Increasing conversions from existing traffic is more important than any other strategy a business can implement.
That is especially important any time there is an economic slowdown (which causes traffic to drop from decreased demand) or you lose organic traffic due to changes in the search engine algorithms.
Every single Web site without exception can be improved – every one – through Landing Page optimization. A landing page is any page used to land traffic on which means ANY page, but you start by optimizing specific important pages first.
While we usually think conversion optimization is for ecommerce sites selling products, this strategy works equally well for business sites and blogs. There are clear thought leaders with vast experience capable of not just doubling but MULTIPLYING your conversion rates – yet so few are wise enough to hire them. I really don’t get it.
If I had an ecommerce store, hiring an conversion expert would be my highest priority.If my blog or site generated leads for my business I would be testing landing pages to increase those leads.If you never listen to a single other piece of advice I have offered this is the one you should believe.
Tools have long existed that allow you to measure how changing headlines, images and text on Web pages affects conversion rates. Like any other advanced skill, experience improves results, so if you have the cashflow I highly recommend hiring someone who already has the skills.
If you’re not sure you know enough yet or want to learn it yourself you’re in luck. The very best experts in the field have created online Webinars called Landing Page Success seminars.
I’ve been recommending Bryan Eisenberg and MaryO’Brien for years. They were two of the very first experts I recommended here, Bryan for his books Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark and Mary for her exceptional Pay Per Click Training Seminars.
They and nineteen other top experts share what they know in these brand new Webinars. Why a Webinar and not a Live Seminar? People attending Mary’s PPC training seminars told her they prefer to save the time and expense of traveling. As soon as she started offering both, Webinars were clearly preferred
Click the images in this post to see the bios of the speakers, descriptions of the sessions and testimonials from previous attendees.
There was a free preview Webinar yesterday and I am hopeful that they will offer another one for anyone who isn’t sure they want to attend.
Look for the signup at the bottom of their sales page that says Signup for the FREE Preview Webinar or Register today to save 50% off.
Ecommerce Tips:
- NEW: Ecommerce Mistakes That Make You Look Like An Amateur
Gail Gardner
That is great idea to hire an expert to analyse conversion rate and help us build a good business. Thanks
It’s worth keeping in mind that your website is never up to date as the web is always evolving. As technologies and experiences change elsewhere, peoples browsing habits change and so a good page now, might only be ok in a few months time. You always need to keep on top of it, especially for ecommerce.
Yes… Increasing our conversation rates is our highest priority now, and I will certainly look into the publications and experts that you listed above
Resimli Yemek Tarifleri would love you to read ..Gelin Tatlısı Tarifi
This is a great resource list for improving your sales conversions. Sales is an industry where the more you know and the more prepared you are the better your chance of closing the sale will be.
Increasing sale to our e-commerce site is my every day problem. The competition is growing every day. I don’t know what strategy is effective but I keep on learning.
I’m afraid it’s all a fraud. Unfortunately, almost a decade only everything revolves around money. People who until recently had an enviable character fall prey to these temptations. Unfortunately, society as a whole began to decline and only fault I see greed. We humans would be to think that there are many other things more important than money. And maybe we will be able to change something in our thinking.
auto dealers would love you to read ..Green auto
Oh my, and some people think I’m cynical. I agree that most people are greedy and there are many frauds online and off; however, there are many people who are generous and selfless and work to make the world a better place.
These Webinars are definitely one of the very best ways any business can increase their sales especially now when the economy is NOT going to recover IMHO because of many reasons I have shared in other posts including the one I’ll put in CommentLuv in this reply.
growmap would love you to read ..Why the Economy is In Decline and What We Can Do to Improve It
I really suck at conversion part. The only thing to improve conversions and product optimization according to me is read, apply, trial and errors. Split testing of LPs is also a good idea.
Hi Pavan,
Most sites convert very poorly. The average ecommerce site is lucky to get a 1-2% conversion rate on traffic that comes from people searching for what they sell! That is far lower than it needs to be, but most ecommerce store owners just don’t seem to understand.
growmap would love you to read ..Building Traffic Using Anchor Text
informative article…one question: i have a site of 50 pages+ and which page do you think i can use as landing page?
Hello Rajesh,
Every page of your site IS a landing page and especially every page that you share online, you run pay per click ads to or is ranked well in the search engines.
A common beginner error is not recognizing that every page on your site is important and must provide a path to the rest of the site (unless it is a one-page sales page or some other unique page you want to stand alone).
