Top Ten Ways to Increase Web Sales
by Judy Cullins
You have only 10 seconds to impress your potential buyer.
Your visitors don't care about you. They care what you can do for them. Give them a reason to buy. If you haven't reaped the sales you deserve apply these ten tips.
1. Write dazzling home-page copy that gives your potential customers a reason to click to your product.
Use benefit driven headlines that lead them through your "click here" to a short sales letter or bulleted benefits of your service or product that signals "buy now." Before I learned this ultimate powerful technique, my Web sales were flat. Since incorporating "passion copy writing," my brand new Web site sales jumped from <75 in August to over <2665 by December 20, and went ovwer <3000 a month during the next year.
2. Preplan and Know your Web site's purpose.
Without a clear purpose, your visitors will be confused and leave. If you are a coach, make sure that is clear. Put up your audience concerns and challenges. Then follow that by what solutions you can give them. If you have a book to offer, make sure you compel your visitor to go to your order page.
When visiting other professional sites, I often go away wondering what are they selling? What do they want the visitor, to do?
3. Sell your products and services through brave, bold, headings.
Headings can ask a pertinent question about you visitors challenges, such as "Are your web sales puny?" Or, "Are you frustrated not being in the career you love? Headings can use a benefit statement such as Quadruple your Success (you name what it is) with one feature it works with, such as the Online Promotion Tool Kit (name your product or service).
4. Use sparkling testimonials from the rich and famous on your home page and all others about each product or service you offer.
You may already have them for your product and service, but do you have them for your ezine, free articles, and Web site?
5. Support your home page "Passion Approach" copy with proper links to product sales letters, stories, and service.
Let's say you have a bold heading "Quadruple your Web sales in Three Months with Opt-In Ezine Articles." Next to it say, "click here." Where will you take your visitor? To your sales letter, of course!
6. Make your layout clear, clean, and consistent.
An unorganized, unclear site tells people you aren't professional (and we all want to be professional, don't we?).
You need to organize each page in the same layout-such as left centered, right centered, or centered. Go to other Web sites and choose a design that resonates with you. Keep every page in the same format.
7. Use color, font changes, small graphics to spice up your site, but remember to use a lot of white space.
Only use graphics occasionally and be sure they are small because larges graphics make your site load slowly. When forced to wait over ten seconds, your targeted visitors who might buy from you, leave!
Easy-to-read and clear navigation helps keep your visitors on your site longer. If you are like me, and have a content-dense site, include long copy so long as you present it in short chunks.
It's a good idea to check your site often to see if you have any glitches. Another good idea is to visit your site with a visitor mind set. What turns you off? What do you like?
8. Put your information in short paragraphs.
When a visitor sees a long line of print, he gets discouraged because he want his information fast, clear, and concise. Make each paragraph only 4-6 lines. Online readers want easy-to- read material they can get the main points from and they want it faster than light rays. Remember clear, compelling copy is always the rule.
9. Be consistent with your heading and body fonts.
Do not use all capital letters in your articles or headings. They are hard to read. Use only a few for emphasis; for the rest, make them upper/lower case such as *Sell More Books with a Powerful Back Cover*.
Do not use the same font for headlines and titles as you do for the body of information beneath. This mistake makes it hard to distinguish the two. If you are a non-techie like me you can use "Times Roman" for the heading and "Arial"b2 point for the body. Notice no tails in Arial (called Sans Serif), good for some headings too.Times Roman and the other serif-style fonts (with tails) draw attention and are more dramatic. From exper- ience, I found these fonts work well for sales letters.
10. Use dividers such as ========== or ---------- when you change topics.
These can add variety and help your visitors to see your message more clearly. These are often used on business ezines. Each publisher makes their ezine their own by their personal choices.
Remember your home page must give your visitors a reason to buy. Use these "Marketing Pizzazz" techniques throughout your site. Think right now, what is it I need to act on next to manifest more dollar success on my site?
