Traffic, Smaffic. What You Really Need To Know To Make Sales Online
By Leigh Hunt • Category: Grow Your Online Business, Internet Marketing Techniques, SEO & Traffic, Web Design & Development 
photo by mortsan
If you market your business online, one of your biggest missions is probably getting traffic to your website.
You’ve learned that you can’t just slap up any old website and sit back and wait for the visitors to flood in. So, bearing this in mind, you get busy finding ways to attract people to your site.
After all, lots of traffic means lots of sales, right? Not necessarily.
Unless you’ve thought about the one thing that will REALLY turn your website into a money making machine, even tens of thousands of visitors to your website are going to be next to worthless to you.
What WILL determine how much money you make from your website? C-O-N-V-E-R-S-I-O-N.
Conversion, conversion, conversion!
Yes, traffic is important. But only the right kind of traffic. Only traffic that is primed for your product or service. And most importantly, traffic that is ready to buy.
If you want to make money online, you MUST attract visitors that want to buy your product or service. It’s a simple concept, but one that an astonishing number of business owners marketing online seem to overlook.
Look at it this way, if you want to sell 10 units of your product or service per month you only actually need 10 visitors to your website if you have a 100% conversion rate. If you get 10,000 visitors to your website but none of them buy (o% conversion), then those 10,000 visitors are worth nothing to you. Especially if you spent a lot of time and money to attract those 10,000 people in the first place.
Essentially, the better your conversion rate the less visitors you need to chase.
The web business that generate the most income for me is this one selling TEFL courses. It generates around £30,000/$60,000 worth of sales every month (not all of which goes to me I should add!). Now, to make that kind of money I need katrillions of visitors, right?
Wrong!
This site averages only 6,000 unique visitors per month. Many Internet marketers would think this a pittance. However, we achieve good sales results not because of the numbers of visitors we get, but because we bring very targeted traffic that is actually in the market to buy a TEFL course.
So, if you’re in the position where you get decent numbers of visitors to your website but you don’t make many sales then your problem most likely lies in one or both of the following areas:
- You’re not attracting the right kind of visitors to your website.
- If you are attracting the right visitors (i.e. they want your product and are ready to buy), but still having no luck converting sales there is something wrong with the way your product or service is being presented.
To tackle the first point, make sure you research your market thoroughly. Find out the core of what makes your customer tick.
- What problem does your typical customer have that your product or service can solve?
- What are the core triggers that make your customers buy?
- What is the real emotion that they want to feel from making a purchase? It’s all about base emotions at the end of the day.
Don’t skip this step because it really is the foundation of everything you do when marketing your business online.
Next, find out where your typical visitor hangs out online, and go hang out there too. Find out what keyphrases they use to search for your kind of product or service, and make sure your website is optimised for those keywords.
Work really hard to define who your customer is and how you can get them to your website.
If you are attracting the right kind of visitors but you’re not making many sales then you need to work on your web content and sales processes.
If you want to make money online, how you communicate with your customers when they reach your website is crucial to your success.
Here are some things you need to be aware of:
- The content of your website needs to be targeted towards your customer. Your words need to be compelling. You need to speak the language of your market and offer a product or service they actually want. (Notice I said ‘want’ and not ‘need’. People tend to buy what they want before they buy what they need.)
- You should have a way to collect email addresses of visitors to your website so that you can keep in touch with potential customers. You might do this by offering a newsletter or free report.
- You need to make it very obvious what your website is about. Internet users are ruthlessly impatient and will click away if it’s not obvious. Even if you have the perfect product to fulfill their wants, it won’t make a jot of difference if they don’t realise it.
- Have a structured sales process that is targeted towards the expectations of your customers. Make the process simple, and if possible include some personal email contact. It makes the whole transaction so much more personal, which in itself I have found leads to better conversions.
To summarise my opinion, conversion is what you should think about first and foremost. Get your market right. Get your product right. Get your tools and techniques to attract and convert targeted traffic fine-tuned.
Then, and only then, focus on attracting more and more of the right traffic. You’ll soon see sales increase.
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Leigh Hunt is a proud work at home mum and serial Internet Mumpreneur. She's been running online businesses since 2002 and absolutely LOVES it! She loves it so much that she decided to start this webzine to support other mums (and dads) starting and running businesses online. She has finally embraced her passion!
