12 Tried and Tested Golden Rules for Converting Your Internet Traffic into Customers

Preaching To the Converted

12 Tried and Tested Golden Rules for Converting Your Internet Traffic into Customers

Imagine that thing you’ve most wanted to buy.

You’ve seen the adverts, read the reviews and write ups, talked to all your friends about it and heard loads of stuff that’s got you so excited.

You’ve seen it in the window and now you’re there, seeing, feeling, touching and trying it. You’re all ready to part with your money and it’s yours. But then….. the Sales Person scare you off, or you can’t find any sales people to take your order, or they close the checkout, or the queue is around half an hour, or they make you complete a three page form before you’re even considered worthy of becoming a customer, or …. Well I’m sure you’ve got your own examples.

We’ve all been there – we’re sold, we want to buy, all we need is….. And the stupid retailer puts a barrier before us.

How frustrated do we feel? How annoyed do we get? Will we ever go back there again? And what about the retailer? What a chump? To get that close? And to have wasted all that effort and expense on a customer who will NEVER come back?

This happens every day in shops throughout the world but it also happens all the time online and, in my opinion, is the cardinal sin of online marketing.

Companies make great efforts to get people to their website and lose them before they even get past the landing page, because they don’t properly engage them and convert them from browsers to visitors?

Website owners set an objective like getting people to sign up for something or request an appointment and then don’t properly consider how it works and what they are actually asking people to do.

So here are our 12, tried and tested, golden rules for converting internet traffic into customers:-

1. Set Clear Objectives, i.e. Conversion Targets.

Sounds simple but you’d be surprised how many site owners just want to get people to visit their website and think everything else will follow. What do you want people to do:-

• Buy Something?
• Request a telephone call?
• Book an appointment?
• View a specific information page
• Download something?
• Sign up for newsletter, mailing list, subscription, etc?

2. Design Your Site/Page Around Those Objectives

If you want people to book a follow up call or visit, make sure your visitors understand that and are clearly requested to do that. My old uncle (who was professional salesman) used to tell me that the biggest mistake most salespeople made was not to ask for the order. And this is the same with a lot of websites. You’ve got a visitor who has found the site, wants what you’ve got, has read all about your company and wants to do business but they don’t know what to do next because it hasn’t been spelled out.

3. Make It As Easy As Possible For Your Visitors To Complete Your Objective

If you want someone to sign up to a newsletter all you need is their name and email address, you don’t need them to complete a 10 item form. If you want someone to buy something don’t put obstacles in the way. Ask for the minimum amount of information you need to complete their request and make it as simple and easy to complete as possible.

4. Keep It Short, Sweet And Simple

Minimise the content on each and every conversion page. Do not fill your page with words and complications; just keep it very simple with straightforward bullet points telling them what they need to know and what they need to do next

5. Finish Every Page With A Strong Call To Action

Whether you want them to submit a form, send a payment, give you their email address or just view another page, issue a strong, compelling call to action, telling them what you want them to do and how it will benefit them when they do it.

6. Make Everything As Simple, Straightforward And Obvious As Possible

Look at your website with your customers eyes. Understand how they think and try to imagine every conceivable scenario that may make them confused or unsure. Don’t use jargon, acronyms or long words where simple English is possible. Try to keep everything to a minimum of clicks, think of Amazon & Apple’s 1-click shopping.

7. Test Everything… Repeatedly

Think of every possible scenario and test it. Get your friends and staff to test it in every conceivable way. Once your site or pages are live, monitor it! If you can see issues which you think may be hindering conversions, test out different alternatives and monitor them closely.

8. Know Your Site & Conversion Process Inside Out

I’m often staggered when I find companies that don’t regularly test their check out process, sign up form, or other conversion processes. When we take on a client we get to know the conversion processes backwards and test them out from all different scenarios;- using different types of internet user, different browsers, different operating systems and computers, different internet connections, different network locations, different times of day and so on. Then we monitor the process closely using analytics to see if there are common drop out points that we haven’t spotted. Then we try to replicate and get the site developer to fix the issues.

9. Build Trust And Establish Empathy

You want your visitors/customers to empathise and bond with you, you also need them to trust you. If you want them to give you their email address tell them all about how you protect their data and privacy, how you will not sell their information and how much you hate spam. If you want their credit card details, make sure you have top notch security procedures and SSLs in place and you back it up with security & privacy policies. Lack of trust is one of the biggest causes of conversion failure and customers bailing out of a transaction

10. Don’t Sting Them With Extras

A Great Headline Price, a Free Offer or Subscription can often bring people in and get them so far, but if you then sting them with extra charges or additional requirements expect your conversion rates to plummet. Extra charges, conditions and the like have traditionally been the number 1 obstacle to converting a transaction.

