If you have read this post, you’ve now got traffic coming in, which is great. Now you need to make the most of that traffic, which means persuading visitors to take a specific action.
The idea here is that converting your traffic creates more benefits and help for your audience, while generating more profit for your business.
To that end, this part is going to show you how to start to optimize conversions on your website, in your ads, and within your email campaigns.
Let’s get right to it…
Get The Basics In Place
Let’s start by making sure you’ve got the basics down, and you’re using optimization best practices.
The first thing you need to understand is that conversion optimization isn’t based on just one factor. Instead, it’s about optimizing multiple factors.
Here’s what you need to put into place:
We’ll cover these exact issues in detail throughout this article.
Each piece of content or each page of your website should have one clear goal. If you try to point your audience towards taking multiple steps, they’re going to get overwhelmed or confused.
You want to keep it simple. One goal per page, and everything on that page is designed to help the visitor take the desired action.
There are a variety of ways you can convert your visitors to have them take a specific action.
Here are examples of the types of goals you might set for your content:
This isn’t an exhaustive list, as you may have specific actions you want your audience to take.
Remember, however, that you should pick just ONE primary goal for each piece of content (or for each page on your website).
Sometimes marketers have one clear goal (such as “buy a product”), but they still give too many options. For example, they might give the prospect the option to buy Product A or Product B or Product C.
If you want better conversions, then tighten your focus. Pick one specific action, limit the options within that action, and then focus the content on getting the visitor to take that specific action (e.g., buy Product A).
In addition to setting content goals (the action you want your users to take), you also need to select your metrics and set goals around those metrics.
For the purposes of this article, the one metric we’re most concerned about is the conversion percentage.
The key here is that you need to be realistic with your conversions.
For example, you can’t expect a 20% conversion rate on a $100 product with a cold audience. For this example, your conversions are more likely to be around 2% — more for warm audiences, better sales copy, and so on.
Be realistic so that you don’t get disappointed. But at the same time, always strive to do better and increase those conversions using the tips and ideas you’ll learn in this article.
You can have all the other pieces in place as far as conversion optimization, but if you aren’t giving your audience what they want, then your conversions will suffer.
That’s why you need to do your market research in order to determine:
Which brings us to the next point…
Take these steps to do your market research:
Take note that while you should use all these methods in order to get as much insight as possible, the best way to find out what your audience wants is to see what they’re already buying.
As you do your research, you’ll want to utilize these tools:
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A survey can help you get better insight into what your audience wants. Follow these tips:
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The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to craft offers and content that really resonate with them. Finding out what they’re already buying will help you select the right offers.
However, learning about who your audience is – from their basic demographics to their hopes, fears and desires – will help you create content that makes each prospect feel as if you’re speaking directly to them.
If you can forge this sort of connection with every piece of content, you’ll see your conversions rise.
One way to learn more about your audience is to spend some time observing them, talking to them, and even becoming a part of the target market. You can:
For example, if you spend time talking to dog owners or viewing their online conversations, you may find that many small dog owners struggle with a pet that seems to “rule the roost” despite the small size.
That tells you that you can create products and content that address these issues, but you can also speak directly to these dog owners in a way that will resonate with them
(e.g., “It seemed so simple – you were going to clip your dog’s nails, but the next thing you, know his lip was up, and he’s snarling at you…”).
Another way to learn more about your audience is to research their demographics using Google.
For example, you’d search for “dog owner demographics” or “demographics of people with diabetes.” Then make note of:
… And anything else you can dig up.
Be sure to use reputable sources of information only, such as those coming from universities, news organizations and professional research organizations (such as Pew Research).
When a prospect lands on your page, they’re going to be wondering why they should do business with you instead of your competitor.
If you want the sale, the subscriber, or some other conversion, then you need to give your visitor a reason.
Here’s a real-life example: Papa John’s pizza rolled their USP into the slogan, “Better ingredients, better pizza.” While other competitors (such as Domino’s Pizza) set themselves apart based on the speed of delivery (30 minutes or less), Papa John’s set themselves apart based on taste.
Here are the different ways you can set yourself apart from your competitors:
This is not an exhaustive list – you’ll want to do some brainstorming on your own to determine what makes your business and your offers unique.
Be sure to research your competitors to see what USP they’re using so that you don’t pick the same one. You’ll also want to pick a USP that your prospects really value.
You don’t need to strongarm your audience, use psychological tricks, use click bait or do anything else to trick or manipulate your audience into taking action.
If you’ve got a targeted audience, you put a desirable offer in front of them, and you explain this offer by sharing benefits, then you’ll naturally get the conversions you desire.
On a related note…
Your reputation is one of your most valuable assets, and it has a big impact on your conversions.
If you’ve got a great reputation in your niche, you’ll always produce better conversions than those who have poor reputations.
So, you will now be hopefully be generating more traffic to your website, and converting that traffic into either leads and/or buyers. For your convenience, you can get all the tips mentioned in both posts in a single handy detailed report; just click on the featured resource below, download, read it and take action 🙂
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business. Without it, you won’t have any visitors to your blog posts, videos, landing pages, sales pages etc.
In other words, no traffic equals no leads or sales, so it is an essential skill to muster.
You need to consider whether you want to use free or paid traffic, although nothing is really free, because organic traffic is time consuming, whereas paid traffic is instant, but you will need a budget to run enough paid ads to get any viable metrics that you can use.
Basically, before you jump in, you need to do some planning first. Read on to learn how to develop a solid website traffic strategy.
