May 2005

The Net Gazette
Helping You Help Your Site

In this issue of The Net Gazette we are going to learn what makes a website successfully sell to site visitors. And I am including a bonus article I wrote called 'Search Like A Geek'. So let's get started on our way to improving your Web business.

Web Tip #7:
When buying online, be sure to check for the yellow lock at the bottom right hand of your browser. This lock icon should be in the locked position. If it is not, then it means the site is not secure and hackers could potentially read all your contact and credit card information when you submit the form. So only give your credit card information if you see the yellow lock icon in the bottom right and see that it is in the locked position.

Also, try to only use the same credit card every time you purchase. Keep the limit low, that way, if it is ever stolen online, the criminals can't spend a lot.

10 Secrets of Sales-Driven Websites

What makes a website successful? It depends on what the explicit goal of the website is. If the goal is to make money, then a successful site is one that makes you more money than it costs you to maintain, manage, market and update.

So what should you do to ensure your website generates substantial sales?

1. State Your Goals
In order for a website to make you money, you have to know what its specific goals are first. Just like any good small business consultant will advise you to create a business plan before you start your business, a good Web consultant will suggest that you create a website plan, with specific, written goals. “I want it to make me money” is not enough. "I would like my site to generate 1000 unique visits a month, produce 100 new leads a month, and create 25 new sales a month” would be much more useful, even if you don’t hit your targets.

2. Identify your Audience
You must know who is currently and will be coming to your website. It is very important to have a clear picture of your typical visitor. The more specific demographic information you have, the better. That way you can tailor your website’s look & feel, writing and calls-to-action properly.

3. Write Sales-Driven Copy
Once you know who your visitors are, you can craft your writing accordingly. Clear, concise, grammatically correct, verbiage is necessary to make sales, regardless of your audience. Furthermore, the less big blocks of text the better. Bullets, headlines and very short paragraphs are much more likely to be read online than large amounts of uninterrupted text.

Your writing should only talk about what you can do for your visitor. It ought to explain to each reader why buying your product or service will make their life easier, richer, more comfortable, or make them more attractive, intelligent, or successful. In other words, your website copy should very clearly explain how you will somehow improve each reader’s life. Therefore, the use of the word “you” is vital in any sales-driven website copy. And your writing should be descriptive, action-oriented and use active verbs instead of passive verbs. “You will learn more by . . .”, “Buy Now” and “Get your Free download” are examples.

So one secret of a website that generates sales is that the writing on the site describes specific benefits the site visitor will enjoy if they buy the product or service. It is action-oriented, uses the words “you” and “yours”, and stays away from simply describing features.

4. Include Calls to Action
Asking your visitor to do something specific is a call to action. At the end of every site section or page, you need to include a call to action. It can be as simple as, “Click here to register”, “Contact Us Now” or “Go here to download your free Guide”. A sales-driven Web page will describe specific benefits to the visitor in its headlines, bullet points and short paragraphs, and then ask the visitor to take an action at the end. Don’t leave your potential customers hanging. Instead, compel them to do something that will bring them closer to buying.

5. Learn from Brick & Mortar Retailers – Show Visitors Where To Go
If you walk into any successful retail store and pay close attention, you’ll notice that there are actually paths already mapped out for you to follow. This is done on purpose by the store designers to maximize sales. They lead you down paths that they know will increase your chances of buying. They put things in your way that tempt you to buy.

You too should create specific paths in your website that will take full advantage of your sales and marketing efforts. If you have a particular page in your site that acts as your sales page, be sure to make the link to it prominent on your homepage, and every page for that matter. This sales page ought to have a call to action at the end of it that points to your shopping cart or sign-up page. Don’t let your site visitors wander your site. Set up the navigation in a deliberate way to generate more sales.

A good example of retail stores coaxing more sales out if its customers is all the small-ticket items they sell at the checkout counter. These impulse items are specifically there to attempt to get a couple of extra dollars out of each customer who is waiting in line. How can this translate into your website? At the virtual checkout in your site, add other, less expensive, complimentary items that they can click to add to their cart right there.

Tell your site visitors what you want them to do and where to go. Stepping them through your site the way you want them to go will increase and streamline your sales.

