The PlanetDomain Blog

For many webmasters, the goal seems to be to attract as many visitors as possible. But if these visitors don’t turn into customers, the investment you made in attracting that traffic is wasted.

When considering whether your website is successful, you need to assess your return on investment based on the number of visitors balanced against the income generated from sales to this group.

But converting website visitors into customers is harder than attracting traffic in the first place. Time and again I come across websites that repeat common mistakes that can prevent visitors becoming customers and will inevitably lead to a costly failure.

Common Website Mistakes

1. Unclear Message

If I were to visit your website by chance today, would I be able to tell within the first few seconds what it is about? Are you a fashion store, a writing blog, a florist, an entertainment venue, a web community or something else?

You may think it is unfair to be expected to sell yourself in a few seconds, but web surfing works in exactly the same way as TV  channel surfing. If you have cable television with fifty channels to choose from, you will flick through with only the most cursory glance at each program before deciding on the show you want to watch.

If a quick glance of your home page doesn’t convey the concept behind the website and doesn’t contain the strongest sales pitch within the first heading and paragraph, you may find all your hard-earned traffic merely hits the back button on the browser and goes elsewhere.

2. No Call to Action

Every website should have a goal. It may be to generate sales or it may be to motivate more people to lodge a telephone or email enquiry. It could be that you want visitors to interact in a particular way with the resources on the website. Whatever the goal is, the copy and structure of the website should be set up to channel visitors towards that goal.

Each page of the website should have only one goal, so you can maximise your ability to funnel visitors where you want them to go. But to do this, each page needs a clear call to action – a phrase, slogan, tagline, special offer or something else that instills a motivation in the reader to act now. If the goal of your product page is to get the reader to buy your product, the page should have copy that finishes with a very strong reason why they should click the ‘Buy’ button right now. The best calls to action tie a firm time factor into the benefits to the reader if they do what you suggest. “Offer only available for a limited time” is a classic (if unoriginal) call to action as it creates a sense of urgency that compels the reader to take up the offer now rather than later.

3. Selling the Features, Not the Benefits

Too many product websites list lots of technical specifications or detailed features that leave a casual reader cold. To help the reader visualise how your product is the right one for them, you need to list the benefits, not the features. “This car is safer, more comfortable and has more space inside” says a lot more to the potential buyer than a list of measurements, component information and mechanical jargon.

There are always going to be interested people who want to know the specifications, because they understand their significance. But most customers are not highly educated about the intricacies of your industry and shouldn’t need to be to recognise your product as a good buy.

A good compromise would be to list features followed by the relevant benefit. “A steel roll cage provides extra protection for your family from on-road crashes.”

4. Putting Barriers in Front of the Sale

If you’ve encouraged the reader to buy your product, don’t place lots of barriers in the way. If your checkout process is too complicated, or if you require registration to complete the action or have a complex navigation that requires a lot of clicks to achieve the goal, the reader will probably give up. This is even more tragic than losing a customer to the previous mistakes as this reader was prepared to follow through before you lost them.

Most online stores list shopping cart abandonment as one of their greatest problems. If a lot of your potential customers start a transaction, but decide to leave before completion, you may need to address whether you are placing barriers between them and you.

Provide easy links. If you’ve suggested an action, place a button or link directly next to or beneath the statement. If you’ve encouraged telephone enquiries, ensure the phone service is suitably manned. If you’ve convinced a customer to buy but the item shows as sold out, provide a means for them to pre-order or to be notified when you have more stock.

5. Ignoring Your Competition

You are not the only online business in your industry. So why should the potential customer choose to buy from you instead of any of the hundreds of other results a Google search will present them with?

Most online shoppers will visit three or more websites before deciding on a purchase. The internet makes it far easier for someone to shop around for the best deal, so you need to be sure the best deal is yours when they visit you.

If you don’t know what your competition is offering, you cannot understand what is affecting your customer’s decision to buy.

6. Overpricing with Postage

When online shopping began to explode many years ago, there was a popular myth that the additional costs of postage and packing were a reasonable expense for the convenience of shopping from home. But most online customers do not agree.

Online customers factor in the cost of postage and packing into the overall price of an item before deciding whether it is a reasonable offer. Yet many online businesses hide the postage costs until the last stage of the transaction, ambushing the unwary customer with a sudden increase n price that can often turn them away and towards your competition.

