Web Design Tips and Tricks

How to Test Your Web Headlines and Web Site Home Page to Sell More Products and Services

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A client asked me, at what point do you change your Web site when not making enough sales? My answer? Within a month because as long as your ad copy is weak, those weak sales numbers will continue.

Your coach is number one on Google and 35 other search engines with the key words, "book coaching." While web site hits were high, I noticed a below 2% conversion rate for one top eBook. The culprits? My homepage headlines lead my visitor to the book's sales letter. My sales letter lacked enough benefit-driven headlines and benefits to convince people to buy.

Ways to Reach your Web Site Sales Dream

Test your web site headlines and web home page content to be sure your sales message is strong.

Through email, send a casual marketing survey. Send different Web site parts such as each headline that takes the visitor to the sales letter or the sales letter itself to your friends, business associates, other writers, and editors.

Say, Dear friends and Associates, "I need your brain." My Web site is not selling this product or service (name it) well. Let me know what phrases or benefits convince you to take out your credit card and buy my product? Will you rate each of these parts?

1) Home page and sales letter headlines. Includes four or five varieties of one headline. Ask your associates which headlines convince them to look further at other site parts or buy your product or service. To make things simple ask them to vote from 1-5 so you can see how to change it.

2) The "who" I am. Include several blurbs on your purpose or bio. Ask your associates to vote from 1-5 and add new phrases they think are stronger. Remember, you site is not about you; it is about your potential customers. Make sure your bio is short enough (one paragraph) to make room for what counts--benefits?

3) Benefits and features. Know that you need to answer the question by your visitor, "What's in it for me?"

From a working list of 5-10 benefits and 5-10 features, choose the top few to include on your web site home page. Benefits are outcomes your buyers want after they use your product or service such as more consistent higher income, saving time and money, or creating a balanced life. Benefits sell, features explain or describe your product. Features include phrases such as "5 steps to...," or "7 Sure-fire ways to ..." Once you know the difference, then you can combine them to read something like this: "7 Sure-fire ways to increase profits from your eBook."

In your survey, ask your people which phrases work? Which ones convince you to order or buy?

Give people a finish line so you can gather this valuable information quickly. Offer a free report or eBook to anyone who takes the time to respond. Give them all the vital contact information in your signature file at the bottom with hyperlinks to your email to make it easy.

Bring those visitors back for more, applauding you and saying BRAVO! This 24/7 marketing team will create a buzz about your great site, and send you many more visitors through word of mouth.

Judy Cullins ©2004 All Rights Reserved.

This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

1. To speed up the load time of their website
2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.

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