6. Don’t Distract your Visitors
If you point people to where you want them to go, thereby increasing your sales potential, be sure not to distract them along the way. Don’t include annoying animation or Flash unless absolutely necessary. Don’t offer lots of superfluous links on the “Buy Now” page, otherwise a significant percentage of people who are about to buy will wander away via the extra links.

7. Include Compelling Images
People will almost always look at pictures before they read anything. Images that invoke emotion are particularly effective. If you’re selling products then you obviously will benefit if you include pictures of each product. Product images should communicate how they benefit the potential customer. If you’re selling flowers, a picture of a bouquet on a table is not as effectual as a woman in a front door beaming from ear to ear as a man in a suit hands her that same bouquet.

8. Offer More Than Just a Sales Pitch
If you include free information on your site, interspersed with calls to action you are more likely to build trust and comfort among your potential website visitors. By offering free information related to your product or service you’re showing your visitors that you have their best interest in mind. You can’t just say “We have your best interest in mind”, you have to actually show it, and free, useful information does just that. By allowing people to get used to you by first offering free information, you make it more likely that they’ll buy from you in the future.

9. Constantly Build Trust
People don’t buy from people or websites they don’t trust. Offering free information is one way to accomplish this. Others ways include offering a good return policy, posting a privacy policy link on every page, and making it extremely easy to contact you.

10. Nurture Existing Website Customers
Selling to someone who bought from you in the past is easier than selling to someone for the first time. Treat existing customers special by offering them discounts or designating certain site sections only for their use. Include a bookmark feature on each page of your site so that visitors can bookmark your site to return again. Update your content regularly to entice return visits. Offer ways for visitors to join a “Buyers Club”, to register on the site to get custom content, or to join a frequent buyers program. Once a person is comfortable on your site and familiar with your business, they are more likely to buy from you online.

By stating your website goals and learning who your customers are, by putting yourself in the shoes of your site visitors when creating, writing and managing your website, by pointing people in the direction you want them to go while on your website, and by building trust, you will see your website sales increase substantially.

Web Tip #8:
Use the Web as a resource and personal teacher. By learning how to search properly, discovering trust-worthy sites and having patience, what you can learn from the Web is unlimited.

We just added a new page to the Oak Web Works website that combines many of the resources on our site. Learn more about Web design, Development and E-Marketing.

Search Like A Geek
Author: Jason OConnor
Copyright: 2005

Some people search the Web like a Neanderthal standing before the Library of Congress steps grunting, “Me want food!” While other, more sophisticated searchers, act more like a person actually entering the Library of Congress, approaching the librarian, and saying, “Pardon me, please lead me to your books on agriculture and growing food, and while you’re at it, please show me your books on fine dining in the Washington D.C. area.”. Who would you rather be?

Back in high school there was the ‘in-crowd’, often populated by the jocks, and then there were the geeks, among other social clicks. Today, many of those ‘geeks’ are wildly successful; while some of those unfortunate others are asking us if we’d like fries with our burgers.

So it’s not so bad being a geek today, especially since so much of our lives and economy are dominated by computers, software and the Internet. It is wise to learn how to use the Internet as best you can. By understanding how search engines and directories work, like many geeks already do, you will find the information you’re looking for more easily, quickly and with a lot less frustration. Knowing how to pinpoint specific bits of information quickly will give you an advantage over most other people who do not have these skills. And this advantage can turn into big money by saving you time in your day to day business. And learning about how to search will help in your search engine optimization efforts if you run your own website too.

So, I invite you to pull up your pants to make high-waters, apply some masking tape to the bridge of your eye glasses, and insert a pocket protector in your front shirt pocket, and join me in learning how to search like a geek.

The more appropriate words you use the better.
Let’s say I want to find tickets to a new Broadway musical show called Wicked next weekend in New York City. If you just type the word ‘tickets’ into Google’s search box, you’ll get 99.6 million results, which is very unwieldy. The first result is ticketmaster.com. It took 4 clicks for me to get to their listing of Wicked tickets, but they were out of inventory up to 6 weeks from now, so it was a dead end since I want to go next weekend.

The next result was Tickets.com, and when I searched for Wicked on their site I found tickets available to Wicked in Toronto only. Another dead end, I need tickets to the NYC production.

The third result only sold airline and cruise tickets, not what I’m looking for either. After clicking on another 4 websites, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. I was getting frustrated, impatient and was just about ready to toss my PC out my window and give up totally.