Many online retailers understand that their price points – including postage – need to remain competitive with traditional high street stores. But high street stores don’t need to factor in postage. This creates a dilemma to the online business in how to maintain a profitable price point whilst keeping the customer happy.

Depending on the product and business model you have, the answer will be different to everyone. But be aware that customers list price and postage as their number one consideration when buying online. Ignoring this factor would dramatically affect your customer conversion.

Monitoring Your Investment

Some websites still do not monitor the essential statistics of their traffic and online sales. Without these figures, it is very hard to interpret the performance of your website. There are many free tools available to monitor traffic statistics, such as Google Analytics. These tools can tell you which links are clicked how often and which parts of a transaction produce the best response. This information is crucial in identifying how to improve your business and to understand customer behaviour within your website.

Is your website making you money or costing you in lost investment?

Online business and ecommerce has been with us for well over a decade. Yet, there is still a lot of resistance to the inevitable changes to classic business models that ecommerce brings.

For most businesses moving online, their business model did not change beyond adding postage and packing to their existing products. But is this enough? Do consumers want more from online business?

Online Purchasing Behaviour

Postage is a major issue for online consumers when deciding on a purchase. If your online business does no more than add postage to products that are readily available in the local shopping centre, you risk turning customers away. Overall price, not convenience, is the number one reason people choose to buy online, so you must stay competitive with your bricks-and-mortar competition.

There is no doubt online customers behave differently to offline customers. Ecommerce success stories like eBay, iTunes and Amazon developed and refined their business models around the unique challenges of shopping online. Many of these business models would never work in the real world, but online they thrive, due to a strong understanding of online purchasing behaviour and the different motivations of an ecommerce customer.

If Amazon had merely retained a traditional bookstore model and simply added postage to every order, it probably would not be the powerhouse it is today. Amazon developed a pricing model that makes it far more attractive to buy from them than from a traditional store by understanding how an international market allowed for bulk stock discounts and how free postage offers can close a sale. Amazon works by selling a lot of product with a reduced profit margin to a wide audience. Because Amazon understands online buyer behaviour, their website is finely tuned to maximise sales to the widest possible market.

But not all businesses have been so quick to adjust to the particular challenges of ecommerce.

Traditional Business versus the Web

The most obvious example of a classic business model being threatened by online trends is the music industry. Throughout the Nineties, they fought lengthy and costly court battles with web entities such as Napster to protect the copyright of their products.

But what the Napster episode revealed was that consumers wanted to access music online, and it wasn’t just about the music being free. During Napster’s heyday, there was no legitimate source for online music purchases, and this led people to illicit sources to find the tracks they wanted.

Many consumers turned to Napster and other online sources because the catalogue was immense. A local music store can only stock so many CDs, but online, virtually every piece of music ever recorded may be available in a form available for download. For those consumers unable to find tracks by a more obscure artist, or wanting music that has been deleted from normal distribution, resorting to online methods may be the only way.

It was only a few years ago that the music industry realised that downloaded music was never going away. By finally understanding what the consumer wanted, Apple liaised with some of the major record labels to release iTunes – the first major online music store. iTunes was, and is, a huge success, proving immediately that consumers weren’t downloading because the music was free, they were downloading because it was convenient. By giving them better quality official downloads at a reasonable price, the music industry harnessed a whole new revenue stream.

The evolution of the music industry still has a long way to go, but record companies are slowly adjusting to new business models that recognise the uniquely different opportunities offered by the internet.

Future Challenges

With bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails taking the distribution of their latest albums entirely online, expect more businesses to move away from traditional sales models.

Radiohead released their album ‘In Rainbows’ by inviting consumers to pay what they felt was reasonable to access the download. About 50% of downloaders opted to pay nothing, but the experiment demonstrated that Radiohead still received more income from the album than they would through a traditional record deal. It also meant far more people were exposed to the album than would normally be the case.

Nine Inch Nails took the idea a step further with the release of ‘Ghosts I-IV’. Made available online through the official website, a fan can choose either a $5 download in a choice of formats, a $10 package of the download with a CD mailed out in April or a $300 limited edition CD and book. The first part of the album, ‘Ghosts I’, is also available as a free download.

