I’m releasing this to you for free.

Why? Because too many websites that are claiming to be experts in website traffic focus on only one side of the equation: Getting more traffic – more people to your website.

The harsh reality is that you probably already have enough people visiting. They just don’t stick around to see how wonderful you are.

Lowering Your Bounce Rates

The art of taking a single visitor and converting them into a loyal reader, customer, or fan is an intricate process. Starting with capturing their attention from another source (the act of traffic generation) – which can be via their own action of searching for something or following a recommendation for your site via a link – all the way to engagement on your site.

It’s your job to draw them in and you have the most control over this part of the story.

Definition: To lower your bounce rate means to reduce the number of people that view one page of your website, then leave. Corollary, lowering your bounce rate also means to increase the engagement between your visitors and your website – get them to click around and explore.

Discovering Your Website’s Primary Purpose

As you can imagine, trying to navigate an ocean without a compass or some sense of direction is impossible. You’ll be floating adrift for day or two, until finally you succumb to exhaustion.

And so it is with your website. It’s hard to go somewhere if you don’t know where it is you’re going.

How To Define Your Website’s Primary Purpose

The content of the case study on lowering your website’s bounce rates that I give away with my newsletter subscription was a focus on one of my clients.

His website was a little haphazard design-wise and structure-wise and because of that customers were getting confused. He was losing a vital opportunity to engage and massage the customer’s interest in his services as a painter. Essentially the feeling of being lost on his website was overwhelming and as such the abandonment rate was high.

Important Segue: Put your email in over there on the right and I’ll send you this case study for free…

In response to the question “what is the primary purpose of this website?” we determined that it was to get them to visit the contact page, find the phone number and give him a call for a quote of his painting services.

Without the primary purpose defined his website’s design had no purpose either and you’ll see how we fixed both and achieve a very desirable outcome of dropping his bounce rate by over 30%.

Have A Goal For Your Website

Having some sort of goal – some action, or actions, that you want your customers to take is an important step in the design process. It must be defined.

Here are six (6) examples of a primary purpose. You might consider them similar to your own? This is just to get those creative juices flowing, there are many more than just these six:

1. Giving me a phone call or contacting me somehow
2. Signing up for a newsletter
3. Buying something online
4. Downloading something
5. Commenting
6. Subscribing

Creating A Path Through Your Website

If you want lower bounce rates – that is, to achieve lower amounts of people leaving your site before they have a chance to discover what you have to offer – then you need to give them a path through your website.

To do this we need that primary purpose in place before a single bit of digital ink touches the page. This primary purpose determines what you construct as a path.

If your site is all about getting more and more subscribers then you will constantly point them toward subscription options. If you are trying to sell an eBook or some other product as your primary purpose then directing them to the product information pages, sales page, or posts about the product is a wise move.

All roads should eventually lead to them taking some form of action and there’s many ways you can achieve this.

Consider the following ideas:

• An advertisement for your primary purpose in your sidebar
• A small mention after all of your interesting articles
• Contextual links within your blog posts that lead to product information or other posts about your product
• Specialist pages that do not try to sell, but rather inform the visitor about your primary purpose. Such as, a page on all the reasons why subscribing to your site is a great idea, or a testimonials page outlining how your product has helped so many people.
• A specific menu item highlighting your primary purpose
• A landing page for your primary purpose designed specifically for conversion
• A greeting box introducing yourself to new visitors and highlighting your primary purpose
• Information links in subscription footers and other highly visual places

These are just a few to get you started. Can you see how many ways you can direct your visitor’s attention?

Your Keywords Should Relate To Your Primary Purpose

If your goal is to sell an eBook on dog training, you can bet that your website should focus around dog training. If you have a bunch of articles on arts and crafts then you’re selling your dog training manual to the wrong market.

Aligning your keywords with your primary purpose means that you can pull in visitors looking to perform the action you want them to take. A website that helps people through the process of painting with helpful DIY articles exploring some of the complexities of a good paint job will likely attract visitors that are interested in painting their house. They might even be part way through it and realise it’s too big a job.

Referring back to my case study once again, my client’s painting business website features articles on how to do some complex painting tasks in a Do It Yourself style article. Seems counter intuitive right? He’s in the painting business, he wants people to pay for this stuff, not get it for free.

What is great though is most people see how full on the task is going to be and the anticipation of such a monster task leads them to think maybe a professional would do a better job.

Guess where they are when that revelation happens? On his website reading about painting.

Without a primary purpose, this would be a dead end. It’s hard to canvass only customers who think they know what they need. Often times, it’s the customers that are browsing around your topic that can be the most valuable.

Loading up your website with keyword rich articles relating to your primary purpose will ultimately bring visitors that have more interest in what you’re wanting them to do than those that come in already set on what they want.

Measurement And Analysis: How To Get A Birds Eye View Of Your Bounce Rates

In my case study that comes free with my newsletter, I give a visual indicator of how my client’s statistics looked without his primary purpose and now with his primary purpose.

