I was approached twice this month by business owners who were open to re-looking at the way their websites drive traffic and revenue. Both asked me for advice on what I think they should do.
In this post I’m going to share some of the advice I gave.
Whatever business you’re in, you are probably going to find a percentage of what I shared with these business owners either thought-provoking, or valuable for pin-pointing some immediately-actionable changes you could make to help you get some more traffic and/or increase your revenue.
Some points may not be relevant to you at all. That’s okay. Just take away what you need.
- Set up your site (or portions of) so your visitors, clients, market… could ‘run’ (that portion of your site) for you. Give people massive incentive to engage (i.e. create profiles > content… ). User Generated Content model.
- Let (visitors, clients, the market… ) fill the site up with content > you monitor/modify and monetize.
- Solidify the framework (branding, layout, flow, make it super clear for people to know what they should do and why).
- Plug up any holes and any inconsistencies (in your messages/sales copy).
- Get REALLY clear on what you want to communicate to each Profile (e.g. Customers, Retailers, Clients or whoever you’re talking to).
- *****ANSWER: What’s in it for me? Why would I? (for each Profile) – be succinct.
- The above is also closely tied in with your SEO Titles and Descriptions.
- Speak succinctly (in fifth grade language) to ALL Profiles in your text. Nobody has time to guess/interpret – no matter how smart they are.
- People need to know: this means YOU – now – call them to action (clearly). Use short, sharp sentences/questions for call-to-action headings and tags, and use bold buttons for actual calls to action.
- Try Hello Bar to REALLY highlight your HIGHEST priority call-to-action. Test different ones.
- Approach (select) key people within certain Profiles (personally). Give them (or point them to) something of great value (first) – then show them how to get even more good value – e.g. by taking XYZ action (say Registering, or Creating a Profile) at your site. But NOTE: Make sure you have given them a serious value before you ask them to do anything. Hint: Education (genuine aha moments) provide excellent value.
- Once everything is ‘set’ and CLEAR – buy some traffic and test your landing page conversions.
- Leverage Social – big time. Make EVERYTHING easily shareable.
- Collect emails. Give people a SUPER good reason(s) to get email updates. If traffic ever dies, you still have the DIRECT connection with your audience (with permission). Imagine if you had of collected just 3% of peoples emails since opening your site/business – just 3%…. would you have a traffic problem? User base. Think User base – then traffic won’t be a problem.
What of these could you implement? What would you add to this list? Feel free to ask questions or make comments below.