11. Make Sure Your Site And Pages Are Quick To Load

Your pages need to load quickly, if not instantly. People are impatient and will not hang around for your tardy site when there are plenty of others who do what you do. Research shows that anything up to 60% of your visitors will exit your page if it takes more than 6 to 8 seconds to load (and you can bet your bottom dollar they will NEVER return).

12. Did I Mention Testing?

Yes I know it’s boring but you need to test everything. Retail is detail as the saying goes and online it’s just as, if not more important. If you website crashes, page fails to load, if your SSL is out of date, if there’s a spelling mistake, or a broken link, your visitors will find it and they’ll leave, never to return! Make sure everything works and then test it again.

And the bonus rule, Don't spend time and money marketing your website until you have fully understood and implemented the above. If you do, not only will you be wasting your time and money but you'll be alienating your potential new customers in the process!

Peter van Zelst is the Founder of SpecialistOnlineMarketing.com , a practical online marketing agency, providing practical online marketing help and support to businesses. If you want practical help to make your business, website or e-commerce venture fly visit or call http://www.specialistonlinemarketing.com/

Search Marketing is Dangerous

Search Marketing is the largest and fastest growing form of online advertising. Search Marketing allows you to communicate directly with your target customers, wherever they may be, when they are in the market and close to buying your product and service. Search Marketing can eliminate a lot of wasted activity, communication and spend on promoting your products or services to people who don’t want, can’t or won’t buy them and is thus a highly effective and cost-effective form of advertising. So how can it be dangerous?


I like to draw the analogy of search marketing with a highly accurate, highly sophisticated rifle. If you know what your target is, are trained to use your weapon, suitably experienced and take careful aim you can hit anything you want with the minimum of expenditure. But, if you don’t know where or what your target is and/or don’t know what you’re doing, you could be lethal, for all the wrong reasons.


If search marketing is like using a rifle, blanket advertising is like using a machine gun. You’ve got a vague idea where you’re aiming and hopefully some of your bullets should hit the mark. A lot of your bullets will be wasted or hit the wrong targets but, heh, provided you’ve got a big enough budget and aren’t too worried about effectiveness, then it’s great.


Now think of a sniper, he’s only got a handful of bullets. He’s spent years training, is experienced in his profession and with his weapon. He spends a huge amount of time carefully selecting his target, taking pinpoint aim then wallop! He get’s exactly what he wanted for the minimum expenditure of bullets.


Most small to medium sized businesses haven’t got huge sums of money to waste on ineffective advertising and can’t afford huge blanket advertising campaigns. Consequently search marketing offers huge potential for most small to medium sized businesses. But using search marketing without correctly identifying your target market or not using an experienced, trained search marketing professionals to undertake and aim your campaign accordingly is like handing a deadly rifle to an untrained novice.


Put it in the right hands, however, and the only danger you’ll have with search marketing is the unexploded potential of your business.



Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/

BT has seen the future – it’s called BT Web Clicks!

A good friend of mine forwarded me a BT email on Thursday announcing a new product that ‘will carry BT's advertising portfolio forward in the next few years’.


BT, apparently, aims to move its marketing packages away from paper, to much more interactive methods of generating business leads. I wonder if this is part of it’s 21C initiative?

They’ve realised that:-

• 86% of the UK’s population visited a search engine in February 2006!


• That the UK Paid Search market grew by 65% during 2006


• And that paid search marketing is by far the most popular online advertising format, accounting for 57.9% of all online ad spend in 2006.

BT says that Search marketing is a proven way of generating leads directly from both major and local search engines, however getting it right and running a search campaign to generate quality leads can be both time consuming and costly. That’s spot on, BT!

They say that it takes 30 hours to set up your campaign and 10 hours a month to maintain your campaign. Only that much, I must be going wrong somewhere!

BT Offers (and I quote):-

• A Fixed budget – you can choose the budget so you know exactly what you will spend each month.


• Guaranteed leads – for the package you choose they will send you the agreed number of leads


• Advertising text – BT use professional (mmm… I wonder if they really do - see later) online copywriters to create a text ad for your website to attract customers


• Keyword generation – their team of experts analyse your website and current usage on search engines to choose the keywords that are going to generate you relevant leads to your site


• Leads direct to your door – when a customer clicks your sponsored link they go straight through to your website, wooooarh! (I wonder how much they paid their advertising & marketing consultants for coming up with this)


• No admin – their automated systems connect directly with the search engines to bid on keywords and upload your sponsored links

Well, they don’t say BT is at the cutting edge of what’s happening for nothing. Just how long have they been thinking up this devilishly clever new scheme?

