Are you sick and tired of struggling for a few more unique visitors daily?
It’s all hard work, and with all these Google updates it’s getting harder every day.
Moreover, the returns of your effort can be rather low unless you manage to score a top position in the search engines.
Check this example.
Let’s say you have 5,000 real and engaged visitors monthly to your site and you are making $2,500 out of it, selling an ebook. This is a decent and rather realistic conversion for many web marketers.
How hard do you have to work to double this revenue? You know how hard is to get these 5000 visitors, so it must be much harder to double them, don’t you think?
But you don’t have to.
There are better and easier way to increase your revenue. There are a couple of concepts you must have in mind.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate means how many of your site visitors end up reaching your target goal – which in our e-book example is actually buying this product.
So, if your ebook price is $29 and you are making $2,500 from 5,000 visitors, this means approximately 86 of your visitors are buying the book per month. Which means you have a conversion rate of 1.7%.
Such conversion rate is pretty common and it’s not very good. I’ll tell you what’s good. Raising it three times is up to 5% is good. And it’s much easier than raising your traffic three times!
So next time instead of wondering how to squeeze the next 100 visitors from some link, or how to make Google raise you 1 position up in the rankings, better think how to improve the conversion rate on your site.
There is of course no universal solution to this.
But there are several important questions to ask yourself.
Check the following points.
Is your site visually compelling?
Be careful here because a site that’s impressive just for the sake of being impressive may distract your customers.
On the other hand, a site that looks ugly and cheap is unlikely to sell your products well too.
The site design must be dedicated to one and only one purpose: increasing conversion rate.
Are there calls to action?
In our ebook example the call to action will be a “buy now” button.
Check your button: is it big and noticeable enough?
Is it above the fold?
If your sales copy is long, does the button show up often enough so the customer nearly all the time can see it on the screen?
Don’t be afraid to focus user’s attention on your call to action.
How credible is your site?
Having good testimonials or other social proof, having your picture on the site, having your own relevant domain name, supporting SSL connection, being Paypal verified, having contact details, TOS and privacy statement.
All these are elements that can increase the credibility of your site, and therefore the conversion rate.
Do you have a clear title element?
Your title must be short and to the point.
It should make it clear what you are offering and why it is good.
Focus on benefits.
People are most interested in what’s beneficial for them in your offer.
So instead on focusing on features (“150 colored pages!”, “50 hours of instructional video!”), better focus on what’s in it for them.
How good is your site copy?
It’s not a surprise that the best copywriters charge thousands for a single sales page.
Copy does matter and a good copy can increase your conversion rates several times.
There are so many elements on your site that can lead to a sale or exit.
So learning about the conversion rates and experimenting with them can bring you much better return than fighting for more traffic.
Of course, not having visitors at all means you won’t make any sales!
But once you achieve good conversion rate this means you will be able to afford spending on advertising and PPC to get these visitors.
Pricing
Another very strong instrument for increasing revenue is your pricing (of course, you can only change your pricing if you own the product you are selling – this will not work for affiliates).
If you have successfully raised your conversion rate to 5% you would be making $7,250 of your 5.000 visitors instead of the $2,500 that you made before. Not bad, eh?
Now, imagine that you raise your e-book price to $49 while still making the same number of sales. This would mean $12,250 monthly revenue! Just a couple of on-site changers can lead to $10,000 extra revenue per month.
Now compare this to fighting for more visitors…
Of course it’s possible that the sales will drop due to the higher price. But they can also raise, because many people are more inclined to buy info-products when they have higher price!
I’ve seen this over the internet – for example many people would skip a $17 priced app (or another product) because they simply assumed they were low quality, while the same people would buy when the app was priced at $27.
It’s a question of finding which price is bringing the highest revenue.
A raise in price will sometimes lead to less sales but still more revenue due to the higher revenue per sale.
Other times it will increase the number of sales too, thus doubling the effect on the revenue.
Finally if you make the price outrageously high, no one will buy and your revenue will drop down to $0.
A/B Tests
But how to know what’s the right price?
How to know if your on-site copy is good and your design is compelling?
Good question.
Guessing will not give you the answers. One of the best ways to find out is to do A/B tests. This means to test two versions of your site and see which ones leads to better revenue.
After you have enough data (usually 200 sales total should be good), you compare both and drop the loser. Then create another improvement and start another A/B test.
You can keep doing this as long as you are getting any increase to your revenue.