By using measurement to see what effect your changes are having you can categorically say whether the changes you’re making at having a positive effect on the website or not.

How To Analyse Your Bounce Rate In Google Analytics

You are using Google Analytics, right?

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool when used correctly. But in order to do that we need to dig a little deeper into what is driving your bounce rate problems.

The default view on your Google Analytics Dashboard, if you haven’t customised it too much, will include a little panel showing some of your overall vitals. A little something like this:

This particular statistic is your averaged site wide bounce rate. Although it’s important as an overview and something you should monitor as a glance into a much bigger picture, it actually means less than you think. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Weekly Bounce Rate Ebb And Flow

Over time you’ll notice that your traffic and your bounce rates increase and decrease in a natural rhythm.

Mine fluctuates daily and over a few weeks it becomes easy to spot patterns your traffic flow that will allow you to predict when the optimal time for launching new content is.

Depending on what niche you’re writing in, when your visitors get the most time, and their general attitudes and tendencies you will find your bounce rates do have some form of fluctuation as well which will allow you to time your content releases for maximum traffic volume and lowest abandonment.

To view which days offer the best chance of getting visitors with time on their hands check out the Bounce Rate page found under Visitors -> Visitor Trending.

This will give you a breakdown of visitors and their bounce rates over time. You can adjust the period as normal to get snapshots of weeks or days at a time for more accuracy in your readings.

Finding Out Which Sites Send Visitors That Click Around

The most important page you’ll want to check is your traffic sources page (All Traffic Sources), which will provide you with a table of all your traffic sources – the websites that send you people.

By default this page shows you the total number of visitors per site sorted by visitor. What we want to do is sort by bounce rate which will give us a much more meaningful statistic to work with.

Clicking on the heading for bounce rate will allow you to change between ascending or descending order.

What you then want to do is find the best traffic sources – the ones that offer you the least bounces for the most traffic. These are the site you want to build a relationship with.

Determining Your Best Sources Of Traffic

So, do you still think of traffic as just coming in one flavour? Any traffic to your website is good traffic right? Not always.

Sometimes the traffic coming to your website isn’t doing you any favours in terms of giving you additional readers, subscribers, customers, so matter what your website’s primary purpose is.

In order to get visitors to your site that naturally want to do what you want them to do we need to do some fine tuning of where your traffic is coming from. Here we touch on the other side of the equation that is so often talked about: Getting traffic.

Using Google Analytics we can set up an advanced filter which will tell us where to focus our efforts in relationship building with other sites.

This gives context to the “getting more traffic” argument. With some smart use of Google Analytics we can now say we want to “get more traffic for sources X,Y and Z.” A much more achievable task.

Using An Advanced Filter On Your Bounce Rate Statistics In Google Analytics

Not many people look much further than their dashboard page in Google Analytics which is a shame. It can be a really powerful and insightful tool when you know how to use it.

Advanced filters allow you to narrow down large amounts of data to provide you with meaningful, accurate statistics.

Navigate to your all traffic sources page in located under the menu Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources.

Select your time range for a few month’s worth of data to build up your data set if you can. This will give you more accuracy.

Scroll to the bottom of the list and click on the advanced filter link which will open up a new section where you can add all sorts of constrictive filters to your list.

The Advanced Filter should constrict your Bounce Rate to what you deem to be the maximum acceptable (it may not be where your average is at right now, but think of it as a goal to work towards), and just to filter out all the 1′s and 2′s that trickle through from site we’ll filter sites that sent more than 5 visitors. If your blog receives a lot of traffic (lucky you), just bump this up to some meaningful value.

The idea is to get about 10 traffic sources that bring you high quality traffic (as in, they send visitors that have a bounce rate in an acceptable range to you). This gives you a list of traffic partners that you should work on building a relationship with.

Link to them, leave comments, write guest posts, and do all the regular traffic building strategies you read about on every blog around the net.

4 Ways You Can Build A Better Relationship With Other Website Owners

Once you’ve figured out your best traffic sources you might be wondering what you need to do to build a stronger connection with them and how you can milk more traffic from those sources.

These are important people! You’ll be working with them to make both of your websites better.

Here are a few tactics you can use to increase the amount of traffic you get from them:

1. Commenting

By leaving relevant and thoughtful comments on their website you’ll provoke their attention, especially if they don’t normally get lots of comments.

Make sure the comments you leave a relevant. “Good post” just isn’t going to cut the mustard. When connecting with these people by regularly commenting on their content you’ll begin to see increased response rates, more traffic, and increased discussion both on their blog around your comments and on your own blog from visitors looking to keep the discussion with you going.

2. Emailing

Have a specific question about something they recently wrote? Instead of leaving a comment try emailing instead. Most bloggers appreciate their audience reaching out to them. If you want to be remembered then you can connect with people by talking to them directly.

