Three Steps to Convert Traffic to Consumers

by: shan 0

One of the primary goals of a business owner online is to turn traffic from random people to people willing to buy from you. Just like a regular business, your business is to sell something or several things to people who are interested in them. The internet public though is, as a rule, a savvy bunch and hard to convince.

The process of turning traffic into customers is called ‘conversion’ and it’s one of the hardest things you will ever have to do in the online world.

Knowledge is power here and knowing how to convert people is extremely important. These three steps are excellent if you want to have people go from ‘eh’ to ‘yeah!’ and start buying from you.

1. Show What You Have to Offer

Banner ads from huge stores and shops are created so that they are easy to read and easily identified by the viewer. They also take advantage of the fact that people on the internet are looking for a quick answer and so the banner ad provides that answer and acts as though it’s the only answer to your question. Banner ads should also be bright, cheerful, but non-intrusive and may or may not have little additions such as the ability to search for something through the advertisement without having to navigate elsewhere.

Should your offers follow the same sort of pattern? Of course! Your ads should be clear, simple and breathtakingly obvious.

Start with your product and then add in ‘extras’ and then a little bonus item at the end of it to make the consumer feel special. It’s all about bringing the customer in and making him or her feel as though they are exclusive and well liked.

You can always do a bit of research on large stores and how they do their ads to get an idea of how to design your flash banners. It takes some practice.

2. Build Trust and Rapport With Well Written Content

It’s easy to copy/paste from others (particularly the supplier of the goods you are selling), but like many so called short cuts, it is often more damaging than helpful. Readers will quickly see that you took no time out to actually talk about your product and so they will lose faith in it as well. Take the time out to write content that is informative, interesting, and not simply revisions of keywords over and over again.

• Interesting, relevant content is one of the major keys to conversion because it builds trust, a rapport, and makes people more likely to buy from you as opposed to someone else.

Remember, if you are truly passionate about what you are doing, others will pick up on it and will become passionate about what you are doing too. A copy/paste job will just drive people off.

• Studies have shown that business owners and website owners have, on average, seven seconds to get a user to decide whether or not to buy from a business. SEVEN SECONDS! And to business owners’ collective horror, that time is dropping.
• Some studies pin the attention span of a web browser at four seconds.

illustration showing conversion on-time

Sites which take longer than four seconds to load are often abandoned. Seven seconds, four seconds; no matter how you look at it, that’s not a lot of time and you don’t want to waste it. Your content should grab your reader from the first sentence and then carry them through to your final phrases; and with luck, to the Buy Now button!

On the other hand, once you have grabbed a viewer, they are far more likely to stay and read more about you which is good news for your business and makes good content even more important.

3. Have a Goal for Each Page

The main goal of any site and many of its pages is to get across your ‘call to action’.

The call to action refers to the final bit in your site where you lead your reader and your traffic to buy whatever it is you are selling. It is sometimes as simple as the link to your product at the bottom of an article to a line such as: If you are sick of blankety-blank, try XYZ.

Some businesses don’t want these on every page though and that’s ok. After all, you don’t want your site to become a walking advertisement; users will get annoyed and the search engines may drop you like a hot potato. Google in particular has been growing tougher on sites with only ‘fluffy’ content and no real benefits to users.

• Each page you put on your site should have a goal in mind, the overarching one being of turning traffic into consumers.
• You can do this by committing some pages to doing things like building trust and giving reliable information on something related to your product.
• A page can also be dedicated to things like getting followers for social media, a contact information page and a way for people to communicate.

The more goals you have in mind, the more likely it is that people will come and stay and thus meet one or more of your goals. In this way, your website will be come a success and you will see the maximum number of conversions.

Remember that converting people into consumers can be a complex process, involving the building of trust, rapport and loyalty, but these three steps will put you well on your way to doing all of those things.

image: dan