Here are some general considerations about A/B testing:
– use software tools for A/B tests. There are free and open source ones for most technologies available;
– make sure that the same user is present only one of the A/B versions even if they refresh the page;
– try not to change many elements at once in the two versions. A/B tests work best if you change only 1-2 elements (for example the page title, some image, the layout etc) because this shows you which part exactly worked best;
– be careful with A/B testing different prices as this may be illegal in many cases. If you want to test different prices, better do it at different times – so at any given time all visitors see the same price;
– try to draw out conclusions of the tests instead of just dropping out the loser;
– you can use A/B tests not only for sales, but also for goals like newsletter or auto-responder subscriptions.
Stop the tests when you stop seeing improvement.
At some point your maximum possible conversion rate will be nearly reached and you will need to go back to working for more traffic.
Or just to sit back and enjoy the profits.
While increasing revenue by these means is most powerful for people who sell their own products, affiliates and even Adsensers can also use them.
Properly placing your ads on the page, or giving strong call to subscribe can help you earn more from ads as well in the long term.
Conclusion
I hope introducing these concepts will help you optimize your online revenue.
What do you think?
Are you running A/B tests?
What’s your conversion rate?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below, thanks!
Hi Erik
It better to bring less and sell more instead of bringing huge number of traffic and selling to a few of them. It directly hits our efficiency and we feel a lot of disappointment if we sell to two of our total hundred visitors. We should see from the other side that we lost or missed 96 visitors. They just came, got everything for free and went away to never come back.
Raising conversion of any type is one of the biggest challenge for each online marketer. Unfortunately most of the people follow stereotyped methods and without knowing about their blog community they apply a wrong method.
If your blog community is amateur golf players they won’t grab a free offer and even won’t be impressed by discount offer or buy one get one free. Usually golf players are from strong financial background and they just want quality and not much care about the price.
All the points you mentioned are tested on and one can see a huge difference in conversion rate at his blog after following them.
Thanks a lot for sharing this very important post on online marketing.
reading the post an going through your comment confirm everything. At times we have so much traffic but they are just traffic with no revenue. One ready need to study his market before market decision.
Thanks Erik and thanks to the too Mi Muba
Hi Erik,
Great post and something I’ve been preaching for years. More traffic does not necessarily mean more sales and revenue.
All you really need is a hungry market.. You want to reach the people ready to buy.
Of course you need to know your market, know what appeals to them, what they want and then effectively help them make the buying decision. Those things combined with your tips above will help you make sales.
Not as easy as some might think, it takes practice but all worthwhile in the end.
Blessings,
Liz
Hey Erik,
Most of bloggers struggle to improve online revenue of their website. Calculating the visitors rate is not enough. Bloggers need to have proper strategy which can boost up their income.
Selling your ebook is not that much fun. If you want to help then its good that you give your ebook free to your readers.
Having an eye on the credibility of your website is very important. You should take care that your website provides the best content to its readers.
You have included some great points here.
Thanks for sharing with us.
Enjoy your day.:)
~Ravi
This is great! I’ve been reading a lot lately about this. Basically, I’m starting to lean more towards the idea of converting the traffic I have, as opposed to always just trying to get more traffic. I would rather have a higher conversion rate with less traffic, than the opposite. Once people can really learn to optimize their site for conversion, while keeping it user-friendly and visually appealing, the traffic matters less and less. Spend more time focusing on conversion and less on traffic. That’s my opinion! 🙂
I always tell people that its much more important to optimise your marketing funnel FIRST, before scaling traffic.
Take a reasonably small level of traffic to test all your marketing resources, then once you’re happy with the metrics and there’s a margin, scale traffic. The CPA (cost per acquisition) will be lower and your funnel much more tuned in to deliver results.
I see the same principle when businesses start with PPC. They essentially pay for traffic and not conversions. Not optimising their landing pages and nurture sequences first means they’re basically paying for traffic and not results. And that’s not smart business or marketing =)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
– Stuart
Hey Erik,
Surely, optimizing conversion rate is a far better and easier idea than going for more traffic. And more traffic on an unoptimized site will only increase the fail ratio.
Great advice about A/B testing, will surely try some of it.
The conversion rate depends largely on the sales letter. It is therefore very important that we fix our sales letter first before testing out anything else,
thanks,
Uttoran Sen,
Innovative ideas… Brilliant effort buddy.. keep sharing more and more awesome updates buddy……… 🙂
Hi Erik
Useful blog post thanks – we can so easily just focus on finding more subscribers, forgetting that it should be easier to make repeat sales to current subscribers, and especially the buyers on our lists. Always assuming that we have shown these people that we are trustworthy and offering them quality information and products.