I’m recommending emailing here and there just to keep your face fresh in their mind – don’t spam them and avoid direct messaging on Twitter, it’s not a good substitute for an email, though a thoughtful @reply might trigger their attention if they are more notable.

Being in direct contact with someone has the added benefit of the “I Know You” factor and they are therefore more likely to link to you in the future in their writings.

3. Linking To Them Frequently

Reciprocation is a huge player here. If you give, give, give you’ll eventually receive. This strategy works best with people who aren’t quite A-Listers, but apply it however you will.

I like linking to my friends online, I read them because I enjoy their content and if my visitors are coming here for me then it’s not a far stretch that they might like what I like. It’s good both ways and Oh So Good when you finally get that reciprocal link back.

4. Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great strategy that more than a few A-Listers have used to leverage other people’s audiences.

Leo Babauta from the popular blog Zen Habits described it as “having the temporary attention of thousands of people you don’t normally talk to”. It’s your opportunity to be fresh and exciting.

Writing guest posts can be a lot of work, but it can also be easy if you know the person and what they like. I’d recommending doing the above strategies for a while first as it’s all about building rapport.

It’s All About Building Rapport

Building a relationship with someone takes time. In sales this is referred to as building a rapport with your customer. Once you’re in, you’re trusted and working with them becomes a lot easier.

Remember though, at the end of the day you’re dealing with people. It helps to not come across like a robot trying to gain something. Be genuine, pay attention to what their needs are and be there for them.

Turning up and being present is half the battle won.

Lowering Your Website By Fixing Harsh Design

The look and feel of your website says a lot about the company or service using the website as a forefront.

In my case study (free with a subscription to my newsletter over there in the sidebar), I talk about my client, Nick The Painter.

Nick was after something very specific with his website. Something he could only attribute to a “homely” feeling. Which is why my original design ideas based around a crisp and clean look and feel didn’t wash well with him.

Browns aren’t usually the kind of colour I’d think of when thinking of a painting company which is why it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what a good choice it was. As soon as Nick’s showed me his design idea it clicked.

An inviting colour scheme can make you feel like you’ve stumbled on something very warm, comforting, engaging – just like you’re standing in his living room and he’s showing you around.

Colour says more, in less time, than words ever can.

Coming from a programming background, design can sometimes feel a bit foreign to me. Web design has a multitude of concepts all rooted deep in artistic drawing, painting, sculpture and even achitecture and other classic areas of the arts. Finding what appeals to people of a certain audience really has more to do with art than IT.

A Logical Thinker’s Guide To Good Web Design: Put Yourself In The Customer’s Shoes

When it comes to problem solving why you might not be getting the desired bounce rates, or visitors sticking around on your website sometimes it helps to imagine you are the user or customer.

Putting yourself in the shoes of your visitor is a fantastic way to creatively visualise the things that are wrong with your website.

Ideally, the real conclusive way to identify things wrong with your website design (and what they’ll tell you to do in any user interface design course) is to actually get someone that is unfamiliar with the site to sit down and use it in front of you. You can then time them performing certain tasks, take notes about their comments on the layout, design and feel of the site and make observations of their actions.

Failing that, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and pretending to be a user coming across this site for the first time comes a pretty close second.

Open up your site and see if you can answer some of these questions:

• What are the elements that stand out to you?
• If you were looking for contact information where would you go?
• Are the menu names obvious enough for you to know what’s there before you even click on it?
• Can you tell what the website owner wants you to do?
• What is the point of this site?
• Give yourself a few tasks of finding information, how long does it take you to do them?
• Is the layout intuitive and obvious?
• Can I interact with the website? How?
• … etc

I’m sure you get the idea. Come up with 10-20 questions along these lines and answer them giving yourself a true and honest rating. Note down things that need improving to revisit later.

If you have access to a person to act as your crash test dummy site operator ask them to complete several scenarios where they need to locate things on your site and get them to explain how they went about it.

Video tape them in action if possible – this is going to be the most raw way to gain this very valuable feedback.

Things You (The Designer) Should Be Asking Yourself

• Is there anything off-putting about the design?
• Does everything line up nicely? Does it have flow?
• Does the site portray the right feel? Compare it to sites you know portray the image you’re after.
• Is it quite clear how to navigate? Are there any roadblocks to accessing information?
• Is it clear where you would find the information you desire?

Contrary to what some designers thinks when they’re showing off their skills with complex concepts, good quality design is all about the user, not the designer.

It’s something more than a few of us are guilty of – making things more complex than they have to be – because it’s tempting to create interest points and show off our skills.

Sometimes it helps to step back and take a look from another perspective – your visitor’s perspective.

Re-Thinking And Honing The Way You Approach Your Design Work

Do you know what you are wanting your visitors to do once they come across your website? How effective are you at conveying that in your design?

Not knowing why (and hence how) people use your website is a major cause of high bounce rates. For every website you design, a primary purpose should be in mind which will guide your design patterns. That is, what you hoping to achieve by having the website will effect how your design looks in the end.