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Outstanding, this is truly some of the best advice I have had the pleasure of reading in a long time. The Internet marketing community tends to put so much emphasis on building traffic, but in many cases you just don’t need a lot if it to be successful. There are some excellent strategies and tips within this and I thank you for sharing your wisdom with the rest of us.
Hi
We have a lot of people viewing our site but the conversion rate is not that good. Reading this article has really made us focus in on this issue.
We sell designer stencils online so really need to focus in on who wants to buy stencils and target those groups rather than hoping that everyone wants to buy stencils.
thanks for the advice.
best wishes
Clare
Hi,its good to go through your site which really had good information .The important point to remember while online business is to get the desired traffic.This is possible when you are well aware of what your target audience desires.
Hi Leigh,
Iwas very interested to read your article because conversion rate is my problem. I am attracting more visitors to my site and I think I am getting them from the right places so it has to be the site. I have recently changed how items are sized on the shop it used to be repeat pictures with different sizes. I am now tackling the categories and trying to simplify them. I also plan to change the home page to be more sales related. Do you think I’m on the right track? I have been running for about 9 months now.
Hi Linda
I’ve just had a browse through your site and here are a few suggestions I would make to start converting more visitors into sales. You may already be on to some of them, but I’ll mention everything that’s in my head anyway:
1. With an online store (as with any online business for that matter) you need to build trust early on. One of the things that I am concerned about when buying clothes online is what happens if it arrives I don’t like the item, or it doesn’t fit. I want to know that there is an easy process for returns and exchanges. You need to have a ‘Returns Policy’ link prominently displayed on your home page that customers can easily find. If you have a straight forward returns policy this should put customers minds at rest. I only had a quick scan, but I couldn’t see anything about returns in your terms and conditions.
2. You should also let customers know on every page how they can pay, and reassure them that the methods of payment are safe and secure.
3. Web surfers are generally lazy, so you need to make the whole process of navigating your site quick and easy. Instead of having a menu item that says ‘Shop’, list the subsections within the shop on the left hand side so that people can quickly click to the products they are interested in. i.e. Organic Girls Clothing, Organic Boys Clothing. This also gives you additional keyword placements to be picked up by the search engines, so bear this in mind when naming the categories. Update: I just noticed that you do have a list of products on the home page, but maybe you need to move this further up so that people don’t miss them. I had to scroll down to see them.
In fact, where you currently have the list of products you could add some feature products with images so that people can quickly see what kind of stuff you have on offer.
4. Tell your customers how they can contact you. Ideally you should display your phone number and any other ways of contacting you prominently on every page. The top right hand side of the page is a popular space for contact information.
5. Start building an opt-in list of subscribers that are interested in your products. You could do this by offering a free report or newsletter subscription. Offer discounts or other incentives to subscribers to encourage more people to sign up. You can keep in touch with your subscribers, letting them know when you have new products etc. If you do this well, you’ll soon start building a list of loyal customers.
6. To be honest, I would think about changing the colours of your site. For organic products I think more natural, earthy colours would go down well. It’s kind of what I would expect.
7. Always bear in mind that when a user arrives at your site they will only see what is referred to as the ‘first fold’. This is the part of the screen that users see without having to scroll down. Make sure your most important info is in that first fold.
8. Get a picture of yourself on your site, preferably on the home page. This goes a long way to developing trust.
I’ve rattled on a bit, but to conclude I’d say you need to focus on building trust and a pleasant, easy shopping experience. Shopping online is really no different to shopping in the high street. We as customers want it to be an enjoyable experience.
Take a look at this Wedding Favors website and study how they do it, because they’ve got it spot on. Use it as a mentor site.
Well, I hope I’ve helped some!
Leigh x
Hi Leigh,
Thank you for your feedback much appreciated. Some of the things you mention are in hand but I like your idea about the returns policy and emphasis on payment safety on each page. I don’t think I could cope with seeing me on the home page! yuchh! but I am on the about us page. I will look at a newsletter as you suggest.
Thank you again some really helpful advice and all your trouble sending such an indepth analysis.
Linda
Hello Leigh,
Your article is very interesting.
I have tried in my website : http://www.beckyandlolo.co.uk to give as many informations as possible to the customers and to make the site clear and easy to navigate.
However, the conversion rate could be better??
Besides, I have heard that having lots of links to your website will increase your website ranking.
The problem is that you can’t ask your competitors to exchange links and also if you have a limited budget, you can’t advertise in relevant websites??
Thank you in advance for your help/suggestions.
Valerie
http://www.beckyandlolo.co.uk