Have a great weekend. Joy
Now this is something interesting where you are putting emphasis over earning money even without increasing the traffic wherever everyone is writing opposite.
Credibility and call to actions are the best things which work. Even if you have 200 visitors a day but if your site has good credibility then you can make good sales. Good post Erik.
Hey Erik,
First This is a Great Article Awesome Tutorial Really Good Surely, optimizing conversion rate is a far better and easier idea than going for more traffic. And more traffic on an unoptimized site will only increase the fail ratio. Helpfully Article , Great Work Good Stuff Thanks a lot For Sharing me ,
Regard
Jassica
While building online revenue another important thing is we must create a loyal readers. That means we need to always share some informative tips to our readers that means they will always read our blogs. When we attract more of these readers then we will get conversion..
Thanks for adding all practical views.. 🙂
Hi Erik,
Very good topic you’ve picked for discussion.
As a blogger we are always so much focused on creating quality content and promoting posts that we often forget about reviewing our approaches and doing different tests and experiments.
I was earning a few cents everyday through Adsense in one of my educational blog. I was convinced on the make belief that educational sites don’t pay much in Adsense.
But it was a fine morning when I sit to analyse my site. I checked the income report for different Ad positions, the money different pages earned and so on. After some time’s analysis ,it was really a great finding!
Following is what I did for that site to increase Adsense earning significantly. Hope it will be useful to other readers as well:
#1. I decided to turn off Adsense sitewide. Simply deleted the Ad codes and uninstalled the Adsense plugin.
#2. Then I used Google Analytics to pick only those pages in site that drew most organic traffic.
#3. I placed two Ad units in each of those pages very strategically.
#4. Wait and watch the result for couple of days
Startlingly it improved much. The cents now turned to dollars. Not bad.
How this change increased my Adsense earning?
#1. I removed all the Ad units and placed on very specific pages only. This reduced the number of Ad units in my site.
When there were fewer ad spots in site, obviously the advertisers’ competition is hightened. I mush be getting better paying Ads than before.
#2 Because the Ad units were placed only on the pages where most organic visitors landed, it increased the click-through rate. You should know it already that it is only organic traffic that click on Ads (regular readers are smart enough to distinguish regular content and ad pices). It is people from search engine who are really searching for something, aren’t they?
Thus, it is not always true that you must increase traffic to improve revenue.
i have got lots of new information from Suresh Khanals Comment, thanks Suresh sir,,
Hi Suresh,
You’ve well investigated the root cause of the problem 🙂 , thanks for sharing the analysis made upon your site,
Well narrated and explained your way of truning cents to Dollars !!!
Hope to connect you soon 🙂
Thanks,
Siva
Thanks for sharing..! Well, this is the unique article about blog monetizing. Actually, I never expected that we could increase our revenue without increasing of blog traffic. You know..? The most of blogger know that the more traffic, the more money.
Great..! Now you configure the problem. We absolute able to improve more earning even our traffic is a bit low.
Honestly, this is really nice article which I ever learnt.
Thanks for quick responding, brother..!
Honestly, it is useful article for almost of bloggers who not ready to enjoy pretty earning such as me. I really love it.
Also, thanks for you wish. And It would be the same wish from here..!
Have nice weekend..! 🙂
This push/pull of love/hate is something we all go through. “Step away from the computer” – your quote has saved me quite a few times. Sometimes I need to take a yoga class and just remind myself just why I’m doing this – I love to help people.
So next time instead of wondering how to squeeze the next 100 visitors from some link, or how to make Google raise you 1 position up in the rankings, better think how to improve the conversion rate on your site.
Now this is something interesting where you are putting emphasis over earning money even without increasing the traffic wherever everyone is writing opposite.
Hi Erik,
First of all thanks for sharing such very very important post of this blog because according to me that main purpose if any blogger is to make money from their blog whether they use Google adsense or direct program or use any other method to make money
I agree with Liz McGee, Traffic is also important but quantity is not important, we should seek those user that want to buy eBook,
So we should know about our visitor desire, what they want?
I think it will be enough for us to make awesome money though some of user monthly.
Any way thansk for sharing your experience with us
Regards:
Areesha Noor!
Drove me again to the same article; The one thing that is necessarily required for whatever you do is A/B testing.
If you fail at one part; You should improvise at second part that is what I learned from past few years;
Thanks Erik
Hey erik,
A little too late to join here,. I watch neil patel on youtube. He was also talking about how he targeted the wrong keywords and even while had a ton of traffic, didn’t get the desired results through monetization.