Entries Tagged 'Design tips' ↓

Instead of wracking my brain trying to come up with new content for some of my websites, I’ve been focusing more on improving what I already have.

I’m talking about increasing my conversions.

I’ve been going through each page and making little changes here and there to see which changes make a positive impact. Sometimes all it takes is increasing the size of the subheadline.

It’s ridiculous how tiny changes can make such a huge difference, yet these are things that many website owners don’t bother to do. If not, you’re leaving money on the table!

I’ve got a short report for you that will help you:

• Increase sales.
• Keep your hard earned traffic on your site longer.
• Generate more income by increasing sales conversion rates.
• Get more newsletter subscribers.
• Learn what mistakes can cost you visitors and sales.
• Learn and use copywriting skills to improve your existing content.

It’s a short report, but it’s packed with information that every website owner should know. You can learn more about Website Makeovers and Conversion Strategies here.

It’s hard as an internet marketer not to visit someone else’s site and view it with a critical eye.

Many times I click to a page and can point out 30 things that I would have done differently.

One mistake I see a lot of marketers make is cluttering up their pages.

I just visited a sales page yesterday that had CPM ads at the bottom and in the sidebar along with links to other websites and products.

This was a sales page for an ebook.

When potential customers view this page, they have many options before them. They can buy the ebook, they can decide not to buy the ebook, they can click on an ad, or they can click on a large selection of links.

Too many choices!

The main goal of this sales page is to sell that ebook. Not to make a few cents by clicking on ads, or driving away traffic completely by posting links to other web sites.

Take that crap off!

You have your sales letter, your opt-in form, and the “Buy Now” button. That’s it. No more, no less.

Don’t confuse your visitors by providing too many choices. They’ll feel overwhelmed, distracted, and much less likely to purchase. “Analysis paralysis” if you will. Read more about this as well as a few other “website no-no’s“.

Review your own pages to see if you’re making the same mistake. Take away any possible distractions for your visitors and start making more sales.

Coding and designing is not my strong point, but these past few weeks I have learned a lot and am proud to say that I pulled some CSS code right out of my butt and it actually worked! It’s great to be able to have an idea of what you want a web page to do and know what code to write to make it do exactly that.

One of the tools I’ve been using will have to take most of that credit – WampServer. I’m not exactly sure what took me so long to download this, but I’m almost sick to my stomach when I think about how much time I’ve wasted before installing it.

This handy dandy little program is perfect for anyone who customizes WordPress themes. I’m sure there are lots of other methods but this one works perfectly for me, and it’s allowed me to learn CSS much more quickly than before. Did I mention that WampServer is free?

So what does WampServer do?

Let’s say you want to spruce up your WordPress theme a little bit, or put up a brand new theme, but you don’t want all your visitors to see any changes (or mistakes) you’ve made until you’re finished. Installing WampServer allows you to use your computer like a server so you can install WordPress locally. You can make all the changes you want and nobody will ever see. When you’re done, just copy the code and paste over your existing WordPress files on your regular server.

This is also a great way to mess around with some code to see what does what. Delete some code, save the file, refresh your page, and see what happened. Now you know what that chunk of CSS you just deleted was for. If it was something slightly important, just overwrite the file with the original one you’ve smartly kept on backup.

After years of messing around with CSS, this is hands down the best method I’ve used to figure out just what the hell I’m doing – and in such a short amount of time. Not to mention the fact that I can customize a WordPress theme in a fraction of the time it used to take me. There’s gold in that thar WampServer.

Today I’ve been spending a lot of time optimizing one of my websites. I’ve made my pages smaller so they load quicker and made some keyword changes and ad tweaks.

I don’t do this too often (I’m a naughty webmaster) but every time I do I always notice positive changes in rankings, traffic, opt-in subscribers and income. Not bad for spending a couple hours on a few changes.

I use SiteReportCard a lot when I do this. It checks for any broken links, how fast your site loads, link popularity, rankings for keywords, etc. It’s free and super easy. Just plug in the URL of the page you’re checking and voila. Pretty simple but it can sure make a big difference.

Checking stats like how fast your site loads is very important. Many website owners don’t realize that their pages are loading too slow for people to stay on their site. Optimizing images and getting rid of unnecessary code can really speed up your loading times and help you keep more of that hard earned traffic.

I also like to check my keywords and their density. You can even compare them to other competing pages. This can not only help you optimize your content better for search engines, but also gives you ideas for even more keywords. I’ve written whole articles and added new pages after discovering keywords and phrases I hadn’t already thought of myself.

If you’re not already using a similar tool to check statistics like these, bookmark this page and visit it regularly.

Something that manages to really irk me is when people use frames on their website but don’t allow their users to resize them. If it was sized properly in the first place, that’s fine. But when you have a huge block of text or especially when you have a form in the frame but it’s cut off and you can’t resize the window, it’s extremely irritating!

So please allow users to resize frames on your website.