Oh yes, and they’re so confident in the product that they ‘will guarantee the number of clicks your website will receive in twelve months and give you your money back if the agreed figure is not reached’. Sensational, eh?

But it gets better!

For only £80 per month they will guarantee 480 clicks per year and for just £200 per month you can have 1200 clicks per annum (I suppose there must be a volume discount in there somewhere).

Now, before you rush off to sign up, there’s one thing they’ve forgotten to mention in their very attractive presentation. Yep, Quality of clicks. And as you know that’s the only thing that I think is important. Any idiot can get traffic to your website, what matters is the quality not the quantity.

Now, much as I’d love people to pay me £200 per month to deliver 200 clicks to their website (in fact I’d even do it for half that), if you’re focussing on just clicks you’re missing the point, and the huge potential of targeted search marketing.

A lot of people can set up a PPC campaign (though, admittedly, quite a few can’t), many people can even ‘professionally’ write Ad Copy, some people can even research & develop a keyword list, but the point is that BEFORE you do any of that you have to develop a proper marketing plan (I’ll omit the phrase strategy if it sounds too pompous but hopefully you get my drift) and, with respect to BT, you can’t do that for £80 per month. Even if you paid them £400 per month, I doubt BT would have the calibre of people, at this level, to develop a proper marketing plan for your business.

Once you’ve properly crafted your marketing plan (and I use the word carefully and deliberately), developed your keyword list, written your copy and developed your landing pages (something BT forgot to mention in their presentation and probably one of the most important factors), then you have to properly and actively MANAGE the campaign, test out different approaches & strategies, find out what works and what doesn’t and develop a proven viable model.

Even if you’d paid BT £2,400, would you really be able to say you’d developed a proven formula based on just 1,200 clicks (that’s 23 clicks a week or just over 3 a day)?

Ah yes, one more thing on the BT bashing front. As BT acknowledge, it does take at least 30 hours to set up a campaign and 10 hours per month to manage it. I make that 150 hours per year. Now if BT are going to charge you £80 per month and promises to deliver 480 clicks into the bargain using PPC routes, one presumes they’re going to have to pay Messrs Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, et al something for those clicks. Now my simple maths works out that would mean you were paying BT less than the national minimum hourly wage rate, so either they were subsidising this grand caper or something was up.

Anyway I’m now off to design a new product that will allow people to pay me a lot of money for doing & achieving nothing. I think I’ll call it Web Chicks!

Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/

Quality or Quantity - A Fresh Look at Search Engine Marketing

I was re-reading Google’s quality guidelines and hints for creating a Google-friendly site the other day. The basis of it is very simple:-

• Give visitors the information they're looking for
• Write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank
• Ask yourself, "Does this help my users?”

Simple, eh?

But still I see people obsessed with ‘rankings’, hungry for ‘hits’, desperate for ‘traffic’. Rankings for what? Hits from whom? What sort of traffic?

Imagine you were a farmer. It would be a great achievement to get to the top of the rankings for ‘farmers’ in a search engine. But what would it get you? The people searching for farmers might be looking for dairy farmers, arable farmers, pig farmers, link farmers, farmers insurance or even Farmers Jeans! If you were a specialist crop farmer, most of this traffic would be wasted and you’d see that through the number of disappointed people leaving your site almost immediately (see bounce rate).

Your site, your activity, your business needs to be built around your specialist area, what you’re good at and who you want to appeal to.

Remember that with the speed of broadband and the ease of the mouse, people can look further than the first site listed for what they want. Internet users are savvy enough to see beyond the first site that comes up on Google, they want quality, relevance and a site that targets them.

Forget rankings, hits & traffic per se and think focused, targeted activity and quality visitors.

Start by taking a long hard look at yourself, your business, your customers and your site. Think about what sets you apart from your competitors in your eyes, your customers’ eyes and your prospective or target customers. Then, when you’ve done all that, start to write words and content that articulate this. But that’s not the end…. Test this, see which activities, words, etc., mean something to your customers and target customers. Only then should you ‘optimise’ your site with targeted words and content.

Simple, yes. Easy, no. But the sustainable and profitable way to develop your business on the internet.

For more information about how to develop a profitable online marketing strategy and help you implement it visit: - www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/