This is a post in a series which begins here. We’ve talked so far about the 3 Simple, Killer Steps to Improve Traffic, and then we moved on to how to Use a Sales Funnel to Blow up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales. Today, I’m going to talk for a minute about how a tip I learned to make better use of the traffic you’re already getting.
High Traffic Ain’t all That…
We’re all understandably concerned with getting more and more traffic. This makes sense. But look, if you’re getting any traffic at all, and you’re not making money…you’re doing something wrong. If you’re not making ANY money with low traffic, you’re not going to be doing much better with MORE traffic. We’ve already talked about this briefly, but this will come up again and again here: you don’t need massive traffic to make money online. You just need to be smart about what you’re doing! In this post I’ll give you a simple tweak that will help you get better results from the traffic you’re already getting. Make more money without increasing traffic at all…that’s gotta sound at least kind of cool, right? 😉
The Sales Funnel, Again
So here’s the deal, everyone of your visitors is at a certain place in your sales funnel. It’s essential to stop looking at your traffic as just “traffic”. First of all, they’re all prospects. They’re all individual people. Everyone who hits your site is there for a reason. Why? What’s their motivation for being there? How did they find you? What problem can you help them solve? It’s your job to be able to answer these questions. One of my goals in writing this particular series of posts is to hopefully help you with some sales training tips that will help you zero in on these concerns and make better use of your traffic.
It’s important to consider this: not everyone is on your site for the same reason. Your friends, your colleagues, people you’ve never met, people who found you on Twitter, through Google…they’re all likely there for different reasons, and you need to tweak your site to make the best use of this information. You cannot use a blanket sales approach and hope for good results. It’s not going to work. You need to sell, as best as you can, to each individual visitor.
Look at where your visitors came from and use that information to make the page they land on as conducive to moving them along the sales cycle as possible. In this post, I’ll give you an example of how to do this with organic traffic (visitors that come in from search engines). In later posts, I will cover more sources of traffic and how to tweak your site out to monetize on those as well.
Tweak Your Page to Monetize on Organic Traffic
Do you have a page that’s getting a lot of traffic from Google or some other search engine? Use your analytics to see what keywords they’re using to land on that page. Search engine traffic is usually pretty targeted, good quality traffic, but if you’re not converting that traffic, what good is it? If they’re landing on your page through a search engine, think about what they means…
They typed in specific keywords for a specific problem they’re looking to solve. They’re looking for an answer, and your site showed up! They’re on your site because Google has told them you likely have a good answer for them. This is a fantastic opportunity to monetize! Yet many sites have a 60% bounce rate or higher. In other words, you have all these targeted leads hitting your site, and 60% of them or more are immediately leaving without even reading a single article, filling out a form or even asking you for more information in any way. Fail! Let’s not let this happen anymore, okay?
Let’s say you have an article on how to grow blueberries on your back porch. Cool. I like this site already! Now let’s say you look in your analytics report and see that people are finding that page by searching “how to grow blueberries”. Here are a few things to think about:
- Maybe it’s time to add a free ebook, specifically on this page, called “how to grow blueberries” and offer it as a free download for any new subscribers.
- Maybe you can even effectively SELL an ebook on that page.
- Perhaps you would do better to increase the size and scope of that particular article and make it more engaging…people are hitting this article for a reason. There is obviously demand for it. Give them tons of information to keep them there longer!
- Link the page up really well to OTHER pages on your site or related sales pages you have up elsewhere. They’ve hit your site as a targeted lead. Now, lead them on to a place that will show them even more value, and give you a better opportunity to make a sale. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!
- Maybe you can try cutting back on the information you give! Require an email subscription to access the page.
See the point is this…there are a LOT of things you can do to respond to this demand for information. But the WRONG thing to do is to simply appreciate the hits you’re getting and then proceed to wonder why you’re not making any money! Unfortunately this is what most people do! Be deliberate in your approach and keep this fantastically simple rule of blogging for business success always in the front of your mind:
Success comes in tiny increments!
You can always wonder why you’re not getting the huge results that other bloggers and internet marketers get, or you can go about the business of making the small tiny tweaks that make all the difference. It’s up to you! Let’s say you have 100 pages or so indexed on your site. Make a tiny 1% improvement to each page, and you create an overall massive increase in income! These small changes add up; trust me!
A Lesson from the Trenches
When I was out in the field selling face to face, I learned how important it was to dress well. On the surface, and to the untrained sales professional, it doesn’t seem like it should matter so much. I mean, if my product was indeed the best, all I should have to do is show it, and the customer should buy it because it makes sense…because it’s a quality, affordable and necessary product, right? It doesn’t work that way. Presentation is everything. Little tweaks to your presentation make all the difference. A clean, well-tailored suit, a slightly different inflection when you make a certain point or ask a certain question of your prospect, effective body language…it all requires extra work and attention to detail. But when you put all the elements together, it becomes nearly impossible to NOT get the sale! You become a force to be reckoned with. But you must do the work! Internet marketing is no different.
Perhaps you’re blogging or social networking and trying to get better results. Maybe you’re selling real estate, or ebooks, or affiliate products of some sort…you’re in the right place, but always remember there are no short cuts!
Make small incremental changes, and critique the results you get. Go back and tweak more. Lots of work, I know! You can complain if you want, or you can go make a killing…it’s up to you 🙂
Upcoming posts…I will be covering more sales training tips for tweaking and getting better results from more traffic sources. As the series continues, feel free to comment and leave any ideas for future content you’d like to see covered. Thanks and talk to you soon!