Look for the bright spots to increase conversion rates (guest post)

The following is a guest post by Robert Brady, who regularly blogs at Righteous Marketing. Robert is a friend of ion’s and we liked this post because it focuses on the positive. What a great outlook! It’s easy to see the problems in online marketing, it’s better to look for the bright spots and optimize from there. 

Conversion rate optimization promises huge potential for your website, but often the project seems so large that you don’t know where to start. Your site has 5 different conversion types, 8 different forms, IT never does anything on time, your graphic designer doesn’t listen to your suggestions because it “cramps his/her creativity,” etc. How do you even get started?

Look For The Bright Spots

Run PPC reports to see what keywords/ads have good conversion rates. Check your analytics goal tracking to see what traffic sources are generating the most leads. Even if it’s only a couple keywords in AdWords or one referrer in your analytics, find what’s working RIGHT NOW!

Once you’ve found what’s working, ask yourself a couple of key questions:

• What is different about this keyword/page/traffic source?
• Why would this difference lead to better results?

In some cases the difference will be obvious and you will wonder how you missed it. In other cases you will have to look hard and may even need an outside opinion (I’m willing to help, just email me – robert@righteousmarketing. com). Once you’ve identified what is working now, you can spread the changes across the keywords/pages/traffic sources that aren’t working.

Personal Example

While analyzing my blog’s most read posts for 2009 I noticed that a guest post by Akin Tosyali of Clix Marketing was the most read post of the year. So what was different?

• The post was longer and included more images
• It was promoted by the author (and David Szetela, owner of Clix Marketing, who has a huge Twitter following)
• It was a case study with a great title

Therefore, in 2010 I have been trying to write longer posts and utilize more images (obviously still a work in progress). I have also been reaching out a lot more for guest posts. The variety and new perspective makes for great reading and you get the promotional double whammy provided by the author promoting their own piece. So what have been the results?

• 408% increase in visits from January-March this year over January-March last year
• 154% increase in visits from January-March this year over October-December of last year

What bright spots have you seen and how can they help you achieve better results?

Comments

[Ferodynamics]

Bright spots. How true. Sit down in Analytics now and then and look at the numbers, you might notice an entirely new wave you can surf. I do this about every two months, but also watch numbers daily using my own tools, macro and micro views. You can double, triple your income overnight when the opportunity is ripe.

[Directory Sieve]

as you mentioned it, guest posts was my find at the start of this year (bright spot i guess :) ) and the instant i knew about it, i knew that i had hit on a gold mine. I not only started to write guest posts actively but also started to accept them on my blogs, and to my surprise, my niche blogs were the most benefited by that.

this post has inspired me to find more bright spots, lets see how many more i can get,

[Robert Brady]

@Ferodynamics - Glad to hear that you're having success finding bright spots. Have you had any "surprise" findings?

@Directory Sieve - Guest posting is fantastic for a number of reasons and I always knew that, but it wasn't until I actually looked at the numbers that I saw HOW good it had been for me. Let us know what other bright spots you find.