‘Ghosts I-IV’ is also licenced under a Creative Commons Licence, instead of the traditional Copyright, allowing anyone to use, edit, adjust, remix or otherwise be creative with the music without needing to acquire legal permission first. This has resulted in YouTube planning to hold a ‘Ghosts Film Festival’ showcasing amateur videos that use the tracks. This kind of viral publicity is more valuable than any traditional advertising campaign.

What Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails realised is that the music is merely the acquisition point to generate further sales. By getting their music into as many iPods as possible, they increase live performance attendance, t shirt sales, back catalogue sales, merchandise, dvds, etc.

Know Your Market

The most innovative and successful online businesses are those that take the time to analyse internet shopping trends and adjust their business models. Those businesses that remain stuck to traditional ideas of business may find the internet leaves them behind.

By taking the time to think how the internet changes the landscape within your market and the unique opportunities it offers your customers, you could perhaps identify the original concept or niche idea that could rocket your business into the future.

Domain names are the cornerstone of the internet. As the primary source of internet navigation, without domain names, your customers couldn’t get around and wouldn’t know how to find you. Also, domain names form part of a company’s identity and branding. Yet many companies make mistakes every day that can be extremely costly by not considering their domain name strategy carefully enough.

A web design error can be fixed. Software applications can be updated. But some domain name mistakes can stay with you a long time and could potentially cost your business a lot of money in lost trade or corrective measures.

If you have an online presence, consider the following five mistakes and see if you need to do more to protect your online assets.

1. Updating WHOIS information

Your domain name registration contains all the relevant information regarding the registered owner. But if this information is out of date, when your domain name is up for renewal, the notifications may never reach you. It is extremely common for a business to register a domain using one email address and then transfer all of their email activity to the new domain without updating the registration with the new email address.

If all your domain name administrative correspondence is going to your old, unused email address, you may not be aware your domain is about to lapse until it is too late. A lapsed domain can be a costly affair, as your website becomes inaccessible, and there is always the risk that someone else could register the domain before you realize.

Always ensure your registration information is up to date.

2. Registering in the Wrong Name

A common scenario is for a business manager to ask an employee to register company domains on their behalf. After all, managers are busy people. But be careful that the employee registers the domains under the company details and not under their own name.

Although it may not seem important at the time, as this certainly doesn’t affect the performance of the domain, if the employee leaves the company, you may find yourself unable to access or administer your own domains. Further, some employees are only too aware of the value of domains. If they are able to gain control of your domains and you part on bad terms, your website could suffer from the fallout as ownership is debated and transfers (sometimes expensive) are negotiated.

Always ensure all company domains are registered consistently under the correct name and with the one contact address. Never allow individual employees to register under their own name.

3. Not registering all the alternatives

You may think that if you only have one website, you only need one domain. But what if someone else registers all the other related domain names? For example, if you own xyz.com but someone else registers xyz.net, xyz.com.au, xyz.org, etc, many of your customers may find their way to these other websites instead of yours.

If at all possible, register all the domain names related to your brand, trademark or website and simply point them all to the same spot. Therefore, no matter which domain the visitor accesses, they arrive at the same place – you.

4. Not registering typo domains

Some domain names aren’t so easy to spell. If you have a domain name that can easily be misspelt, consider registering those domain names as well. A common trick amongst unscrupulous domain speculators is to register ‘typo’ domains for popular websites and fill them with advertising to catch the high amount of traffic that hits the wrong key.

For example, one commonly misspelt word is ‘restaurant’. If a domain name contains this word – and many do - it is advisable to register the most likely typo versions as well rather than risk losing customers.

5. Not keeping your domain management login information secure

The risk of hackers continues to increase with more websites having their home pages hacked or domain names commandeered. If a hacker were to take control of your domain name, they can point your reputable name towards a website of dubious content; spam advertising, phishing, internet viruses or simply steal your business.

To do so, they need to be able to hack your domain name passwords. Surprisingly, many companies still don’t have very secure procedures in place to safeguard their passwords.

Protect Your Online Assets

You wouldn’t leave the front door to your shop unlocked. Domain names are just as vital to your online business as a front door is to a high street shop. By planning a domain name strategy and protecting the ones you have, you can reduce the risks of a costly domain name nightmare.

Why has Planet Domain started a blog?

