Increasing Your Sales and Lead Conversions
I was listening to Jeremy Shoemaker’s (aka Shoemoney) podcast today and a guy called in and asked why his traffic wasn’t converting into leads.
He was getting 2000 uniques per day and about 50 click-thoughs but no leads.
This peaked my interest for a moment, but when he explained it further the problem was fairly obvious.
He had music news site - Breaking Music News - a pretty nice site with some decent information. It has a nice design and no obvious problems.
To help with his click through rate, he had decided to show his own links that were made to look similar to Google Adsense links - an idea I have seen used before with varying success (he may have changed this by now). The “Google Ads” actually then pointed to affiliate offers.
And there was the problem. His affiliate offers had to do with ringtones (which happens to be Shoemoney’s specialty).
Ringtones don’t have much to do with the content of the Breaking Music News site. Very few people will visit a music news site with the intent of finding a ringtone. It is therefore very difficult to presell them on the idea of downloading a ringtone - even if it’s free.
Offering visitors something that they are already looking for when they arrive at your site is the key to getting higher conversions. If the visitor comes to your site after searching on Google for “ringtone download” they are going to be much easier to convert into a ringtone lead.
For the Breaking Music News site, however, he would probably have much greater success by finding offers related to.. well.. breaking music news. Off the top of my head, music downloads, music video downloads, music magazine offers would pobably be a good start. I think I also remember seeing a free 500 songs download on either CPA Empire or AzoogleAds (both aff. links) recently too, which would probably produce better results for him.
Horses for courses.
Find out how and why people are coming to your site and then give them what they want.
A LOT of people without a marketing or sales background make the mistake of thinking they can sell anything to anybody.
You’ll always do better when you match the message and the offering to the market you’re serving.
Here’s a big-time tip :
Dig deep and narrow for your gold - not wide and shallow.
We all need to find more ways to narrow our offerings down to those in the market who actually buy, not a general offering to everybody in that market.
If he’ll do a little in-depth searching, with the proper ( magic )keywords, he can find out what that market is actually buying and not just what they are interested in.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:55 pmGood advice there Mike. A bit of research can save you a lot of pain!
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:51 pmHey
I by the way am the owner of the site and the caller on Net Income. Very cool too see someone wrote an article about the caller. The advice is very helpful and glad I found it. I will reply soon hopefully with a success story.
Thanks a lot
August 5th, 2006 at 7:47 amThanks for stopping in Thomas. I hope the post was some help and that you come back and let us all know how your conversion rates are going!
August 6th, 2006 at 5:25 amYeah, that is good advice. As someone who runs a number of sites, I too can get a little myopic and forget what the “product” is, even though past experience shows what you are saying is correct.
I think the hard part is finding a good niche product to sell that has a good margin though, which is outside of this post’s scope.
August 8th, 2006 at 10:45 pm