Web Site Conversions

by John Eberhard

The whole idea behind website marketing of a commercial web site, meaning a web site for a business, is to get people to respond. When someone goes to a web site and responds to you in some way, we call that a “conversion.” Conversions could include:

1. Someone calling you on the phone, from the web site
2. Someone filling out a form asking for more information
3. Someone filling out a form to be on your newsletter email list
4. Someone filling out a form asking for some free item you are offering like a free report or white paper
5. Someone clicking on an email link on the site and emailing you
6. Someone buying something via a shopping cart on your site

Sometimes those things are called the “desired actions.”

Obviously we want as many people to respond and become conversions as possible. But of course not everyone is going to respond, for a variety of reasons.

So if you have a web site, and the site is set up in such a way as to allow or encourage people or ask them to respond in some way, and you’re NOT getting many or any conversions, then what do you do?

The very first thing you should do, if you are getting few or no conversions, is to find out how many people are actually coming to the web site. And this means a web statistics program or service.

There are many such web statistics services available, and most web hosting programs have a free web statistics program. But most of these are just terrible. I recommend people to use Google Analytics, which is free and is very good. You have to set up an account, then take the code they give you and put that on every page of your site. If you have a Wordpress site, you have to install a plugin that allows you to use Analytics, and then you just have to enter the account number and you’re set. I use a plugin called “Analytics WP.”

Once you are set up with Analytics, you should check the statistics once a week and see how much traffic you’re getting. If you do graphs for your business you should do a graph for web site visits weekly.

So let’s take a scenario. Let’s say you are only getting 2 conversions, meaning people responding to you, per month. Then you get Google Analytics installed on your web site and a few weeks later you see that you are only getting around 100 visits per week, or 400 per month. If you are getting 2 conversions per month with 400 visits to the site, that’s a conversion percentage of 0.5%.

Your problem in that case is simply that you are not getting enough people visiting your site. Your program then is clear: drive more traffic, via Google AdWords, sending out emails, social media, press releases, and so on. You need more traffic.

But now let’s take the other side of the coin. Same situation of 2 conversions per month, but after checking your traffic you find out you are getting 1,200 visits per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.04%.

Now you know that your web site is not set up properly to take advantage of that traffic. If you examine your site with a critical and fresh view, you will probably find one or more of the following:

a. It’s hard to buy stuff or hard to find where to do it.
b. Your newsletter signup form, if you have one, is not on the sidebar on every page (which it should be).
c. The phone number is not on every page or is hard to find
d. Your contact page is non-existent or hard to find.
e. You have no free offers to entice people to respond who maybe are not ready to buy right now.

If you find any or all of the above, you can make changes to the site to make it easier or more obvious for people to respond, or add some free offers if you don’t have any.

Now let’s wrap up by talking about conversion percentages. Ed Dale, well known Australian web marketing guru and organizer of the yearly 30 Day Challenge training program, says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for a web site. That means you’d get one conversion for every 200 visitors to the site. In that case he is specifically talking about online sales, which are usually going to have a lower percentage than with lead generation.

If you are doing lead generation, meaning you’re trying to get leads that a salesman will call and close, I think an acceptable conversion percentage is anywhere from 1% to 5%. If you are getting less than 1%, you need to work on the web site, making it easier to find stuff, and adding some free offers.

But I find that in most cases when I ask someone what kind of traffic they’re getting to the web site and they don’t know, then the problem is almost always really low numbers of visitors to the site. And in that case the program is to start generating more traffic, because you need thousands of visitors.

Good luck with your web site conversions.

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Why Article Marketing is Important

by John Eberhard

Article marketing means to write an article and then distribute that article around to various web sites called article directories. Article marketing is an important part of link building, which is often lumped in with the subject of search engine optimization.

My company does a lot of link building for clients. The purpose is to build up a lot of links to the client web site from other sites. The reason for this is that for Google, the number of links to a web site from other sites is their top criteria for determining the ranking of that web site. So the higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you will get from them.

I use several methods to build up links to web sites. But the most effective method I have found for building high volume links is article marketing. I use other methods to build quality links, but for quantity, it’s article marketing, hands down.

The first step is to write an article. This should be a minimum of 500 words, and should be about some topic of interest related to your product or your industry. It should not be a pitch directly about buying your products or services, but should be informational.

Aside from building links, writing and distributing articles is a way of establishing you as a reliable information source. For many companies, this is an important strategy today in making you and your company a trusted place to do business. By writing an article with relevant, correct information, you are demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about.

Once the article is written, I usually distribute it to between 50 and 100 article directories. Some of the top directories are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are several of what I consider premium article directories, including:
http://www.squidoo.com
http://knol.google.com/k
http://business.blinkweb.com/

We used to consider HubPages.com a premium article directory, but they have demonstrated that they are really anti-marketing, so we don’t bother with them anymore. Not sure why a site like that would even exist if it was anti-marketing, but there you go.

The best frequency is to write and send out an article to at least 50 article directories, at least once a month. Sending out to 100 directories is better, and sending more than one article per month is better too. We have some clients where we distribute one article per week.

By following a program of at least 100 article submissions per month, it is possible to build up links from practically none to over 2,000 links within several months.