This is the first question I ask my clients:

“What are you hoping to achieve by having the website?”

Invariably, 90% of the time the answer is “to get the phone to ring more”, “to gain more customers”, “to get people to contact us for information” or some variation of having more clients contact them to conduct business.

The way you architect your website will change slightly depending on the answer to this question.

For most business websites that represent off-line businesses they want the customer to discover information about their products and services, then get them to call and order.

The Negative Effects Of Displaying Information Too Early

One interesting problem I have with smaller business customers is displaying information like phone numbers too early on to the customer which removes our ability to track information about our visitors.

While this isn’t necessarily a devastating thing to do, it makes it very difficult to track the effectiveness of changes to the website. By checking how many people visit the contact page coming from blog posts and services pages we have a way to measure how effective using a blog can be for a website.

Measurement is your friend: “What get’s measured, get’s managed.” – Peter Drucker (Management Guru)

I’m personally a fan of centralising important information such as contact details in one place on your website, this enables better tracking of when visitors are converting and performing actions that you want them to perform and provides a logical point to lead your visitors.

Displaying information too early can also have a dramatic affect on your bounce rates. If you’ve incorporated a blog and a more personal interactive quality to your website design this can be disaster. You want your visitors to click around your site, consuming information and when they are ready to buy (subscribe, enter their details, whatever), lead them to the place you want them to go via the paths throughout your website.

Lower Your Bounce Rate Via Suggestive Linking

One of the easiest ways you can improve your blog right now is by telling your visitors what to do next. What I call a suggestive link.

That doesn’t mean that it’s rude, just that it gives the visitor a little nudge. Call it a “call to action”, a “call to arms”, a “do this right now or I’ll break your legs”, whatever floats.

It’s the power of suggestion at work.

These kinds of cheeky suggestions are just the kind of hints your visitors need to stay on your site. Sometimes it’s just a matter of providing more material for them to consume until they’re ready to take action.

A suggestive link can be as simple as placing automated post recommendations at the bottom of your posts. Or it can be as complex as placing contextual links throughout your blog posts.

You can drop hints in many other ways and it should all relate back to your website’s primary purpose. Is your primary purpose to get your content seen? Is it to get more subscribers? Sell more products? This will determine what you do with these suggestive links and where they lead.

Laying Down The Path

Now that you know your primary purpose and you’re getting a handle on inter-site linking, you can start thinking about laying down a path through your website.

End of post linking or suggestive links throughout the blog post with clear calls to action – think along the lines of “Click here to …” – can really increase your readers engagement and that’s what getting your bounce rates down is all about – increasing engagement.

How Inter-Site Linking Lowers Your Bounce Rate

If there is one thing that is spruiked correctly in the blogging community it’s how much linking to different articles from your archives in your blog posts can help you turn visitors into readers.

Once you get your visitors to read more than one article the chance of them staying, subscribing, buying, etc, goes up dramatically.

Linking To Your Own Stuff Helps Keep Reader Attention

Not only does it get and keep their attention, it gets them clicking which is important for lowering your bounce rate metric.

A lower bounce rate means you’re getting more from every visitor and successfully guiding them to your website’s primary purpose.

By linking to articles from your archives in your blog posts you’ll ensure that there is a consistent path through your site that never stops. The only time they’ll run out of more articles to click on is when you stop linking.

Using Sneeze Pages

Not only can you link to your past content inside of articles but you can also do entires posts which simply link out to different content in a deliberate and obvious fashion.

Some people do these in an end of week, or end of month way which send people back to articles over the last period of time they might have missed.

Digests Of Your Archives

I love doing this for my newsletter subscribers. Because not all of us get the chance to follow everything everyone does, why not send an end of the month digest of all your content?

My newsletter subscribers have gone out of their way to thank me when I do this as they often miss some of the greatest content on my site when they don’t visit back often enough, or have too much other work on. When that digest email comes out you can bet on a surge of visitors.

List Posts

I personally like the combination of the humble list post with the concept of gratuitous internal linking. It gives out great information in a format that folks like, plus it gets your content seen again and again.

Revising And Recycling Content Is Not Blogging Voodoo

The topic of revising and recycling content comes up occasionally in the blogosphere as a way to generate more interest in your work.

I personally think it’s a great practice to update content that you’ve previously posted as it keep the content fresh (something the search engines like) and fixes mistakes that would typically send people away.

Revising Posts Is A Great Habit To Get Into

The more you write the more your old content will fall out of date and out of favour.

The thing is that these older posts are your strongest connection to your readers. They are likely the ones that are receiving most of your traffic from search engines (check Google Analytics if you don’t believe me), and could use some fresh links to pull your visitors towards more recent content.

Revise your posts periodically and find ways to increase the amount of contextual linking to newer posts. This will have the effect of lowering your bounce rate on those posts by refreshing them and adding more internal links with information to consume.

I try to think of my blog as one big living document. It requires constant revision.

Revision of posts.

Revision of ideas.

