Most Powerful Knowledge Source On The Web
If your website is getting traffic, then JACKPOT, you have acces to the most valuable and powerful source of knowledge on the internet. The reactions of real people.
Spying Works
TWO POSSIBILITIES
1– If you are getting some level of conversion results
Then you know that something you are doing is working. Among the 50-100 critical elements in your site design and conversion process, you got lucky with more than a few and are getting actual conversions. Now you just need to test and test to take that higher.
2- If you are getting ZERO results
If you have search traffic (paid or organic) coming to the website and you are still not converting visitors to leads or sales, this is a bitter pill to swallow. However, your traffic is telling you two things loud and clear. First, they are coming to your site searching for your product or service. Second, they are not interested in the way you are selling it.
Trap Number One
The possibility that visitors have no interest in purchasing or taking action in a business owner’s website, is just about the most difficult concept to fathom for the owner. They are always sure that if they just had the traffic that they would close tons of sales. They have spent hours staring at the website and probably a direct role in the design, therefore they are the absolute worst person on the planet to judge usability.
Trap Number Two
Next the business owners shows the website to 5-10 other employees, friends or family for their opinion. This is like asking someone to read your yellow page ad years ago. So that person sits down and reads every word of the ad and says “looks great”. Problem: that was a coerced opinion. Ads don’t get read. They must grab attention and draw someone through the content against their will. You customers don’t read your ads or indeed your website as a favor to you.
Solution – Some Wind In The Sail
Get some traffic with sponsored ads if you have no organic traffic. Run a few hundred dollars of traffic through the site, shut the ad off and analyze the data. Look at the visitor behaviors, bounce percentage, visit length, traffic flow through site, exit pages, etc. This is cheapest market research imaginable. Remember that the BIG e-commerce sites that you modelled your Internet dreams upon, spent huge fortunes to discover the optimum conversion strategy. Do you really think you will stumble on success out of the gate. Big competitors didn’t stumble on their success and they hired the best money could buy. They tested and tested again. How can you do less and succeed?