One of the biggest lessons we learnt running a successful subscription website was to constantly monitor the site network. Here’s our quick summary, all this and more in Niche Content Millionaire.
1. Clarity of purpose and message
Your web site must, from the home page onwards, have a clarity that ensures visitors, whether new or returned, instantly understand what you are on about.
2. Cleanliness and Navigation
Your web site must make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for, it must guide them in a natural, enforced way around the pages. Menus with a couple of dozen options, or four sub-levels are counter-intuitive. Instead focus on providing immediate access to key information, and then creating a simple path deeper into the site to the less important data.
3. Compelling and Contemporary
What is contemporary today will be yesterday’s chip wrapper as the saying goes in Britain. A site that is contemporary in its visuals and content will appeal to visitors more than a site that has been sitting there waiting for a few years in the hope that the fashion trend it was built around is going to come around again. A bit like corduroy and shoulder pads. Your site should have features and functions that compel visitors to stay long enough for your marketing message to take hold.
4. Consistency and Cross Browser
The ongoing development of web browsers is the bane of a web developer’s life. It’s essential you check your site in multiple browsers. Does the site look and function correctly, and consistently, across all these browsers?
5. Code that Works
How often have you visited a web site, and something didn’t work? We see it all the time, and it’s even more puzzling on very large successful web sites. It makes you wonder just how often they test their web sites – and it means you must test test test. Don’t just rely on something that used to work, continuing to function. Things break
6. Calls to Action
Remember your objective is to make money. You need a sales funnel – a sequence of events on your site through which your visitors move that are pushing them towards handing over their credit card details and paying you money. To some degree it’s easy to work out whether the devices on your site are working – if you ain’t got purchases, then it’s a fair conclusion something is wrong. But if you do have sales, the question becomes whether you can lift the sales rate by tweaking the calls to action, the prompts and text that encourage visitors to purchase. These are mission critical issues that must be constantly monitored, evaluated and if necessary amended to maintain or improve your sales.
7. Check Out
Once customers get to the pointy end and enter their details and credit card number, it is essential that the check out process operates simply and smoothly. You want the minimum of fuss and complexity. Test this constantly. Don’t just click through to the purchase page and leave it at that, you need to test the whole sale process, through to the email you send to acknowledge the purchase.
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Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. |
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