When they arrive you need to keep their attention and inform them about what your site is all about and describe its benefits.

You need to keep their attention, but not by an attention grabbing web design! Instead, use attention grabbing text! The most important attention grabbing text is headline! The headline will break it or make it!

Does this mean that web design can look sloppy or amateur like? No! It just means that design of a site should not be made with extensive graphics or flash presentation. This will just confuse and take to long time to download. If you make a clean and easy navigational web site you are much better off!

Yet, what one see on Internet is to often sites with advanced web design that leave you asking what its all about and what its creators are thinking!

If website owners and webmasters concentrated much more of their effort on text information and less on design they will see much better response from their potential customers.

There is no need to hire a web designer and pay them several 1000 of dollars to make a site attractive and to make it commercially viable. In most cases this is contra-productive.

The web designer often will kill your sale by creating attention grabbing web design. Instead, put your effort on text information on your site!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Per Strandberg is a software designer and web site maker! He has a web site which offer data backup information at www.data-backup-and-storage.com ==> Visit his site with web traffic generating tips at http://www.catch-traffic.com +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Again, conversion is an important measurement here. It can be applied to all of changes you make to your site as you eliminate these ‘Butt Brush Factors’. Later in this article, I’ll explain how.

Attention All Shoppers…

“For next fifteen minutes, in frozen food section, free passion fruit sorbet for everyone” is a perfect way to instill urgency in shoppers to go to that section of store and get freebie. They know they only have 15 minutes, and they know that after that time they won’t get lovely sorbet. This was Paco’s way of showing how stores could be more imaginative. The store knows that that section of store is going to be jammed with people for that 15 minutes and can capitalize on impulse sales. That’s how it works in retailing world, but what about online? Instilling urgency online is a major factor overlooked by many business websites. Some examples of how you might want to start employing this technique online are listed below.

1) Time Expiry Offer. Just as in above example, you could let your readers know they will miss out if they haven’t subscribed or bought your product by a certain time.

2) The First Number. Your website could offer first 50 subscribers a free e-book or could advertise that first 50 items sold will be at a 30% discount. This could be combined with a counter showing number of places/items left, so that browser thinks “I have to subscribe before those places are taken up”.

3) The Nth Number Competition. The website states that if you are subscriber number 1000, you get a free website makeover, again combined with a visible counter of current number of subscriptions. This could be tied into a referral deal so that if subscriber is not lucky number and does not get deal, at least he could be offered something for making referral while his friend might still end up being lucky number and win prize.

So how does conversion relate to all these changes? The conversion rate should and can be measured in every instance.

The Science Of Online Marketing

There are two incredibly significant lines in Why We Buy:

“Science is by and large study of very small differences” and “When you change one thing, everything changes”.

The first ‘very small difference’ and ‘changing one thing’ situation I came across in my online marketing career was a complete mistake. I was working for a large press organization and one day I had to change some HTML code on a sales form. By mistake, I removed a voucher entry field from form. As a result, people could no longer enter their voucher number to get a cheaper deal. Conversion improved by three times. I told our editor who was amazed but instructed me to put voucher field back on form while they figured out what to do. There was a good reason for voucher; in fact, it was entire reason page was there. However, putting voucher entry field back resulted in a drop in conversion to almost identical sales that we had been getting before my mistake. The voucher idea was eventually scrapped on that page and sales sky rocketed again. The reason, we ascertained, was that visitors figured that they could get a cheaper deal with a voucher. The voucher could only be gotten by physically buying a newspaper and that limited us to around 10% of audience. Nine out of ten people visiting website did so from a place where they couldn’t buy newspaper at that time, so it was obvious that voucher idea could only be good for local readers. This experience was a catalyst for me personally, and from then on, I began to understand importance of measurement online. In particular, measurement of conversion.

So in order to turn online changes you make into a science, follow three simple rules.

1) Measure Conversion. Conversion is a percentage, a calculation of number of people who take action you desire as a percentage of total number of visitors to page. Using percentages makes actual number of people arriving at a page irrelevant. It becomes possible to compare a busy week with a quiet week.

2) Change one thing at a time. An average page has lots of variables: graphics, headlines, paragraphs, sentences, links, testimonials and probably a lot more. By only changing one thing and always measuring for same period of time (30 days is good), you will get a fair result. So for instance, if you change a headline, look at page click-through and if possible length of time an average visitor stayed on page for 30 days before change. Make change and measure results for next 30 days. Then if conversion is higher (more people reading or more people clicking through), keep change. If it’s lower, revert to what you had before.

3) Experiment. Don’t limit yourself to headlines. Copy, content, graphics, adding competitions, etc. — try them all. But remember rule: change only one variable at any one time.

Summary

I’ve desperately been trying to keep this article short; I think I could have written an epic on this subject. If I were in same room as Paco Underhill, we would have an awful lot to talk about. However what I’m trying to say is that businesses should start waking up to fact that online marketing is as much a science as Paco demonstrates in retailing world. Measuring conversion rates online is beginning of making it scientific.