Does your web site produce what you expect from it?

In my experience most web sites, including one of mine, achieve very little, despite spending considerable sums of money on Search Engine Optimization, key words, etc.

Good page ranking by Google seems to have questionable benefit.

When you get a lot of traffic as a result of web based promotions, you often get a lot of very unqualified traffic, so often conversion rates are very low. So what can one do to change this?

It seems that the prevailing wisdom says it is important to give prospects lots of choice, prevailing wisdom also suggests letting the customer control the sales process.

Another popular belief is that people don’t read on the web, so you have to be very brief.

I quickly grew tired of my poor results. I am impatient and I also don’t like to keep repeating things that don’t produce results. Quite frankly the conventional wisdom didn’t seem to be working for me.

So I sought the advice of Bob Serling, a brilliant information products marketer who writes an e-zine called Direct Marketing Insider; www.directmarketinginsider.com

Based on what I have learned from Bob and my own experience, I now believe that this prevailing wisdom is preventing many sites from achieving their full potential.

Bob has pioneered a concept called Single Action Web Sites (SAW). SAW’s do exactly what they say. On a SAW you can only do one thing. This means you have to have a very clear strategy and that you have to market your products or services one at a time. This could be a challenge if you have a large number of products; however for my purposes it made sense.

On my Results Exchange site, there are dozens of choices of things you can attend, look at, read, see, listen to, etc.

Rather than re-work this site, I created a brand new web site packed with useful information. I also wanted to be able to assess them side by side.

The new site’s designed only to get visitors to sign up for this newsletter. If you would like to see a SAW in action please visit www.streetsmartmarketer.com I think you will find it instructional.

Taking a leaf out of direct response marketing Bob Serling believes that all the choice you get on “cafeteria” site simply confuses prospects and most end-up by doing nothing.

When you go to streetsmartmarketer.com web site there is a sales letter for this newsletter, an archive of past issues and a subscription form for new subscribers. You can’t buy anything, you can’t see pictures of me playing golf or of my kids and you can’t download anything other than past issues.

Although the site is new and I have not had time to drive traffic to the site, our conversion rate for visitors to the site has increased from less than 5% of visitors opting-in to about 60% opting-in. I would call that success. Also we are getting more new subscribers from the new site than the old even though we have not promoted it. I will give you updates as I begin to actively market the site.

Obviously, if you are receiving this, we already have your e-mail address, so when you visit the site please enter the address of a friend who could use some insights on how to grow their business more rapidly. Just put in their first name and their email. If you like you can add your name in the “referred by” space.

Most important, please let them know YOU did so, as they will need to reply to the auot-responder email to ensure that they really wanted to subscribe and this email will also include the latest issue so they can begin to grow their revenues more rapidly and I don’t want to be labeled as a spammer.

Don’t enter your own name unless you want to get the same issue in your mail box more than once.

In future each of my services will have its’ own site, and I will direct prospects to each site as appropriate.