Conversion Strategies Archives

3 Steps to Turn Your WordPress Site Into a Lead Generating Machine

February 25, 2013 Jennifer Bourn

Last week Brian and I both gave lightning talks at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup. Brian’s talk shared the 5 must have plugins we recommend for every WordPress website. My talk covered how to turn your website visitors into clients and customers — more specifically I talked about website strategy and three steps you can take to turn your website into a lead generating machine.

How to Make Your Website a Lead Generating Machine:

Creating a complete small business website takes comprehensive strategic planning of the content and user flow, the user experience, the sales funnel, the design, the navigation menus, the page templates, and more. Usually my website strategy presentation is an hour long, but for the Sacramento WordPress meetup, I was limited to only 10 minutes!

These are the three website strategies I shared in my talk — the strategies I think are most important for a website owner to understand:

STRATEGY 1: Use the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach to naturally lead your visitors to take action
STRATEGY 2: Create multiple opportunities for visitors to find your key money content
STRATEGY 3: Eliminate all unnecessary distractions from your sales funnel and conversion pages

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these three strategies:

Closing the Gap Between Prospects, Patrons, and Profits

March 5, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

2008 was a year of near economic collapse in the United States. Americans in some sectors are still reeling from the great slump in the housing market, the widespread loss of jobs, and the ongoing outsourcing of work overseas, among other catastrophes. When it comes to our economy, unrest and uncertainty seem to be its calling cards. In such a climate, it’s easy for us entrepreneurs to focus on the negatives, mostly that consumers don’t have any money to spend on our goods and services.

But what about focusing on the positives?

Kiplinger reported at the end of last year that “Consumers are finally loosening the purse strings.”
Time magazine announced in January that 2012 is “The year of the entrepreneur.”

In fact, entrepreneurialism is at an all-time high. And that means that businesses, especially targeted, niche businesses, are continuing to push ahead, finding a steady stream of customers for their products and services. If you’ve been convinced by all the talk about the bad economy, you may be missing what’s right in front of you: money, ready to be picked up off the table, and leads and prospects who want to work with you. Eventually, if you do things right, they will give you their money.

If you shift your focus a little bit, you can close the gap between your prospects, patrons, and profits.

4 Keys to Landing Pages that Clinch Conversions Every Time

February 19, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

If you’ve been thinking of your landing page a just a holding area where your website visitors can launch browsing excursions to all the other areas around your website, I’d like to change your way of thinking. You do not want your visitors to leave your landing page to browse your website. Your landing page isn’t just a portal or a launch pad. It’s the first place you’re going to clinch a conversion and win a new customer.

If you haven’t been thinking of your landing page as a place where you land conversions, your strategy may need some revising. Here are five keys to creating a landing page that does what it’s supposed to do – win customers.

Bait the Hook: Market with Benefits, not Features

February 10, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

If you’ve ever been shopping for higher-end technology, you’ll resonate with the marketing ideas I’m going to share with you today, because part of shopping for technology involves reading about features, and today we’re going to learn why marketing with features isn’t enough to capture your customers.

To begin to understand what I’m talking about, just read (or try to read) this list of features posted on Amazon for a Nikon digital camera:

14.1-megapixel CCD sensor for superb image quality
21x Wide-Angle Optical Zoom-NIKKOR Glass Lens
5-way VR Image Stabilization System
EXPEED C2 for enhanced image quality and processing speed
3-inch Ultra-High Resolution (921,000-dot) Clear Color Display

Now, if you’re NOT a photographer versed in digital photography, the features listed above aren’t going to tell you much. But if you’re a savvy shopper, you would be asking, “Well, just what IS a 5-Way VR Image Stabilization System, and how can it help me?” In other words, reading a list of features can only take you so far. What you really want to know are the benefits. Now, sure, a few of the items above state that with the given feature, “image quality” will improve, but none of them says exactly how or why.

That’s exactly the problem with marketing with features instead of benefits.

9 Simple Tips To Increase Online Sales

December 2, 2010 Jennifer Bourn

If you’re selling a product, program, or your services online and you’re using a shopping cart to do so, you need your website to convert prospects into leads, and leads into customers. And, If you’re like other entrepreneurs, you need your small business website to increase online sales and help you create multiple streams of income.

But the big questions is, “How do you do that?”

Here are nine tips you can use to increase your online sales conversions:

Good Design Is Not Optional

September 19, 2010 Brian Bourn

A study I recently read stated that an average person only gives a website 10 seconds before deciding if a site is worth their time, which means you have less than ten seconds to: attract the viewer, declare your message, and get them to take action.

With so much noise on the web today, and the natural ADD nature of most web surfers, your worst enemy is the browser back button. After someone lands on your website from a search engine, status update, marketing promotion, Tweet, or email link, you have a very short window of opportunity to keep them on your site, so let’s cover each step.

Get Me All Hot And Bothered And Leave Me Wanting More: Three Steps to More Sales

January 18, 2010 Jennifer Bourn

If you trim out all the fat, filler, and fluff that beef up a lot of marketing websites, you’ll see very clearly that there are really only three things that you need to do to make more sales and boost your bottom line.

STEP 1: Capture My Attention

Start with a captivating, powerful, direct headline that draws me in. Don’t beat around the bush or use cute-sy catch-phrases and don’t speak in jargon I don’t understand. Keep the headlines and the sub headlines strong, clear, and helpful. The easiest way to do this is to write one short sentence that communicates the benefits the article, web page, or blog post, etc. I will get out of the content.

Another great way to grab my attention is with a great photo, graphic or image. You have only a couple seconds to entice me to stay on your web page and read your content and sometimes a killer photo can do that even faster and more effectively than a headline.

7 Ideas to Get Your Audience to Take Action and Buy

November 6, 2009 Jennifer Bourn

Whether you have a product, service, program, or combination of the three, if you’re in business, I can pretty much guarantee that you need to sell something. With budgets tightening and consumers becoming more discerning on what they spend their money on, many entrepreneurs and business owners are finding that they need to try a little harder than they had to before to make a sale.

Here are seven tips to increase online sales and get your prospects and customers to take action:

Offer money back guarantee. Your guarantee can be a 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, year-long, or lifetime guarantee. The longer the guarantee you extend your guarantee, the more successful it will be.
Give away bonuses and free stuff. When your customers purchase something or take a specific action, reward them with a free gift or some extra bonuses of value. Sweeten the deal to catch more conversions.