=============
Judy Cullins: author, publisher, book coach Helps professionals manifest their book dreams eBook:_Ten Non-techie Ways to Market Your Book Online_ http://www.bookcoaching.com/discounts.shtml Send an email to mailto:Subscribe@bookcoaching.com The Book Coach Says... includes 2 free eReports mailto:Judy@bookcoaching.com Ph:619/466/0622
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
More Online Business Help Articles
More By Developer Shed
 developerWorks - FREE Tools!
|
Attend this launch webcast with Scott Hebner, Vice President of IBM Rational Marketing and Strategy, for an overview of Rational’s new software offerings and resources to help modernize and accelerate software innovation on i on Power Systems – while ensuring past application investments are protected and continue to grow. Learn how these solutions are helping customers extend their core i5/OS solutions toward modern architectures such as SOA and web technologies to deliver business improvements that stand the test of time.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Download the Rational Application Developer (RAD) v7.5 open beta code and start developing applications for the JEE5 standard which features EJB3.0, JPA, JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5 standards. When you use this beta you will see how you can increase developer productivity for already existing applications with improved support for refactoring, as well as adding new features to existing applications. In addition, the beta provides tooling for JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft to improve the developer productivity with these enterprise systems.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Download the IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1 beta code and learn more about the rich features and enhancements in IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1. WebSphere Portal provides a composite application or business mashup framework and the advanced tooling needed to build flexible, SOA-based solutions, and scalability to meet the needs of any size organization.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Visit IBM developerWorks to download a free trial version of WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid, which lets you schedule, execute, and monitor batch jobs. Because online transaction processing and batch jobs execute simultaneously on the same server resources, you can avoid costly duplication of resources. Compute Grid supports job types of Java transactional batch, compute-intensive and a new type called "native execution", which enables non-Java workloads to run on distributed end points.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join us for this web seminar to learn how you can defend your web applications from attack. Learn about the 3 most common web application attacks, including how they occur and what can be done to prevent them. We’ll also discuss manual versus automated approaches for scanning and identifying web application vulnerabilities and how IBM Rational AppScan, an automated vulnerability scanner, can help you automate more of what you are doing manually today.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
XML has become a common way of storing business data as flat files and many data server vendors including IBM have provided ways to store this data within relational database systems. Increasingly collections of XML files are accessed like databases using an xQuery and other XML standard mechanisms. Businesses find the need to combine the traditional tabular structured data with XML formatted data. In this webcast, you’ll learn about IBM’s WebSphere Federation Server technology, which provides users with the ability to integrate these two data formats.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join this Rational Talks to You teleconference on December 6 at 1:00 pm ET to participate in an agile application development discussion and get your questions answered on using IBM Rational Method Composer in a distributed environment.Get your questions answered!
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Discover how Rational tools and best practices for testing can make your job easier. The new Rational Testing eKits provide you with valuable resources – including demos, webcasts, tutorials, and articles – that help you address your specific testing needs across the software lifecycle. Five new eKits are available covering the topics of Requirements and Test Management, Functional Testing, Performance Testing, Code Quality and Embedded Systems, and SOA and Web Services Testing.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
This paper is about the critical role that a discipline called integrated requirements management can play in helping to ensure that your business goals and IT investments are continuously aligned—whether you are sourcing, integrating, building or maintaining software. It also looks at ways that automated IBM Rational® products can work together to help you use requirements in the very best way.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
WebSphere Process Server delivers a unique integration framework that simplifies existing IT resources. Often, as IT assets grow to support business demand, so too does their complexity and manageability. In this webcast, we’ll discuss how WebSphere Process Server helps deliver an SOA infrastructure that provides a common model to orchestrate, mediate, connect, map, and execute the underlying IT functions. Discover how WebSphere Process Server simplifies integration of business processes by leveraging existing IT assets as reusable services without the complexities of traditional integration methodologies.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
All FREE IBM® developerWorks Tools!
|
