While we build websites for many different reasons, it would probably be fair to state that the main reason is still so that we can make money. Even if this doesn’t explain the motives of every page on the web, it certainly explains the vast majority and even those sites not designed with financial gain in mind probably wouldn’t turn down the offer of getting paid for making the site they are clearly passionate about.
With this in mind then, it’s perhaps a surprise that most sites really don’t make the most of their traffic and don’t seem to even have much of a game plan in place when it comes to directing them towards their monetization methods.
Let’s say for instance that you are hoping to make money from Google ads on your pages. Where are they on the page, are they placed strategically or are they just scattered randomly around the page? Because if that’s the case then is it no wonder that people aren’t clicking them that much? More to the point if you are trying to sell your own e-book, service or product (which is a much smarter way to make money from a website) then where on your site is it?
Time to Reflect
The point is that it’s not just enough to get visitors to your website and then present them with your content and your ads/products – you also need to direct them through your website as though they were on rails so that they see the things you want them to see and so that they sign up to your newsletters and buy your products.
Ask yourself this then, when someone comes to your website, what do you want to be the first thing they do? Because if you don’t know the answer to this question, then clearly you aren’t maximizing your revenue by making the most of the people who come to your pages.
What you need to do then is to decide what you want people to see and do on your site and then think about how you are going to send them – how you are going to ‘funnel’ them to where you want them to be.
Techniques
One strategy of course is to give your visitors no way out. This is why landing pages selling e-books don’t have menus along the top or down the side – because that makes leaving easier. At the same time you want to think about what you can use to attract the attention of your visitors and to hold it and then use this to direct them around the site. With the aforementioned landing pages, this is effective because the writer uses a narrative – a story of how the book helped them to get rich or get great abs – and this will then lead the visitor to get sucked in and to scroll the page downwards.
You can also use bait to get people to search around your site. If you have something you know people are looking for instance like a free download or a free e-book, then make them click a few links in order to get there and you can keep them on your page longer.
Finally, think about the gaze of your visitors and where they are likely to look when they visit your site. You can find many analyses of these around the net (the ‘F-Zone’ is always winner) and you can use these areas to decide on what your visitors see first when they load up your pages.
Todd Ramos is an expert web designer who works for a leading web design ct firm. He studies about various web layouts and shares tips and tricks that can help in increasing web traffic.
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