Revision of theme and content.

You can update old posts placing more relevant and exciting links to new content, or rewrite these posts as new posts and put links in your old posts to notify the search engine visitors.

Whatever your strategy, don’t be afraid to put it into action.

Lowering Your Bounce Rate Is A Continuous Process

I hope this post has been useful to you in your quest for the best bounce rates you can possibly attain for your website. I’ve loved crafting these articles over the last few weeks and finally getting the opportunity to write this mammoth post!

I’ve learned a lot not only about bounce rates, but about my own processes, my design habits, and what I have control over and what I don’t.

The fact remains that employing strategies to lower your bounce rates is the most effective ways to get more control over your existing audience and their actions.

My biggest tip: Make the most of the visitors you have, but never ever take them for granted.

Often times you’re already getting more traffic than is good for your site. With a lower bounce rate, you will receive more interaction, more engagement, more sales, more subscribers, and more enjoyment from your visitors.

Make the most of the visitors you have and thank them for being there just as I’m thanking you now for reading this post.

Thank you!

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Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

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http://www.codemyownroad.com

Hi everyone,

The chapters I’m posting here on the blog today are part of the upcoming release of my Mini Web Design Business eBook. They’re just the introductory remarks and are in addition to the 8 core chapters of content. You will get your money’s worth, folks. Not long now…

Mini Web Design Business Preview Chapters

Introduction

Hi, my name is Josh Kohlbach. Thanks for purchasing my eBook!

I’m going to take you through how to create a mini, self sustaining web design business that you need little to no programming skills to run, and can begin by canvassing your friends and family.

But first, a little about my self. My journey started all the way back at the beginning of 2009.

For those that don’t know me, I spend my days working as a professional programmer. It’s a craft that I’ve been learning and working on since I was 13 years old.

When I started this mini website design business idea I didn’t really have any other streams of income other than my day job.

I started to think about what I could do with my computer skills that could create some extra income on the side just as a backup plan if things took a turn for the worse.

At the time, a few friends and some family members were asking me what I knew about websites and since I’d created a few in my time I felt like I could fumble my way forward with helping them.

It’s important to note at this point that while I’ve created a few websites before, I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. It’s something I’m working at, but art isn’t my strong suit.

Anyway, back to my friends. Taking a looking at some of the quotes they were getting from professional design firms I was seriously shocked at what they were charging for just a simple 5 page website.

I hate seeing people get ripped off. It makes me hulk-angry when I know that it’s really not that big a deal to whip up a simple website these days.

So now that I’ve done this a few times, I decided to systemize it and put it in an eBook so people like yourself could enjoy a little extra income from their computer skills as well. The beauty is you can take this as far or as little as you like.

What This eBook Covers

1. Pointers to all the tools and resources you need to create websites.
2. Tips on where to find your customers. As I mentioned, I started with my friends and family and got a few referrals after that. Really, you shouldn’t have to spend anything on advertising unless you want to.
3. How much to charge your customers and my suggestion on how to collect money.
4. How to put things in place to automate parts of your business so you don’t have to work on it all the time.

Let’s get stuck in!

I’m in the process of finalizing my plans here so that I can roll this out as smooth as possible. Subscribe to the newsletter over there on the right if you want to get in as soon as I launch. They’ll be the first people to be notified – other than that, I’ll do a post on the blog to let you all know it’s available for instant download.

For those that already have a copy of version 1.0, I’ve not forgotten you. You’ll receive an email from me prior to launch with your new copy of version 2.0.

All the best!
Josh

Join my newsletter and get a FREE EBOOK!

Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

Go on, it's free. My treat ;)
http://www.codemyownroad.com

Belated Weekender

This is a bit of a belated CMOR Weekender this week, I didn’t schedule anything ahead of time so I’m typing this on Sunday evening and I’m just going to post it live. Last week I missed the weekender because I was living it up on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane where I live on a much needed break.

The Origin Of My Sore Legs

This weekend has been equally hectic, culminating with today’s 10km fun run race (Oh, you better believe I’m paying for it). The race starts at the twin Gateway bridges and leads us all the way through to the RNA showgrounds where the famous Brisbane EKKA is held.

Every year there is a free car giveaway that you get to enter just by showing up. The funny thing about this year’s draw was that the 10 year old kid who won the Suzuki Swift last year managed to win the car again this year!?! What the!!

There was about 45,000 people running the race last year and around 40,000 this year.

This Month’s Posting

Over the past two months I’ve been posting on a pretty strict schedule of Tuesday to Saturday every week. I’ve been quite proud that I’ve stuck to it for two months so far, but I’m going to have to break that untarnished record (told you I would have to at some stage!).

I’ve got quite a few projects on the go this month and don’t think I could really commit to that posting frequency while keeping the quality at an acceptable level. I’m planning on relaunching my Mini Web Design Business eBook v2.0 this month, I’m launching a new WordPress related service on my freelancing site, and I’ll be continuing a few other projects including an offline one that will take up quite a bit of time.