I highly recommend Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. See the book listings at the bottom of my post Why Conversion Rates are More Important Tahn Generating More Traffic for links to that and other books and his site.
growmap would love you to read ..Opening an Online Store- Options for Selling Online
This is one of them things that i totally neglected on my first e-commerce store. It may have been one of my biggest down falls on why i ended up shutting it down. It wasn’t converting like i thought it should have, and the fact that i got scammed a couple times with CC thieves.
As i look back on it now I realize that i was targeting the wrong keywords, keywords which bring you traffic won’t always bring you conversions. So I have recently closed that store down and took a step back to look deeper into keywords and on page optimization, and building pages that convert.
Ok i ranted long enough, thank you for this posting and most of all thank you for this blog.
Teddy would love you to read ..Are You Curious About Idol White Teeth Whitening Pen
Hi Teddy,
You have pointed out several reasons why it takes experience and time to get a site making money. You rarely just go online and instantly get positive cashflow.
Now you know much more than you did before. Converting keywords is key – especially if you’re buying traffic. Be sure to read my posts about Pay Per Click on the Best of GrowMap page.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
Great post!! Thanks for the tips of way to increase sales or leads. I believe it to be the best indicator for how successful I am at optimizing landing pages and gaining my customers trust.
Hello,
Yes, conversion rates are a very good indicator of how well your site is doing. All sites have room for improvement but few work on it enough. I sincerely hope more people will take the time to access the resources that Mary and the others are providing in these Webinars.
growmap would love you to read ..THE Most Effective Way to Increase Sales or Leads
That is great idea to hire an expert to analyse conversion rate and help us build a good business. Thanks
Hi Tinh,
If I had an ecommerce site that is the first thing I would be doing. It makes me sad every time I think of all the sales that are being lost because of weak usability and lack of attention to testing and details.
growmap would love you to read ..New Free How to Make a Blog eBook
I agree that hiring a conversion expert should be the first step when launching a site or a webshop. You only have 10-15 seconds max to convince the visitors to stay, and if they find one tiny thing that seems strange, they’ll leave.
Thomas would love you to read ..Velkommen hos IKB
Hi Thomas,
I can understand new businesses not knowing about the importance of landing page optimization. It is the ecommerce businesses that already make money that are not optimizing that make me really wonder. The tighter buyers are with the money they have and the less disposable income available the more important this becomes.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
If you know nothing about landing pages and trapping leads it’s best to hire an expert to do that for you, but in the long run it’s best to start learning how to do that by yourself.
I would say the best way to start is with split tests, search of advices on how to optimize your page to get more leads and then leave your normal page but also try and construct a new one following the advices you found. Then do a split test by driving traffic to both pages and watch which one converts better.
But seeing how a professional does it, can save you a lot of time and teach you lots of tricks, and I guess that it depends on your time and motivates on which path you choose!
Practically you can do this indefinite until you are satisfied with the conversion rates and not only you increased your leads count but the experience can be carried on to other projects.
Alex would love you to read ..Jocuri dragoni de foc 3D
Hi Alex,
I’m sure they’ll be covering both split and multi-variate testing in the Webinar. While I agree that some would be better off hiring an expert, if you don’t have the cashflow to cover it any improvements would be worth it.
For those businesses that are making significant money already I can not express strongly enough how unwise it is not to hire the best right now. Average conversion rates on most sites are 1.5-2.0% but a top notch optimizer can increase that to double-digits.
Why this is so important can be quickly and easily seen in the graph on UserEffect conversion graph.
growmap would love you to read ..How NOT To Monetize Your Blog!
Great post! I know for many websites, I’ve worked at, we’ve been lucky enough to have people to work with who are great at building different landing pages, so we can test and monitor where people go. A/B testing is definitely the wave of the future.
It’s no longer easy in today’s day and age to pump out a website and hope your customers find what they need to. We have to literally guide them to the product that we want them to buy.
Hi David,
I have been seeking an optimization expert to collaborate with and recommend because it is such a specialized skill and I believe experience or at least landing page optimization training would be a huge benefit.
I would love to hear from anyone who has those skills so that I can add them to my list of specialists I recommend.
growmap would love you to read ..Support Small Businesses
Oh my gosh, this webinar is something that I NEED. I’ve already gotten people to come to my site to view my products but not a whole lot of them are buying! I’m stumped as to what to do next. I don’t really want to hire someone because I don’t have the money to pay them. This webinar just might be the answer. Thank you! And thank god that it’s a webinar and I don’t have to travel anywhere just to attend it!
Hi Jen,
You couldn’t find better people to put on this kind of Webinar so I’m sure you’ll learn a ton. Sometimes even small changes make a big difference in conversion rates. The main thing is to make your site really easy and obvious.
growmap would love you to read ..Building Traffic Using Anchor Text
A couple points…
1. you’re right, conversion is the same for different kinds of businesses; your opening sentence proves that.
