You have a beautiful-looking website. You originally invested a great deal of money to have a reputable firm design and build it yet you see almost no return on investment (ROI).

When you start to look into why your website is ineffective, you start to discover that not only are you not increasing website traffic but you are actually losing traffic, losing potential customers, and losing the opportunities of establishing new relationships. In fact, your website may be failing to attract visitors at all.

How to get your website to become effective and remain effective

You should have a balance between graphics and text on your website. The website should definitely be aesthetically pleasing but should have valuable content that is easy to download at the same time.

You should always test your website on more than one browser. What looks fantastic on one browser make look terrible on another browser. Many people still use text-only browsers at this point in time.

You should always remember to be meticulous with your website; keep it clean and up to date. You should look for ways to update your site at least once a month. If you let your visitors know that you are doing this on a regular basis, it will be an incentive for them to return to your website often. Even if they visit your website only because they are curious, they are still visiting.

You also need to make sure that you are reviewing your website analysis on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing for sure if your website is totally doing what it is supposed to do.

Issues with your positioning and branding

Website conversion rates: Differentiating and clearly articulated value propositions have a profound effect on website conversion rates. The conversion rate is a measurement of visitors who fulfill your intended outcomes. Those outcomes could include contacting you directly, buying a product from your site, signing up for a blog feed or newsletter, etc.

Your value proposition, which should be the centerpiece of your homepage, should answer the question “Why should I choose to do business with you instead of your competition?”

That is the most important question in business. People struggle with it all of the time. If you are missing an opening message that really grabs your visitors, it can seriously have a negative effect on the ultimate success of your business.

If your website visitors go to your home page and leave quickly, something isn’t right. Your content is not enticing them enough and it is not answering the fundamental questions “Can this company fulfill my needs” and “Should I explore this website further?”

An area of your website that can prove to be problematic is your landing page. The landing page is the first page that a visitor sees. The reason for this is that you generally have some well-indexed content that your visitors have found in a search engine.

It is key to understand how the visitor thinks here. Visitors come to your website to find something specific. It is irrelevant how they may have found you (on purpose or by accident). Initially, they may have absolutely no interest in you and possibly no idea of who you are at all.

It is critical that the first page that they come upon on your website engages your visitors instantly and communicates a solution to their unfulfilled needs. Additionally, your content must be compelling enough to attract them to other areas of your website. You need to make them want to learn more about you. It is not sufficient to merely give them a lot of good information. Otherwise, they will take all of that in and then they will leave.

Hopefully, your traffic reports are detailed enough to communicate to you which keywords are effective at bringing visitors to each page of your website. This helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from, mentally.

If your website visitors are reading the page and leaving, you have succeeded at giving them what they want but you have failed at drawing them to the rest of your website. This can be fixed. You need to improve your navigation and make it more compelling and you need to have calls to action on your website pages.

There are many websites that offer great information and compelling content and that’s the end of it. It is so important to guide visitors to the next step that you wish them to take. If you count on your website visitors to do this by themselves, there is a great chance that they will either make a different choice than the one that you want them to make or they will just leave your website altogether, which can impact how much business you do.

Issues with building your credibility

Testimonials that are authoritative, powerful and specific can have a serious impact on your website’s conversion rates. You must ask yourself the question “Am I potentially losing business because my website does not adequately establish my credibility and value?”

A great way to get in touch with this is to review your website for credibility by building content, for example, testimonials, case studies and client lists. You should distribute your testimonials throughout your website, using one- or two-line excerpts that are appropriate for the content on each page. The testimonials can be about a product, a service or the value of subscribing to your blog or newsletter.

Be sure that all of the content is linked to and from other pages so that your visitors can find it very easily. If, after that, you start getting more phone calls or Emails, you will know that you have done something positive to make your website more effective.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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One of the ways in which lead generation is done over the Internet is by giving away free gifts, such as eBooks. On the Internet, leads usually mean email addresses of people who are interested in your business and the promotion is done through email marketing. The approach is quite simple. Marketers write an eBook that is relevant to their business and then promote it over the Internet. In order to get the word out, they will advertise the eBook on their website and/or blog. The marketers may also place classified advertisements on other business’ websites about their goods and services, paying them affiliate income.

