain how your product fills the wants & desires of your customer 2) Take the customers order as fast & easily as possible.
The point of copywriting is to clearly communicate the value of your product or service to your visitors. In the offline world, a salesperson does this. On a website you are completely dependent on the power of your words to qualify prospects, give your sales pitch, close the sale and take the order.
Based on the statistics given above (85% of Visitors abandon a new site) - our websites are not doing a very good job. Some people even condone firing your website. I say: 'don’t fire it, fix it.'
How do you fix your website's sales copy?
As you will learn in future issues of Trafficology, there are very specific ways to engage the reader at a deeper level. We will discuss how to become a better copywriter, and the things you can do to enhance your copy. But, in this course we will focus on the basic fundamentals of copywriting.
The first step in copywriting is to understand the wants & desires of the people who will buy your product. You learned in lesson 2 how to easily find this information with some basic research.
If you did that research when finding keywords, you can use the same information here. If you did not conduct that research, I highly recommend that you review lesson 2 and learn exactly how to find the customers who will come to your site and will buy your product. This is the fundamental building block of copywriting - without it you can't know for sure which customers to focus your efforts on.
Once we understand the wants & desires of our visitors, then we need to think about how we can frame our offer. Remember, you are not selling a product with physical features - you are selling a solution to a problem that the customer is having. You are not talking about the product specifications - you are talking about the benefits and how your product fills the wants and desires of the visitor.
What we need to do is create a sales presentation that:
When you write your web copy you need to walk the reader through each of these 4 steps. Use what you have learned about the readers to reach their deepest emotions and compel them to give you money in exchange for your solution to their problem.
Sometimes visitors already know what they want and you just need to show them the order button. Sometimes your visitors don’t even know they have a problem - and you have to explain everything step-by-step. But, every time you need to help your visitors achieve what they really "want" - that right THERE is the point of copywriting and salesmanship on the web.
In future issues of Trafficology we will explain each step of the copywriting process. We will show you how to write copy for different types of products & services, and we will also share with you the best tips from some of the greatest copywriters ever. Yes, ever.
Online or offline, conversion has been the key to business since the beginning of time. On the web, conversion starts with your copy - it is your website's salesperson. 'Don’t fire it; fix it.'
I hope this article has helped you, if you would like to recieve more of these tips please visit http://nicetodobusiness.com
To Your Success
Mark Flavin