My intentions will be – instead of posting every day – to post a few longer more inclusive articles including the summary to my lowering your bounce rate series that’s been going for the last month or so.

So I hope you’ve had a good weekend, and that you’re legs aren’t as sore as mine. I’ll see you about the place!

Join my newsletter and get a FREE EBOOK!

Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

Go on, it's free. My treat ;)
http://www.codemyownroad.com

Here’s some interesting facts about MWDB v2.0:

• It’s now over 4100+ words long
• There’s 8 core chapters of killer website creation content, tools and advice on how to build your mini biz
• Loads more links to resources, plugins, and help that’s just a click away
• Detailed information about charging your clients – how to go about it, how much to charge and more
• New information on travelling with your biz, outsourcing, and letting things go on autopilot

A Mini Web Design Business is more than just something you read in an eBook. It’s a thriving little system.

Next post I’ll publish the introduction chapter to give you a taste for my writing and see if you’re interested in maybe purchasing it. I’m not going to high pressure sales-pitch you, I’ve never liked that agressive selling style.

At this stage I’ll be looking at selling the eBook for $19.95 and I’m considering chucking in a few things to sweeten the deal (although I don’t have any clue what they might be – contact me if you want to do a joint thing!)

The current version has now been withdrawn from sale. Anyone who has a copy of version 1.0 will be receiving their copy of 2.0 via email when 2.0 launches. I’ll let you know when in the next post!

Exciting stuff folks!

Join my newsletter and get a FREE EBOOK!

Simply visit my site and enter your email on the right hand side and I'll send you a free copy of my comprehensive guide to lowering your website's bounce rates (valued at $19.95)!

Go on, it's free. My treat ;)
http://www.codemyownroad.com

I’m fascinated by the simple (or, sometimes not so simple) art of pricing and the psychology behind it.

I was reading one of my favourite blogs on money by Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich) and he’s talking about raising your charge out rates.

Down near the bottom he makes a really valid point that I wanted to share here on shifting your customer’s mindset from deciding to buy to deciding what to buy.

“Do you know why it’s critical to offer more than one package? There are 2 reasons, actually:

1. He might actually pick a higher tier, which would be money in your pocket — and a new hourly rate
2. By offering 3 options, she’s shifted the prospect’s decision from “Should I buy her services or not?” to “Should I buy $50, $60, or $75/hour?””

Shifting The Way Your Customers Think

As you as you present multiple options this shift of thinking “whether I should buy your services or not” is changed to “which one of your services should I buy?”

Let me explain.

• I offer a programming service at $50 per hour.

Immediately the question becomes, “Should I purchase Josh’s service which he offers at $50 per hour?”.

The shift happens when I tell you I offer:

• Basic programming service at $50 per hour.
• Priority programming service at $150 per hour.

With a few optional extras such as after job support:

• Basic after job support at $35 per hour
• Priority after job support for $90 per hour.

What’s the question in your mind now? You’re working through deciding if you need priority or not, whether you will need after job support or not and a range of other questions that will need to be self-answered.

Now obviously this is an example I’m not quoting my exact rates (It’s pretty close to this though), but you can apply this to other pricing games as well.

How about products?

eBooks are popular among bloggers right? Most people throw out a price like $19.95. Buy the eBook, it gets delivered, transaction over.

But what about the upsell? Instead of giving away those bonuses, why not price them fairly? Give you customer options.

• eBook  – $19.95
• Upsell 1 – $9.95
• Upsell 2 – $9.95
• eBook + Upsell 1 + Upsell 2 – $29.95!

That sounds like a good deal right?

Now all of this so far is theory, but it’s something I’m dead keen to explore in the coming months.

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I just finished listening to a fantastic podcast by Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income blog whose exploits I follow quite regularly. Pat is a smart guy and has really had some great success in creating multiple streams of income and trying to turn them passive. Basically, his goal is to create recurring money with little ongoing effort.

Anyway, he has an interview up with another bloke I follow from England (they’re buddies online and you can tell from their repeated comments on each other’s blog). Glen Allsop is the affiliate marketing and SEO guru behind the popular ViperChill blog.

Here is their interview together:

Affiliate and Niche Site Interview With Glen Allsop

My Notes On Creating Successful Affiliate and Niche Sites With Glen Allsop

At the start of the interview Pat encourages us to take notes (something I almost always do anyway) and since I’ve posted my notes on this kind of thing before with a speech by digg creator Kevin Rose I thought it might be helpful for you guys to do it again.

So if you haven’t got the time to sit down and listen to the podcast, file it away for later and read my notes below:

Glen takes us through the 5 exact steps he’s using today that has helped him create over 30 successful affiliate niche microsites which generate all of his 6 figure income.

1. Write down your passions, fears, and problems

If you work on something that you’re passionate about you’ll maintain your interest. If you’ve got no interest in knitting, then your chances of long term success in the knitting niche is low.

