Seven Tips To Improve Website Sales And Conversion Rates

When most people want to increase their site's monetization, there are a lot of mistakes they usually make. It's all too easy to fall for the trap of just adding in more ads, promoting more products, or trying to get more users and rankings. It's much better to just focus on increasing the website conversions and sales instead, because you can get tangible results instantly.

Trying different “tricks” to get more traffic can often make your site perform worse than before, as Google catches on that you're focusing in rankings instead of good content. Besides, if 1000 people a mint isn't making you any sales, who's to say 10,000 people will?

If you've got 5 ads on your site already, is it really a good idea to grow more on to try and squeeze more pennies out? If anything, you'll just be making your site look ugly and your visitors will leave.

..,but what if you could just increase the performance of your site using the current traffic? What if you could turn your site from earning 5 cents per user, to 50 cents, or 5 dollars per user?

Surely it's better to have 200 visitors who buy something than 20,000 who don't?

Today I'm going to give you eight tips (plus one bonus tip) for doing exactly this, and if you implement just a few of them, your site could start earning more almost instantly. Does that sound like something you'd want to read?

Then let's get to it.

Tip One: Stop Using Adsense

Adsense is a relatively easy way to make money from your website, but it's also the easiest way to sell it short. If you're a beginner looking to start their passive income portfolio, then adsense makes sense, but as soon as you are ready to start earning more from your site, get rid of it.

In his study of 2,000 sites, Justin from flipfilter.com found that sites that use Adsense earn a lot less on average than sites that use affiliate sales or own product/service sales as their monetization methods.

And before you think “well I'll keep adsense and add in another method,” I've got something to tell you.

Sites that use Adsense AND affiliate sales earn even less than just adsense. If your site lacks focus or direction, users get confused.

Either stick with Adsense because it's making you a fortune, or get rid of it and try something better.

Tip Two: Add One Or Two Affiliate Products.

Whatever your site topic, there will be a product you can promote, and a company willing to pay you a commission to promote it. Clickbank has a great library of digital products to promote, and Amazon is another popular choice (although commissions are pretty low).

Affiliate products aren't the most lucrative thing to promote (more on what is, later), but they are a great way of getting started on the “product promotion” ladder and usually have some great tools and tips to help you promote them.

Another way of finding products to promote is by typing your site topic + affiliate program into Google and seeing what comes up.

If you don't know anything about affiliate marketing and want to learn the basics, click here.

Tip Three: Build A List

Not everybody buys on a product on their first exposure to it, and certainly if they don't know whether or not they can trust your recommendations.

Building an email list and sending a weekly newsletter or updates on your new articles is a great start. Don't purely send promotions though, no-one likes a spammer.

I recommend Aweber for managing your email list, and if you've got a budget, Autoresponder Madness will teach you how to make thousands of dollars off your list.

For many people, email marketing is their only way of monetizing a website. They'll fill the site with useful content and encourage people to sign up to a mailing list/course/bonus, and do the selling there. Learn some more about that here.

Tip Four: Learn To Split-Test

Not everybody does this, but they should. A split-test is where you run two versions of the same page side by side, and compare which one gets higher conversions. Let's say you write two reviews of the same product, with slightly different text or promotions. Use some software like Visual Website Optimizer to alternate the pages users see, and record the results.

Doing this takes a bit of time, depending on how much traffic you get, but just increasing conversions by 1% could have massive results to your income.

Tip Five: Try Other Products

You never know when a new product will appear that is better than your old one. It doesn't have to be more expensive or offer higher commissions, but if it converts better, it could mean more money in your pocket. I once had to change a product that earned me $27 a sale with one that earned me $9 a sale, and the $9 one made me more money in the long run.

Of course, in an ideal world, you can promote both and double up. You should decide whether or not your site will focus on promoting one thing, or multiple things on the same topic. Both models work, as long as you set it right.

Tip Six: Redesign Your Site

I'm not talking about a drastic redesign that takes a lot of time, just a few tweaks that will help your users find your money pages and promotions.

Here are someone things you could consider trying:

1.) Centralize your money pages. Put all your affiliate links or promotions on dedicated pages, so each “product” has a page promoting it. Then, use your other articles and posts to send visitors to those pages.

It will be much more targeted and you will also be able to keep track of which pages are working and which aren't.

2.) Use call-to-actions. CTAs are banners or lines of text that call out to a user to click or take an action. Popular ones are a footer banner or sign-off encouraging people to check out the most popular product on the site, or something like “to learn more, read about how you can improve your results now”.

If you track these CTAs by using link shorteners or something that counts clicks, you can optimize your site incredibly well and make sure your traffic is being funneled correctly.

3.) Try a better theme. Modern design trends are going towards minimal, clean designs. White space is popular, as is larger text. Check out some popular themes and make your site look more professional.

No-one wants to trust an amateur looking site. By all means start out with a free theme, but go premium as soon as possible.

I recommend WPZoom for this, as their themes are awesome and their support is very hands-on.

Tip Seven: Create Your Own Product

If you're having success promoting a $45 product for a 10% commission, just think how much success you'd have if you were making 100%.

Start out with a digital product. Create it once, and get paid for every download.

A lot of people are perhaps afraid of this step, and will stick with affiliate marketing. The thing is, are you building a website or a business? The money is a lot more lucrative in the latter.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you can just make something better. There are probably a dozen digital/information products in your niche that you can improve on. Search them all and see how you can make them better.

Read the top blog posts on your topic and collate them into a concise guide, or compile a list of tips/money saving advice.

You could even outsource it to somewhere like iWriter where they'll turn it into an eBook for you.

I'll be writing a more dedicate post about this subject in the upcoming weeks, so subscribe to stay tuned.

Bonus Tip: Go back to the basics, what do your audience need?

One thing a lot of people tend to do when they get started is lose sight of their audience. I know I was guilty of that.

Ask yourself a few questions:

·Why are they on your site?

·What are they looking for?

·How can you help them?

If you can answer those questions, the rest will be easy.

What Next?

If you can implement just one or two of these tips, I have no doubt that you'll see a marked improvement in your site's sales and conversions. Implement ALL of them, and you'll be very pleased that you read this post today.

Quick Question: What's the number one thing you try to improve on your site?

Best answer wins a free cookie.