Before you start bringing traffic to your site, you’ll want to determine your overall goals. Specifically, what are your overall goals in terms of revenue and sales?
You need to figure this out first, and then in a moment, you’ll determine how much traffic you need to achieve your goals.
Note: these numbers need to be realistic. While you may want $10 million this year, that’s not realistic if you’re still new to online marketing. You may find a goal like $100,000 (and the traffic required to get to that number) more realistic.
Now that you have your overall goals, your next step is to work backwards to determine traffic and conversion specifics to achieve these goals.
Here are the questions you need to ask yourself:
The point is, don’t just pick a traffic goal out of thin air. Do some realistic calculations to determine how much traffic you need, minimally, to achieve your goals.
It’s a good idea to add at least 20% to your estimates as a cushion, as most people underestimate the traffic they need to obtain to achieve their goals.
Now that you know how much traffic you need, you can start setting specific traffic goals for the year as a whole, for each month, and even for each week.
Be sure your traffic goals include the following characteristics:
For example, “I want more traffic by the end of this month” is not specific nor measurable. Instead, you’d set a goal such as “I’d like to increase traffic by 25% this month.” (Naturally, you’d know what your baseline traffic number is, so that you know exactly how much traffic you need to reach the 25%.)
The next part of your planning is to determine where you’re going to send your traffic, and what you want this traffic to do when they arrive at the destination. Take note that you’ll likely send traffic to a variety of links, and you’ll want the traffic to do different things at each of these destinations.
Common destinations include:
And similar.
Be sure to create a specific plan for how much traffic you want to send to each destination. For example, you might send the majority of your traffic to a variety of relevant lead pages, and then send some traffic directly to sales pages.
As you’re creating ads and content to drive traffic, keep in mind that not all prospects are in the same place in their buyer’s journey. That means you need to create content that appeals to people in these three stages:
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Another factor to take into consideration when developing your traffic strategy is what part of your sales funnel will you be promoting?
There are 3 main parts to a sales funnel, namely top, middle and bottom.
As the prospects move down the funnel, the numbers decrease, but their receptivity increases.
A basic funnel looks like this:
Not everyone is going to follow your sales funnel exactly. For example, some people may start by buying your core offer or even your backend offer.
As such, you need to consider your funnel and the path most people will take as you develop a traffic strategy (and how you’re going to allocate that traffic throughout your funnel).
You don’t necessarily want to send all your traffic to sales pages. In most cases, it’s wiser to send traffic to your lead pages.
That way, you can build your platform – and then use your email list to send your traffic wherever you want.
Before you start creating a traffic strategy, it’s a good idea to determine how much money you have to invest in this strategy. Primarily your investment will be put towards two things:
After you determine how much you can invest per month, then you’ll need to allocate these funds (e.g., X% to paid ads and Y% to outsourcing). The exact allocation depends on your needs and budget.
You don’t need to implement your traffic strategy yourself, as you can outsource all or part of it. For example, you can hire someone to:
And so on. The exact needs you have will depend on the traffic strategy you develop, but you’ll want to start thinking early on about what parts you might be interested in outsourcing.
If you have a limited outsourcing budget (as most of us do), then you’ll need to decide what to outsource. Consider these points:
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There are multiple ways to find freelancers to help you with your traffic-generation activities. These methods include:
PeoplePerHour.com, Upwork.com, Freelancer.com,
Fiverr.com or similar.
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Ultimately, you’re going to have plenty of traffic methods included in your overall traffic strategy. However, a big key to your success is to keep it simple.
Start with ONE traffic method. Study this traffic method so that you understand it. Implement the traffic method and refine your method as needed.
Once you’ve got one traffic method up, running and delivering results for you, then you can add another method. But don’t do this until your website traffic rankings are high enough to justify it.
You can use Google Analytics as a good free website traffic checker, although it can be a little complex due to the mountain of information you get!
So, to put it another way: focus on just one traffic method at a time.
Before advertising, you need to know everything you can about your ideal customer. That way, you can place ads in the right locations, you can select the right keywords and audiences for generating quality traffic, and you can create ads and content that really resonate with the targeted audience.
Here is the type of information to include in your customer avatar:
… And anything else you can dig up that will help you find and connect with your audience.
Here’s how to collect information on your audience:
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Avoid these two common traffic mistakes:
#1, Using non-targeted advertising. Targeting narrower audiences often means you’ll get less traffic from a particular source, but that traffic will be more responsive than a broader audience. This usually results in a better ROI.
#2, Using little-known methods or platforms. For example, if you’re going to place a pay per click ad, then stick with well-known platforms (like Google Ads), as the big platforms combat costly click fraud.
So, you will now be hopefully be generating more traffic to your website, but now you will need to convert that traffic into either leads and/or buyers and we will cover that in another post here.
For your convenience, you can get all the tips mentioned in both posts in a single handy detailed report; just click on the featured resource below, download, read it and take action 🙂
Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception.
You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.
For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.
The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.
The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site.
It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly.
Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.
Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention.
You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.
As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation.
This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.
Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages.
Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.
After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.
However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you.
Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.
As you can see, measuring website traffic can be difficult to do accurately as it is as much an art as it is a science, but it can at least give you a rough idea of how your website is performing so it is well worth the effort to investigate.
And if you want to learn more about converting those visitors into opt-ins and sales, then check out the featured resource below where you can download a free Conversion Boost report; download, read it and take action 😊