“Increasing conversions from existing traffic is more important than any other strategy a business can implement.” is the same as the old sales adage, It’s infinitely easier to keep an existing customer, then to constantly look for new ones.”
2. I’d have to say, the choice of hiring the expert or not, is far less about being wise or not, and more to the point of affordability. As with any expert skill, it always comes down to money.
Personally speaking, as one with blog traffic now, AND soon to be e-commerce traffic, I’d be happy to engage some conversion webinars…as long as the price was right. 😉
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Hi Dennis,
The sites I believe are missing the boat by not hiring conversion experts are those already earning thousands of dollars a month. If I knew I could double my sales or more (and that IS highly likely – almost certain if you hire the best) if I were them I would have already done it!
For bloggers like us we will either have to learn to do it ourselves or find someone interested in collaborating. When you get your ecommerce site launched be sure to check with me. I may have (or know someone) who has a related site.
growmap would love you to read ..How to Use TwitterFeed- Consistent Twitter Presence
Great tip, Gail. I’ve been sending out certain tweets that send people to a landing page and the number of opt-ins I’ve gotten from that has been awesome!
Hi Tristan,
When you’re driving traffic in that manner you can create multiple landing pages and measure which converts best. That is a basic method of split testing.
growmap would love you to read ..New Free How to Make a Blog eBook
Attracting new customers is a good thing. But attracting new customers is not the only way to increase your sales, and is, in fact, the hard way of going about it. Shifting your sales focus to enticing your current customers can make increasing your sales easier – and best of all, build the customer loyalty that results in repeat sales.
Creating a successful landing page is quite not easy, hiring an expert could make a better choice, thanks for the review
Thank you for the information, I know you can get all the traffic in the world and still get poor conversions. It can be hard to find a balance between them both. I do agree with Jim – Design can play a huge part too to keep people on your site. If the design is really 90s your bounce rate will go up.
[Sorry Craig. Bingo sites are considered gambling related and therefore “bad neighborhoods” so most sites avoid linking to them. If you have any other sites that are non-adult and suitable for mixed company you are welcome to link to those.]
Hi Craig,
If I had to choose between more traffic and greater conversions I would choose conversions every time. The previous post I wrote recommends several books that perfect for improving any site.
There are some tips about that on the post I’ll put in CommentLuv in this reply. If you have another non-gambling related site you can link to I will keep your links. By keeping your comments even without the links at least those who are interested can find your site through your Twitter account.
growmap would love you to read ..How to Build a Successful Blog Based Business
Yes, agreeing with Jim, the landing page needs to be eye-catching, yet not to gaudy for people to actually stay on the page to see what it’s all about, instead of landing and bouncing right back off. This means titles, categories, colors, links. I especially like the mouse-over function. And, in my experience, people look at your page in an “F” motion, from top left to right, then down the side and glancing through the middle, so I use this as a basis for design. Great post!
Hi Jasmine,
What people like changes with time, but there are basics that never change like making it obvious how to navigate a site, where the shopping cart link belongs (top right) and many other things. I highly recommend Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. It is reviewed in the other conversion post I linked to from this one.
We have a gift blog you may want to visit. If you comment in it that will remind me to add links to your content from my posts there. You may like some of the information and tools in the post I’ll put in CommentLuv in this reply.
growmap would love you to read ..Building Traffic Using Anchor Text
I couldn’t agree more. One of my primary KPI in google analytics is Ecommerce Conversion Rate. I believe it to be the best indicator for how successful I am at optimizing landing pages and gaining my customers trust.
[Added a keyword phrase to benefit you business. I also recommend registering your site with CommentLuv (which can be done even if you don’t have CommentLuv installed) and using CommentLuv anchor text links.]
Hi Andrea,
Trust is a whole ‘nother issue, isn’t it? I suspect that is also covered in this Webinar because what a site does to enhance trust has a very strong effect on conversions.
Did you know that people who visit a strong about page are much more likely to buy than those who don’t? What you have on your about page can greatly increase trust – especially when it makes your business more “real” to them. Photos (of both the building and people) plus history or background do make a difference.
You may want to read the post about KeywordLuv so that your comments can be benefitting your business.
growmap would love you to read ..DoFollow CommentLuv KeywordLuv Community
Thanks, it is not just enough to get people to your site. They need to buy something as well and the right site design is key to that.
Hi Jim,
There is so much involved in increasing conversion rates that I sincerely hope many people invest in this training. If they apply anything they learn that should more than cover the cost and keep increasing their income over time. (Yes, the bad news many won’t want to hear is you have to actually apply what you learn or it won’t make you any money.)
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place