A strong blog takes effort, planning and focus, but the outcome can be very rewarding. Corporate blogging has become popular in recent years. In the US, businesses are taking up blogging at an incredible rate. 87% of enterprise business respondents to a recent survey indicated they use blogging as part of their online marketing strategy.

The Benefits of Corporate Blogging

Blogging has become a favourite pastime of the search engine optimisation community. With the ability to have posts syndicated across the internet quickly and effectively, blogs can draw a lot of attention, links and traffic to your website. Each blog post creates fresh content for your site – another search engine goody – as well as creating more reasons for other websites to talk about and link to you.

For the reader, blogs have become a popular source of online information, opinion and comment. Many people regularly subscribe to a large number of blogs to stay in touch with their chosen field. A blog allows customers to converse with the business in a less formal environment, providing feedback and comments. Blogs break down the wall between the business and the customer, creating a stronger relationship and greater responsiveness.

But a bad blog can be as damaging as a good blog can be effective.

Five Tips to Succeed With Blogging

Many blogs never achieve online fame (or infamy) because, to be frank, they suck. There are many ways a blog can fail. If you are planning to enhance your own online business with a corporate blog, consider the following tips to design a better bogging strategy.

1. Plan Ahead and Post Regularly

Blogs die quickly without nurturing. They are like ravenous beasts, screaming for fresh content to keep them alive and active, especially in the first few months. If you don’t provide fresh posts to your blog on a very regular basis, interest in the blog will wane and your target audience will drift away.

The Planet Domain blog will be updated every Wednesday afternoon as a minimum. Planning this in advance allowed us to schedule the time and resources to make sure this can happen.

2. Be Original and Fresh

Often, I come across an online marketing blog that offers obvious tips, tired and unremarkable comments and old news. If a blog wants to entice a reader to subscribe, it has to offer something that can’t be found elsewhere.

The key is to know your target audience and the information they crave. Present opinion, offer original suggestions or provide alternative or quirky viewpoints to current industry trends.

Some blogs address this problem by finding an original style, such as humour or satire, to cast a different viewpoint on otherwise established news. Others attempt to remain original by posting quickly after relevant news events or industry developments with insightful comment. Being the first to provide a view on industry news can quickly give your blog the reputation of being a thought leader.

3. Personality Counts

Confine the legal speak and marketing talk to the rest of your website and use the blog to show off personality. One of the prime reasons why blogs have exploded as an online phenomenon is that they allow faceless entities to appear human again. Blog posts haven’t been through the filters of legal departments and five tiers of management approval before being served up in a homogenised and bland form, and even if they do, they shouldn’t read like it.

Blog posts should read like a conversation between you and the reader. Casual language is good. Humour is fantastic. The best and most effective copy is that which gets the reader to the last line.

4. Social Media Means “Social”

If your blog doesn’t have comments activated, it isn’t a blog – it’s a webpage. Invite comments. Encourage people to leave responses, both good and bad, and don’t be offended or feel the urge to argue with the bad press.

Also, no blog should operate as an island. Any blogger should interact with other blogs, leaving comments, reading and subscribing. Blogging is a community activity and you can’t hope to receive without giving first.

Most blogs gain traction through participating in social applications like Digg, Facebook or Del.icio.us. These can be a huge source of traffic and if the content is strong enough, a lot of this traffic will subscribe and keep returning.

Some industries also have very specific social networks. For example, the online marketing field has a very good community at Sphinn and anyone interested in marketing their website or blogging should become a member.

5. Write Well, or Find Someone Who Can

You may be thinking that tips one to four are all about good writing, but they aren’t. You can be original, witty, organised and social and still turn readers off with poor writing.

Bad grammar, poor spelling, overlong sentence structures and vague statements can make an otherwise clever post irritating to the reader. Strong writing is a skill that is developed over time. If you are not confident in your abilities to write concise, clear copy, it is best to find someone who can, rather than risk blog failure.

Vibrant copywriting is about simple words without complex structure. George Orwell said it best when he constructed his five laws of clear writing.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Before submitting each post, it is worth reading a couple of times and removing absolutely anything that isn’t essential to the point. The shorter and clearer each post is, the more digestible it becomes to an internet readership.

Time to Blog

Blogging is not a quick activity. Many blogs don’t gain traction for months as they slowly build a stockpile of archived posts. By staying committed for the long term and devoting time every week, blogging can become a fun outlet that can eventually reap huge benefits.