Chris Cardell Review

With the recession meaning customers, clients, and prospects are even keener to get more value for their money, it’s ever more important for us to do what we must to ensure they see us as the people to do business with rather than our competitors.

That’s why I find it frustrating to see business owners wasting so much money within effective websites.

It’s useful to consider your home page as the “concierge” of your business – it’s the place they’re directed to when you place a PPC ad or offline ad to drive them online.It has to act like a concierge – because all your future business with your visitors depends on it.

So if you’re not doing everything you can to maximise the results you get from your home page, you’re wasting money.

Your online profits come down to two things: the amount of traffic you get, and then the percentage of visitors you convert to paying customers or clients.

With that in mind, here are some tips and strategies you can implement today, right NOW in fact, to make our home page more effective.

First, you MUST have a headline. It’s the first thing people see when they visit your site, and you have about 8 seconds to capture their attention and keep them there.So your headline needs to be big, bold and promise a huge benefit to them to keep on reading. Your logo and your company name is not a headline: it’s a cop-out and an example of either a lack of imagination or laziness. Perhaps both.

Secondly, your home page must have one purpose and one purpose only. Sometimes this is called the “most wanted response”. I strongly urge you to make your home-page’s purpose to get the email address and name of the visitor so you can start marketing to them (see next month’s Strategies).

And thirdly, begin your relationship with them by giving. Most home-pages either ask visitors to buy something or, perhaps worse, say nothing at all (the page has no real purpose). Instead, offer something of value (free report, CD, trial-run of something,free sample, etc.) in return for their details.

Once this is all in place, the next step is to MEASURE the response to your new home page and then TEST variations to improve that response rate. The good news: Very few people are doing this and those who take the time and trouble are well on the way to having a Recession-Proof Web site.