The Internet is what I consider one of the most awesome things every created. I am of that generation that grew up with computers and the Internet has really been a god send for me as it allows me access to places and people I would never have had the opportunity to meet. It is also the source of some of the best information you could ever wish to garner. But! It is also the source of some of the worst information as well. Website owners, just like you and me really need to carefully look at the material that we provide on our websites and consider the issue of whether everything we are providing is really what our visitors really want. So, the question is, how do we find out? There are four simple key strategies you can use to find out whether the visitors to your site actually value your information. The four strategies are †1.Email the Visitors 2.Survey the Visitors 3.Put Feedback Ratings on the Page 4.Email to Friends buttons These four strategies might seem obvious or simple but how many people actually use them. Not too many. Why Put These Strategies Into Place? The key reason for this is that by understanding what your customers are thinking you can tailor the information on your website so that they are more inline with what they want. For example, and I will use my own training company as an example, if we had let say a sudden rush of 10,000 visitors to our site and they told us via the four strategies above that they wanted more information on Excel, what do you think we would do. We would add more information on Excel. If through the Feedback ratings we got higher positive responses for say articles on Pivot Tables, what would we do? We would put more articles on Pivot Tables onto our website. Let me give you another very clear reason to do this. My team and I run a website in Townsville, Australia called GetTheRightPrice.com. This website provides the fuel prices for the local community and tells them where to get the best price. For three years my company had been running this site to the tune of $100,000 plus a year. We had struggled to work out how we could run this site and make a profit. Over the three years we used some of the strategies above to learn one clear lesson. Nobody in the community was prepared to pay for the fuel price, which meant we had to change our way of thinking to find a model that worked. Okay so let’s look at the four strategies. Strategy 1. - Emailing Your Visitors This strategy I personally think is quite simple and straight forward, but it does rely on one thing. You need to be asking your visitors what their email addresses are. If you own a website and you aren’t collecting visitors details, then what are you doing. Remember one thing, always ask your visitors their first name and their email address so that when you send out an email, you can address the email to them personally. You will always get more responses if you address the visitors by their first name. One other thing, get the visitors details into some sort of Customer Database as soon as possible. There are lots around. When you email your visitors you could ask them simply some questions to reply to, you might ask them to complete an attached survey or you may just ask them to give you some feedback on say a certain webpage. One thing to note too, sometimes people can be very shy about completing a survey via email. You may want to consider finding a way, with this strategy where they can reply, but anonymously. Strategy 2 †Survey the Visitors This is one, I have been using a lot of late and I have learnt so much about my customers. You can survey the visitors in two ways, have a link on the page that takes them to the survey or you can use what we call an Exit Survey. This was a strategy I learnt from a series of interviews done by a gentleman called Mr H. There are about 5 hours of discussions on how to really make an effective website in these interviews. An exit survey is where a screen will popup as they leave your website and done effectively is a really simple way to learn what your customers think. I thought when I first used it people would be really anti the technique, but they haven’t been and I have got some really cool information from my customers. One thing though, if you are using Pay-Per-Click search engines, then they usually frown on this technique. But, if your traffic is from other websites then I encourage you to use this technique. Note a few things though, for this method to work, the questions must be extremely simple and quick and to get the optimum responses back you need to make sure that you offer the visitor something. In particular some Free Gift like an eBook, article or report and make it something worthwhile not rubbish. Nothing irritates me more, than registering for something free and it being a load of rubbish. If you do this, it will affect your credibility. Strategy 3 †Feedback Ratings On Your Webpage Feedback ratings are definitely what the big boys are using. If you visit sites like MSNBC and go to their news articles, at the bottom of each article you will see the ability to define how you rated this story and they give you five stars to click on. With this sort of information what you can do is to then look at the styles of articles you are providing and provide more in that category. This will ultimately help you to attract the customer back in the future. The other key thing with this style of tracking is that you can work out if a particular author or style of article is more attractive to your visitors. It can also help you work out whether its worth paying to get a key author to write for you. Strategy 4 †Email This Article To Your Friends button This strategy is really an extension of Strategy 3. What it essentially requires you to do is to track how many times somebody forwards your article to a friend. By looking at the statistics from here, if a certain style of article is being emailed then you may again want to look at getting more articles in that category. What’s the bottom Line? The bottom line is this, the more you learn about your customers behaviors, what they like, what they don’t like, who they are etc, the more effective your website will become and the more likely people will come back to your website. The other thing I would like to put to you, is not to lose your statistics. You need to be looking at them regularly. In our centre we use Microsoft Access to view and evaluate our statistics. Trends change in the marketplace and what works today may not work in the future, so by keeping those statistics you will be able to see if the trends are changing.
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