Fears and problems will be something you share with other people. People pay money to get past their fears and problems.

2. See if there is a market or people with similar interests

Google Keyword Research Tool – try typing “learn [your phrase here]” or derivitive and you’ll get an idea of how many searches are being made per month on this topic. This will let you know if you’re onto a big enough market.

Google Trends – If the industry you’re planning on entering isn’t going up in search volume you can expect that it’s dying out.

Talk to friends/family/online buddies/people in forums. Just ask people if they think a product like the one you’re thinking would be worthwhile for solving their problems.

Search on Twitter – Twitter is a search engine and a very powerful one at that. You can see if people are talking about their problems online in a realtime manner.

(Josh: I have a couple of these tools in my tools section)

3. Find a relevant product to promote

ClickBank has loads of information products. You can also see how well they are selling by looking at sales and gravity, etc.

Amazon is probably the biggest source of products, but it works best for higher ticket items because of the low commissions (as low as 3%~). Pat suggested that Amazon was good because of the upsell factor – people will generally buy multiple items to save on shipping and you get a commission on all of them).

Personal Recommendations work well because if you’re willing to buy and use the product or service then others will be too. Think about what you’re using and check for affiliate programs. Thesis, Market Samuri, etc all came up.

Other affiliate product aggregators you can use are AzoogleAds and CommissionJunction. I’m sure there’s loads of others such as ShareASale and eJunkie.

The final option is that you can create your own product. If you can’t find it online then you might have more success creating a new product rather than giving up.

4. Build a website around it

Buying the domain is an important step to get right. Try to get the .com domain for the phrase. This can be hard if it’s a popular niche and can get expensive if you go around purchasing domains from others. You can try adding “my” or “hq” to the start of end of the phrase to help with uniqueness. Try to avoid hyphens and go the .com if you can.

5-10 pages is all you need on your website to make it look legit. It’s rare for a 1 page website to rank really high in the search engine results. Try writing some articles, filling in FAQ pages, about, contact, etc. The main purpose should be to get them off your home page and onto the product page.

WordPress is the easiest platform to setup fast.

You can pay people to build links, add content, etc if you want to tackle more than one website and have limited time.

5. Get traffic to your website

A site is only as good as the traffic you get to it. Glen spends his time building text links to increase the SEO value. Focus on quality text links from websites in related industries. Go for quality over quantity.

That said, he did suggest you can purchase a whole bunch of directory submissions quite cheap on forums which can give you a good kick start in the rankings (he gave an example of 500 directory back links for $10).

Work on reciprocal linking. If you link out to people you’ll hopefully get a return link via reciprocity.

A great tactic is to search for the backlinks in Yahoo from what your competition is ranking for and try to gain links from the same sources.

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The look and feel of your website says a lot about the company or service using the website as a forefront.

In my free eBook (which you can get by subscribing to my newsletter over there on the right), I go through a case study about my client Nick The Painter.

Nick was after something very specific with his website. Something he could only attribute to a “homely” feeling. Which is why when my original design ideas based around a crisp and clean look and feel didn’t wash well with him.

Browns aren’t usually the kind of colour you’d think of when you’re thinking of a painting company which is why it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what a good choice it was. As soon as I saw Nick’s design idea it clicked.

It’s an inviting colour scheme, one which makes you feel like you’re standing in his living room and he’s showing you around.

Colour says more, in less time, than words ever can.

I’ve been going over lots of tips and tactics to do with lowering your bounce rate over the past few weeks. This information has mostly come from my personal experience with it in working for clients and doing web designs for myself. I’m hoping to throw in a few practical exercises here and there now and some of this will focus around fixing design elements.

Coming from a programming background, design can sometimes feel a bit foreign to me. Web design has a multitude of concepts all rooted deep in artistic drawing, painting, sculpture and even achitecture and other classic areas of the arts. Finding what appeals to people of a certain audience really has more to do with art than IT.

I’m interested in hearing what some of you professional designers think about this, leave us a note in the comments and tell us your experiences with how colour changes and influences people’s ideas.

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When it comes to problem solving why you might not be getting the desired bounce rates, or visitors sticking around on your website sometimes it helps to imagine you are the user or customer. Putting yourself in the user’s or customer’s shoes is a fantastic way to visual the things that are wrong with your website.

Ideally, the real conclusive way to identify things wrong with your website design (and what they’ll tell you to do in any user interface design course) is to actually get someone that is unfamiliar with the site to sit down and use it in front of you – timing them, taking notes, making observations and all that.

But, failing that, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and pretending to be a user coming across this site for the first time comes a close second.

See if you can answer these questions:

• What are the elements that stand out to you?
• If you were looking for contact information where would you go?
• Are the menu names obvious enough for you to know what’s there before you even click on it?
• Can you tell what the website owner wants you to do?
• What is the point of this site?
• Give yourself a few tasks of finding information, how long does it take you to do them?
• Is the layout intuitive and obvious?
• Can I interact with the website? How?
• … etc

I’m sure you get the idea. Come up with 10-20 questions along these lines and answer them giving yourself a true and honest rating. Note down things that need improving to revisit later.

