Is Your Website Visitor Ready?

Far too often people say, “My business is not working.” Yet when they are given the solution for what to do, they don’t take advantage of it. For example, there was one Shark Tank participant I had a phone conversation with after he appeared on the show. He was frustrated that he didn’t get the funding he had hoped for, and his site wasn’t selling much at all. Within seconds I identified a few glaring problems with his site.

I told him I wanted to use his site as a case study for a group of my high-level clients. I wanted to show them a few simple changes that would make the site a money magnet. “Absolutely,” he said without hesitation. I created a short screen-capture video in which I pointed out the most obvious steps he could take to improve conversions. The video was made available to my private clients as well as to the owner of the site.

The guy got really excited about the information, saying he was going to update his site as soon as possible. One change would have been very simple: offer a gift such as a report, short video, or MP3 that visitors would opt in for. Another was to offer a fabulous special for Shark Tank viewers and make it super easy and very low risk for people to make their first purchase. The site owner received the video about six months ago. Not one change has been made.

Mind you, if he would have said, “I’m not interested. I have no desire to change things. Beat it,” I would be fine with that. But he got really excited by my offer, said he didn’t know much about using the internet to market his business, and welcomed my recommendations. So why hasn’t he updated his site? Simple. He’s not convinced it’s worth the effort. Or worse yet, he is so caught up in the details of his business he is missing the big picture.

Considering that online purchases during the 2012 holiday season were up considerably from 2011, there is massive opportunity for online retailers. Retail web sales increased 12 percent and surpassed $92 billion according to Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation trade group. The increase covers shopping during November and December of 2012.

Forester Research says that e-retail spending will increase 62 percent by 2016 and U.S. consumers will spend $327 billion online in 2016. Most consumers are choosing the internet to purchase what they want. For an entrepreneur not to have their site fully optimized (especially when millions of eyes will be seeing what they offer) is crazy.

If you’re not doing everything you possibly can to ride this ever-increasing wave, you’ll soon be left behind.

The simplest way to make your site visitor ready is to have a high-value giveaway. You simply add in an opt in box, a short description of your gift, and then drive traffic to your site.

It’s literally that simple.