Better Conversions on Your Homepage

The two most important factors to a successful, money-making website are traffic and conversions.  Of course, getting a constant stream of new visitors is a base requirement for any kind of online success. But unless the website is designed in such a way that it converts those visitors into customers or subscribers, any traffic you get is wasted. Here are five things you can try on your website in order to boost it’s effectiveness.

1. Place Your Main Converting Action Front And Centre

It’s crucially important to have a strong call to action on your homepage. There should be only one action that the visitor is encouraged to do and it should be front and center. As an example, if your site’s conversion goal is to get people to subscribe, place be clearly visible “subscribe” button and a call to action in  a conspicuous area of your landing page.  In your call to action, mention at least one good reason why people should subscribe.

2. Testing Above and Below the Fold

On the sales-page or a bridge page for an affiliate product try placing the order-button and call to action below the fold. Often, when people need to be convinced before they are ready to buy, having an order-button too high up on the page can have a negative effect on the conversion rate. The idea here is to convince your prospect’s that the really want your product and not showing them the order-button before they have made up their mind about it.

3. Get You Visitors Clicking

Try segment in your content into several pages and test it against a single page style. Getting people to interact (even if it’s just clicking on the “next page” link) can often significantly increase conversions.

4. Test colours and graphics

Test different colours for your text elements and the background. Tweak your font and text size and try a few different order-button colours. Just keep testing and you’ll often be surprised at how small changes can make a big difference.

5. Subscriptions vs. Sales

Instead of sending visitors directly to the sales-page or your order page, make them sign up to your newsletter first. Sometimes, making people jump through a few hoops will actually have a positive effect on conversions. Apart from that, having people on your mailing list gives you more chances to get in touch with them and pitch them an offer.

If there’s one common theme among all this it must be: Test, test, test! Get a hold of a good split testing program and install it for your sites, as this can speed up the entire process significantly. If you are looking for a free option, you can give Google’s own split-testing solution a try. It doesn’t work very well for WordPress sites, however. For those, I recommend a plugin called WP Split Test .

Just keep in mind: If you aren’t running split tests, you may be missing out on a lot of earnings!