If you have access to a person to act as your crash test dummy site operator ask them to complete several scenarios where they need to locate things on your site and get them to explain how they went about it. Video tape them in action if possible – this is going to be the most raw way to gain this very valuable feedback.

Things you (the designer) should be asking yourself out of this might be:

• Was there anything off putting about the design?
• Do things line up nicely?
• Does portray the correct feel? ie. “homely” compared to other sites we’ve already identified as “homely feeling”
• Is it clear how to navigate?
• Is it clear where to find information?

Good web design is all about the user, not the designer. This is something I think more than a few of us are guilty of, sometimes it helps to step back and take a look from another perspective.

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Do you know what you are wanting your visitors to do once they come across your website? How effective are you at doing that?

Not knowing why (and hence how) people use your website is a major cause of high bounce rates. For every website you design, a primary purpose should be in mind. That is, what are you hoping to achieve by having the website?

This is the first question I ask my clients.

“What are you hoping to achieve by having the website?”

Invariably, 90% of the time the answer is “to get the phone to ring more”, “to gain more customers”, “to get people to contact us for information” or some variation. The way you architect your website will change slightly depending on the answer to this question.

For most business websites that represent offline businesses they want the customer to discover information about their products and services, then get them to call and order.

Be aware of the effects of displaying information too early

One interesting problem I have with smaller business customers is displaying information like phone numbers too early on to the customer which removes our ability to track information about our visitors.

While this isn’t necessarily a devastating thing to do, it makes it very difficult to track the effectiveness of changes to the website. By checking how many people visit the contact page coming from blog posts and services pages we have a way to measure how effective using a blog can be for a website.

I’m personally a fan of centralizing important information such as contact details in one place on your website, this enables better tracking of when visitors are converting and performing actions that you want them to perform and provides a logical point to lead your visitors.

Displaying information too early can also have a dramatic affect on your bounce rates. If you’ve incorporated a blog and a more personal interactive quality to your website design this can be disaster. You want your visitors to click around your site, consuming information and when they are ready to buy (or subscribe, or enter their details, or whatever) then lead them to the place you want them to go.

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Once you’ve figured out your best traffic sources you might be wondering what you need to do to build a stronger connection with them and how you can milk more traffic from those sources. These are important people! You’ll be working with them to make your blogs better, it can’t hurt to get to know them right?

This article will take you through 4 ways your can build your relationship with these websites. If you haven’t read my recent article on finding out your best traffic sources then you should go and read it now otherwise I’ll sound stupid.

4 Ways To Build A Better Relationship With Other Bloggers

Once you’ve done your identification of the site you want to connect with there’s a few tactics you can use to increase the amount of traffic you get from them.

1. Commenting

By leaving relevant and thoughtful comments on their website you’ll provoke their attention, especially if they don’t normally get lots of comments.

Make sure the comments you leave a relevant. “Good post” just isn’t going to cut the mustard. By connecting with these people by regularly commenting on their content you’ll begin to see increase response rates, more traffic, and increased discussion both on their blog around your comments and on your own blog from visitors looking to keep the discussion with you going.

2. Emailing

Got a question about something they recently wrote? Instead of leaving a comment try emailing instead. Most bloggers appreciate their audience reaching out to them. If you want to be remembered then you can connect with people by talking to them directly.

I’m recommending emailing here and there just to keep your face fresh in their mind – don’t spam them and avoid direct messaging on Twitter, it’s not a good substitute for an email. Personally, I think Direct Messaging in Twitter’s stupidest feature. I don’t think I’ve ever received a genuine one.

Being in direct contact with someone has the added benefit of the “I know you” factor and they are therefore more likely to link to you in the future in their writing.

3. Linking To Them Frequently

Reciprocation is a huge player here. If you give, give, give you’ll eventually receive. This strategy works best with people who aren’t quite A-Listers, but apply it however you will.

I like linking to my friends online, I read them because I enjoy their content and if my visitors are coming here for me then it’s not so far a stretch that they might like what I like. It’s good both ways and Oh So Good when you finally get that reciprocal link back.

4. Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great strategy that more than a few A-Listers have used to leverage other people’s audiences. It’s like having the temporary attention of thousands of people you don’t normally talk to. It’s your opportunity to be fresh and exciting.

Writing guest posts can be a lot of work, but it can also be easy if you know the person and what they like. I’d recommending doing the above strategies for a while first as it’s all about building repore.

It’s All About Building Rapport

Building a relationship with someone takes time. In sales this is referred to as building a rapport with your customer. Once you’re in, you’re trusted and working with them becomes a lot easier.

Remember though, at the end of the day you’re dealing with people. It helps to not come across like a robot trying to gain something. Be genuine, pay attention to what their needs are and be there for them. Turning up and being present is half the battle won.

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