As an inbound marketing tool, an eBook’s main purpose is to increase site traffic and act as a source of lead and audience generation. eBooks should be basic and interesting enough that non-experts understand and learn from them.

Internet visitors are generally very interested when they see free offers being advertised and eBooks are especially appealing because they always represent real value to the consumers. The Internet visitors will certainly try to click on the link and download the free eBook. This is where the process of lead generation is introduced.

When the Internet visitor clicks on the link, it will not take them directly to the page of the eBook download. They will arrive first at a webpage that will ask for their email address. That page will tell the visitor that if they provide their contact information (including email ids), a great deal of additional (and valuable) information will be available to them. Of course, the Internet visitors won’t mind providing their contact information because the reward will be to receive free things. This type of page is known as a landing page, lead capture page, or squeeze page.

Quality landing pages use success stories that the prospect would relate to when making a buying decision. As a general rule, Internet Marketers try to keep the content on their landing pages to a minimum. The goal of the page is to obtain the visitor’s email address; additional information could distract the user or cause them to "Click-Away" to a different website. Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent from typical landing pages. The absence of links is used to focus visitors’ attention on one choice: register for the email list or leave the site. Savvy internet marketers have discovered that convincing a visitor to sign up for an email list provides an opportunity to present that visitor with multiple sales messages over time, develop a relationship, and even cross-sell other related products.

After the visitor puts in his or her email address on the landing page, he or she will be redirected to the page from where the download can occur for the free eBook. At this point, the marketer has the email addresses of the Internet users who have taken advantage of the free eBook. In other words, the marketer now has a list of email opt-in leads, which can be used for additional promotions, such as email marketing.

Here are some tips for writing effective eBooks for lead generation:

• Know your objectives. What is your goal in writing your eBook? Clearly you want to generate leads and increase your database, but you should also have an audience takeaway goal. What impression are you trying to convey for your company, brand, or product and what response do you want from your audience? Are you looking to position yourself as the expert in your industry? Are you offering tips on a niche topic in hopes that your prospects will contact you to learn even more? Are you looking for a more interesting way of sharing your story or trying to establish your profile in the business community? Or maybe you’re looking to create awareness for your brand/product in a way that is helpful to your audience rather than promotional. Knowing your objective will help you set the tone for your eBook.

 

• KISS. Keep it short and simple. No one wants to read your 300-page eBook, and keep this in mind as you decide on a topic. Identify specific topics that will limit the scope of your writing. Fifteen to thirty pages should be more than enough for most eBooks. Remember, you aren’t writing a sales manual or company promotional material; instead, you are writing to capture and engage readers. With that in mind, don’t write in over-complicated language when things can be explained simply.

 

• Name your eBook. Done in tandem with identifying your goals and settling on a topic, choosing a title will give your eBook some structure. You won’t be inclined to digress too much from the concept of your eBook if you’ve already figured out a compelling title. And don’t be afraid of subtitles, especially if this is a business eBook. Subtitles increase your SEO rankings and more accurately describe what the reader is interested in.

 

• Write quality content. Yes, eBooks are downloaded for free (or in exchange for your reader’s email address), but people are coming to your site for a reason. Give them good-quality writing and show them that you are the expert that they think you are.

 

• Hire an editor. Although an eBook may not seem like an official document, you want to be sure that it is edited thoroughly. A professional editor can check for consistency of tone, grammatical errors, and anything else that might make your reader dwell more on the writing than the content.

 

• Design. eBook design is just as important as eBook copy. Sometimes it is even more important. A text-heavy, badly designed eBook will turn off your online readers, who have gotten used to stimulating, interactive online content. If you want to engage them, hire a professional designer to establish the look of your eBook. Use graphics and images in addition to the text, and don’t try to pack too much text onto any given page.

 

• Add an appropriate copyright license message to your finished eBook to let your audience know that they can share your copyrighted material. You can use a tool such as Creative Commons to accomplish this.

 

• Promote your eBook. You should promote your eBook anywhere and everywhere that you can. Tweet about it, post it on Facebook, share it with your LinkedIn groups, blog about it, and send it out to your established network.

To learn more how we can help you with the writing and editing of your eBook, please visit us at CompuKol Communications.

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