It goes without saying that most of us want more web traffic.
The more traffic we generate, the more subscribers and customers we’ll get, right?
Right.
And WRONG.
There’s a glaring hole in “the more, the more” theory, and as you guessed it, this is what we’ll be talking about this week.
Conversion Optimization
Imagine all the work you have to put into increasing your blog traffic: writing quality content, guest posting, mingling on social media, working on your SEO rankings…
Now answer this question: considering all the work, would you rather get 1,000 visitors and convert 100 of them into paying customers (10% conversion rate) or 10,000 visitors and convert 100 of them (1% conversion rate)?
Rhetorical question, I know.
So before you ask me “How do I get more traffic to my blog, Ana?“, let’s ask ourselves:
How Can We Do More Business with Less Traffic?
We all tend to fall in love with our site designs and often ignore the fact that they simply don’t work for our readers.
Since Traffic Generation Cafe started in July of 2010, it’s been redesigned THREE times.
The sad thing is that the first two times it was redesigned because I wanted it “to look pretty” and include some of the features I came across on other blogs and thought they were great.
Never occurred to me to actually do some testing to see whether any of those features actually helped or HURT my conversion optimization.
…Until I stumbled upon a Google Analytics feature that I never bothered to use before.
I was very unhappy to find out that so many features I thought were great were in fact simply cluttering my blog.
Take a look at this video I’ve made BEFORE I gave Traffic Generation Cafe a new makeover in December and see what worked and what didn’t.
We’ll talk about:
- One or two navigation bars?
- What actually gets clicked on your navigation bar?
- What about your sidebar? What do your readers want to see there?
- Should you use related posts plugins?
- And more…
Conversion Optimization Problems Addressed
Fast forward one month.
My blog looks pretty much the way you see it right now.
How much traffic conversion improvement has Traffic Generation Cafe seen since the redesign?
And here’s another video I made AFTER I redesigned my blog:
So as you can see, working on tweaking your design to increase conversion optimization never ends.
I’ve got a long way to go…
Conversion Optimization Marketing Takeaway
There are plenty of tools to help you optimize your blog design. Some of them are listed on my internet marketing tools page.
However, most of us don’t make an effort to work on conversion optimization because it sounds complicated and time-consuming.
With a simple and FREE tool like Google In-Page Analytics, there’s no excuse.
It’ll take you about 5 minutes. Do it now.
Yes, it’s that important.
I do hope my redesign experiment will encourage you to take a look at your own site and try to figure out what works and what doesn’t BEFORE you spend gazillion hours driving traffic that will never stick.
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