You can check your number of links on Google by entering this in the search line:

“yourwebsite.com” -site:yourwebsite.com

I hesitate to give that because every time I do someone complains that it doesn’t work. But it does. It’s your web site address, in quotes, then a space, a dash, the word “site,” a colon, and your web address again without quotes. You enter that in the Google search field. It will then say at the top “About 27,700 results” (as it did for my web site just now). That’s the number of links.

If you do that for some of your competitor sites, that will give you an idea of how many links you will need to be able to rank well for your industry.

Good luck with link building and search engine rankings.

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Promotional Strategy When Times Are Tough

by John Eberhard

Years ago I worked for a software company as the VP Marketing. It was policy at that company that each week they would allocate 20% of the gross income for promotional expenses, things like ads, direct mail, trade show expenses, and so on. This was before the Internet and website marketing.

I was in charge of that promotional budget, so each week my staff would prepare the purchase orders and I would sort through them to select what I thought was the best way to spend that money, then I would submit those to the financial planning committee.

There was one time where the company’s income was lower than usual for several weeks. Of course every company goes through this from time to time, and of course it creates a problem for financial planning. Because the question is how do you pay all the bills, make payroll, etc.? I was on the financial planning committee then and I’ve been on it in a number of companies since then, and I can tell you it is always a challenge. But if you are a business owner, you already know that.

The Executive Director of the company at the time had the idea that we would dramatically cut the percentage of gross income going to promo. I objected to this of course, not just because it was my personal fiefdom so to speak, but because I had observed that there was a direct proportion between the money spent and the amount of promo sent out, to the number of leads that came in, and to the sales, and to the income.

Well the ED was undeterred by my objections and we embarked on a period of six weeks where the promo allocation dropped to 6% of the gross income.

What do you think happened?

Do you think we recovered to our previous level of income?

No we did not. In fact, the gross income dropped even lower during that six week period. At the end of that period, the owner of the company stepped in and removed the Executive Director and appointed a new one. The policy of 20% to promo was reinstated, and the company slowly climbed back up to its previous level of income.

What I learned from that experience was that it is vital to maintain a promotional budget, and that it is especially important when the gross income dips below its normal level. Cutting the promo budget is not the solution when the income is down. If anything, it is more important to maintain or increase promo levels when income is down.

Over the years I worked for a number of companies in the capacity as a Director or VP of Marketing. And those companies all had different policies on how much money they put towards promo items. The software company mentioned above allocated 20%, some allocated 14%, some 10%. I’ve seen some smaller companies that put no money towards promo at all, but existed entirely on referrals and repeat business. But even those companies eventually reached a point in their expansion cycle where they had to start promoting and spending some money on promo.

So no matter what percentage of your income you are putting towards promo items, when income dips, it is vital to maintain or even increase the amount of promotional actions you are doing. It’s not easy. I’ve sat on that financial planning committee and I know it’s not easy. But it is the route to survival and expansion.

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Logistics for Re-Designing a Web Site

by John Eberhard

When you decide to have your web site re-designed, there are some logistical considerations that you should be aware of.

Keeping the Same Hosting Company

If you have a web hosting account that you are happy with, then your web designer should create a new sub-folder on your web site and put the newly designed web site there. That way you can view what he is doing by putting in your web address plus the new folder, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/new.>

In this way your web designer can build the new web site, and upload the files to the sub-folder, and you can look at it on your computer, give him edits or changes, and give him final approval before the new site is live.

Once you have a finalized design and content that you have approved, then your web designer can upload all the new files into the root folder and the new site will become live. He should also, before he uploads all the new files, download all your old files and keep them on his hard disk just in case anything goes wrong.

Switching Hosting Companies

If you are not happy with your hosting company for whatever reason, then the best thing is to have your web designer start a new hosting account and build the new site there. He will be able to give you a preview web address so you can view the new site while he is working on it.

I typically use GoDaddy and Hostgator for setting up new hosting accounts for client web sites. They are inexpensive ($5-8 per month) and I have had a good experience with both. GoDaddy’s basic hosting account is $5 per month and they have a “deluxe” hosting account for $8 per month where you can host multiple web sites for the same price.

While your web designer is working on the new site in the new hosting account, your old web site will still be live. Visitors to the site will still see your old site until you’re ready to make the switch.

Once you preview the new site and approve everything, now the switchover can occur. The way this is done is that you have to know where the web address was registered, i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc. And you have to have the login information for your account. Your account with one of the domain registrars is separate from your hosting account, though some companies like GoDaddy do both domain registration and hosting.

So once you find the domain registrar login information (I find most clients have to dig to find this) then you log into the account, and switch the DNS (domain name servers). This means that the web address, or domain, will now point to a different computer, the computer at your new hosting company that holds your new web site files.

There is a record, contained in every web server across the planet, that includes every single web address, and what computer the files for that web address are on. Let’s say your old hosting company for your www.mywidgets.com web site was located in New Jersey. That record would point to that specific computer inside the hosting company in New Jersey, and so every time someone would type in www.mywidgets.com, their computer would be directed to that computer in New Jersey and pull up the files from that computer.

So now let’s say your new hosting company is in Arizona. Once you switch the DNS, that record gets updated on every web server across the planet, and it now points to that new computer in Arizona. Now when someone types in your web address, they get directed to that computer in Arizona and the files get pulled from that computer.

When you switch the DNS, it takes about 24 hours for the records to be “propagated,” which means they get updated on every web server across the planet.

Good luck with your web site re-design.

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