After all, your site reports say you’re driving the right audience to your site. AND your sales pitch appeals to this audience. AND you sell high-quality products or services.

But few visitors are buying. Why?

Consider How Your Site Appears To Visitors

Consider the possibility that your web site is turning visitors away. FOREVER!

Internet visitor turnoff happens every minute of every day. How do you minimize it?

Well, suppose you’re a customer in a “real” store. You want to buy a light bulb. But the store is so big that three employees can’t give you directions to the right aisle. Maybe you can’t even find someone to give you directions! Is this how your site navigation appears to visitors?

Another example: Based on the length of the checkout lines in the supermarket, you know it’s going to take at least 15 minutes to give away your money. Will you walk out? Your web site visitors can just click out of your site!

Hey, My Site Is Perfect!

You say these “real” store situations don’t apply to your site? Do you think you’re objective?

With a wee bit of effort, you can create a money magnet web site! Check out this list of tips for keeping visitors at your site so they WILL buy or contact you.

Ten Tips Plus One Bonus Tip

1. Use a popup to ask if your prospect’s visit satisfied their reason for clicking to your site. A few visitors find this annoying. Others will be happy to comment. Trial a popup, and remove it if it is unpopular. Success depends on how quickly visitors can answer your questions.

2. Survey past visitors.

3. Ask ten people in your target audience to test drive your site.

4. Click on the home page. Where does your eye go first? Is this location the FIRST item you want visitors to see?

5. Test the site using several different browsers. Your software might give you this option. Sometimes there’s a flaw you won’t see in your own browser.

6. Encourage your visitors to contact you and make it simple for them to do so. Turnoffs are addresses like webmaster@site.com, email@site.com, and customerservice@site.com. The address should contain a person’s name.

7. Your site’s purpose needs to be clear and easily understood by the visitor. If you want a customer to contact you for more information, say so. If you want a customer to buy, say so. Keep visitors guessing and they’ll exit quickly. And PERMANENTLY.

8. Check out the structure, copy, and look of your competition’s sites. Take advantage of other people’s web knowledge.

9. If your site has links, check them often. There’s nothing worse than a visitor clicking on a link and getting an error message. This includes internal as well as external links. Again, the software used to build the site checks for certain links. Use it regularly!

10. If you have a FLASH intro or other cutesy gimmicks, remove them. Why risk losing visitors who might be offended? These gimmicks are way different than the popup question mentioned before. The popup is a feedback mechanism. Gimmicks are more than annoying -- they’re unprofessional.

BONUS Tip: Consider revising site design based on your findings from the previous ten tips. Most people start with a small site and then add pages gradually. Sometimes the site size gets out of hand, or the site loads slowly, or it navigates like a boat taking on water. Find the problems and change the design!

Happy web site creation and revision. Make your site a money magnet!

Copyright 2005 Valerie Mills