If instead, I used a few more appropriate words in my search, my results would have been much better. I tried typing the words ‘new york city broadway wicked musical tickets’ in the Google search box and came up with 230,000 results instead of 99 million, which is slightly more manageable.

The first result was www.musicalschwartz.com which offered ‘Ticket Tips - Wicked on Broadway, Seating info’. So I clicked on that and learned a number of things about purchasing Broadway tickets, NYC travel tips and other information on Wicked the musical.

The next two Google results were http://www.eagletickets.com and http://www.bestshowticketslasvegas.com, and they both offered tickets for the Broadway musical Wicked in New York City on the weekend I wanted. So by carefully choosing appropriate words to search with and using more than one or two words, I found what I was looking for much more easily and quickly than just searching using the word ‘tickets’.

I am not suggesting you use lots and lots of words willy nilly. The best method is to think of very specific words related to what you’re looking for, be a little creative, and watch what order you put the words in. Searching for ‘broadway wicked musical tickets’ and ‘tickets broadway wicked musical’ will give you different results.

Never search using one word. Avoid only using two words. Try to use 3-7 words. This search rule follows the law of diminishing returns however. So searching using 25 words will probably get you little or no results. So there is a “sweet spot” you’ll have to discover for any given search, but it is almost always using more than 1-2 words.

Use more than one search engine.
When I search on the Web, I use more than one browser and more than one search engine or directory. The difference between the two is that search engines are run automatically while directories are run by humans. Google is a search engine and show search results of websites that no one has actually looked at in advance. Directories on the other hand contain websites that have actually been reviewed by a person. Therefore, the results you get will differ. A good list of directories can be found at http://www.directoryarchives.com.

Open up your browser and click on ‘File’ in the top left of your browser and select ‘New’ > ‘Window’. Do this a couple of times until you have three or more browsers open on your desktop at the same time. Choose your search words carefully, use more than two words and try the same exact phrase in Yahoo, MSN, Google, and a favorite directory using a different browser for each. That way you can compare results to find the best ones. You can also try a new site I found called http://yagoohoogle.com which lets you perform a simultaneous search on both Google and Yahoo.

Use modifiers in your searches.
Going back to the tickets example, let’s say I wanted to find airline tickets, but each time I performed a search on tickets, most of the results had to do with sports and theater tickets. I could weed out all those irrelevant results by using the minus (-) sign next to the word ‘theater’.
Bad search: tickets
Better search: tickets to New York
Even better search: airline tickets to New York –theater

So if you are getting a lot of extraneous results in your searches, try adding a minus sign to words you don’t want showing up in your results.

Another good tip is using quotes around your phrases. By doing this you are telling the search engine to find the exact phrase and in the order you are specifying. By adding quotes, you are being much more specific. You’ll get very different results using quotes. If you searched for ‘2005 NBA playoff tickets’ (without quotes) you are asking the search engine to look for sites that have the words 2005, NBA, playoff, and tickets associated with them. So you will probably come up with airline tickets, football playoff information, NBA history and so forth. If you put quotes around your phrase you’ll get much closer to what you want.

Use the ‘Find’ function.
Trust me; this one suggestion is worth the price of admission alone. You will save lots of valuable time if you do this. Ever get to a Web page that has a lot of text on it, and quickly scanning the page doesn’t immediately produce what you’re looking for? In fact, the scanning just makes you dizzy.

Try this: while holding down your ‘Ctrl’ key hit your ‘F’ key (this works on PCs only). A ‘Find’ dialog box should pop up. Simply type the word or phrase you’re looking for in the box and hit ‘Enter’ and it will immediately find each and every instance of it on the Web page you’re on. This will truly save you time if you remember to use it.

One can get lost on the Net. There is so much information, and almost all of it is not applicable to what you want at any given time. If you use the Net for your business, pinpointing appropriate and relevant information quickly will put you ahead of the pack every time. By following these simple suggestions, you will find more accurate results which will reduce your frustration, save you time, and give you an edge over others who are still searching for information like a caveman at the steps of a library.

In the next issue of The Net Gazette we're going to look at more ways to improve your search engine optimization, more Web design suggestions, and maybe we'll get into some technical programming stuff as well, all in the name of improving the Web, one site at a time.

To learn more about these subjects or if you have a need for e-marketing, design or programming services, please visit www.oakwebworks.com.

Happy Webbing.

- Jason

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