8 Ways to Improve Your Web-Based Business

Thursday, 20 August 2009 08:00

Do you have a web-based business? Well, if you don’t, you should consider starting one. If you do, what you’ll notice is that there is always more room for improvement.

Over the past few years I have started a handful of web-based businesses and consulted a 100 or so. No matter what size company I was working with I noticed that there are were always 8 things (if not more) you could do to improve it.

Hopefully you are already doing some of these 8 things, but if you aren’t, here they are:

Perfection doesn’t exist

Nothing is ever going to be perfect. You have to get the misconception out of your head that your website has to be perfect. Just look at some of the worst websites out on the web, a lot of them make a shit load of money.

So instead of going the route of creating a perfect website why not just throw stuff out there and fix it up over time? I am not saying that your website has to be ugly or non-functional, but instead realize that your website visitors aren’t as picky as you.

Keep it simple stupid

Features, features, and features! Who doesn’t want the latest stuff on their website? Having the latest and great features on your website will make it look cool, but it can also ruin the usability.

Some of the most successful sites on the web are very simple. Just look at Craigslist. There isn’t much to it from a users perspective, but yet it is popular.

A great way to keep things simple is by focusing your site on 1 major objective. If things fit around that objective, then do them. But if they don’t, don’t waste time on them.

Ask your users for feedback

Does it really matter what you want? No! All that matters is what the customer wants. Before you make any major changes to your website, consider surveying your visitors.

Find out what they want or don’t want and why. And after you figure that out, dig a bit deeper because a lot of times people will say that they want something and never use it.

Or in other words surveying your users is a great first step, but you actually need to get to know them if you want useful feedback.

Help your visitors trust you

Even if you aren’t, people are afraid to swipe their credit card online. If you want convert visitors into customers, you should consider a few things:

• Add testimonials – don’t just create fake testimonials, add real ones from real customers. If you don’t have any testimonials give away your product or service away to a few people in exchange for an honest testimonial. And once you have a few testimonials, integrate them into your website, such as on the checkout page.
• Badges build trust – whether it is the Better Business Bureau badge, or a money back guarantee sign, badges help build trust.
• Contact options – in addition to listing your email address, consider adding a phone number and a live chat option. All of these things will show your visitors that there is a “real” person behind your website.
• Video clips – it doesn’t matter if you are ugly and have a terrible voice, people want to see and hear from you. Having a video on your website will help build trust.
• Press – if you’re website gets showcased on any popular blogs or in the mainstream media, let your visitors know.

Optimize for conversions

The smallest changes like the color of your call to action buttons can drastically affect your conversion rate. Consider testing every aspect of your website’s layout so that you can maximize your conversion rate.

A few things to consider testing that you may have not thought about before are:

1. Use different font typographies. Certain fonts are easier to read than others.
2. Test different website copy. All the way from your headlines to the text within your paragraphs, the copy on your website is one of the main things that will affect conversions.
3. Remove different elements from your design. Typically, less will result into more conversions.
4. Try different variations of your website’s background color.
5. For your call to action buttons, don’t just test how different colors perform. Test how different shades of a color perform.
6. If you have pages that are very long and your goal is to get people to read all of your content, try adjusting the color of your scroll bars. Different color scroll bars can affect how many visitors actually scroll through your content.

If you are new to maximizing website conversions, try using Google Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg. Both of these will help you understand how to maximize your conversion rate.

In addition to that, make sure you check out popular sites like Amazon who have already invested millions of dollars in optimizing their conversions. There is nothing wrong with copying.

Optimize your website for search engines

An easy way to get more traffic to your website is through search engine optimization. 2 detailed guides that go over search engine optimization are the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Optimizing Your Blog for Search Engines.

Now the guides above are going to be a bit long and overwhelming, so if you were to prioritize some SEO aspects to consider doing first…

1. Make sure you URL structures are clean. You don’t want extraneous characters (* & % $ =) in your URL. Ideally a URL should only consist of numbers and letters. Dashes are also acceptable, but try not to use underscores.
2. Both your title tag and meta description tag should be unique on every page of your website. They should also be descriptive of what the page is about, and readable. The last thing you want to do is stuff keywords into your title and description tag.
3. Create an XML sitemap that includes all of your URLs and submit them to the major search engines. This will help them index your pages faster.
4. Google Image Search can drive a ton of traffic as long as you describe what each image on your website is about. Bots can’t look at an image and understand what it is. By using alt tags to describe each image, search engines will do a better job of categorizing your images.
5. When you are reading a book, how do you know what a chapter is going to be about? Headings… right? Just like how books use headings, you should also use them on your website. You do this is through the use of h1, h2, h3, and h4 tags.
6. The most important aspect of search engine optimization is related to links. The more websites that link to you, the higher chance you’ll have of getting more search engine traffic. So creating a good website is the first step in increasing your chances of getting other websites linking to you, but it isn’t enough. You have to get creative and leverage social media sites like Digg, or create things that are viral such as games or quizzes.

There are hundreds of other things you can also do to improve your SEO, but the 6 things I mentioned above are a great start. None-the-less, I still recommend reading the 2 guides that I linked to above.

Sell, sell, sell, and then sell some more

If you already have people coming to your website that are purchasing, why not up sell to them? Just look at sites like GoDaddy, have seen how many times they up sell?

There is nothing wrong with up selling to your existing user base. Up selling converts very well because the customer already has some faith in your company.

But before you start up selling, take a look at the emails Amazon sends and walk through the GoDaddy checkout process. Hopefully those two sites will spur some creative ideas that will help you up sell to your customers.

Step outside of your little box

Your web based business doesn’t end with your website, instead, that is where it starts. If you want to grow it you have to start looking at some of the new hip mediums around the web such as Facebook.

Does your company have a fan page on Facebook? And if you do, are you also leveraging Twitter?

The possibilities are endless. If small companies like The Purse Blog can make money through their Facebook fan page and big companies like Dell can generate 3 million in sales through Twitter, the it’s possible for you to leverage the social web.

Conclusion

In addition to this list, there are a ton of other things you can do to improve your web-based business. Although you should never stop looking for new opportunities you have to prioritize what you should do first with your website.

Typically the answer is going to be: go after the lowest hanging fruit.

Anyone else have any ideas to share?