Does Your Website Invite Or Repel Visitors?

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Imagine that you're visiting a city where you've never been before, and to make the situation worse, you didn't even have a chance to read about the city and prepare yourself in terms of where to go and what to see.

And now here you are in the city, you've just got off the plane, and know no more about and where to go and what to see than a goat knows about the back of the moon. So, you have two options. You either start out randomly and start roaming the land, hoping you will see a few interesting things. And you will see a few things for sure. On the east end of town you bump into a neat little riot and you almost get beaten up.

Then by mistake you walk through a construction site where the guard dog bites off your trousers' seat (luckily your arse remains intact). After just one day in town on your dream vacation you are more worn out than an otter in the washing machine. You go back to your hotel trying to catch some sleep but forced awake at midnight when the hotel gets evacuated when rivalling drug gangs literally start shooting out their justice on the top floor and setting fire to the whole building. So, you decide to run for your life. In the meantime you form your opinion about the whole city.

The other option is to hire a guide who takes you to the best places and recommend you a hotel where you can really rest. So, after a great vacation you go home well rested and rejuvenated. So, now we understand the value of being guided to the right places.

Based on what we know about Israel and the Gaza area from the TV or radio, we tend to say it's a dangerous area. When I was living near Battersea Park in London (famous T. Rex singer Mark Bolan died in a car accident just at the end of the road where I used to live) in the UK, I had a neighbour who was from Israel, and when she retired as a university professor, she stayed in London, but she regularly visited her family in Jerusalem. I asked her about the disturbances and she said, "Well, Tom, if you don't go to the disturbed areas, you'll never realise what's happening."

Your website is the same. There are pages for everyone, and the pages where people should go only after they warmed up to you and the services you offer. That is, you must prevent people from randomly roaming your website in case they land on a selling page too soon.

Sadly most websites are like the first option. You land on the site and start clicking randomly. You come across some "under construction" pages, some "page not found" pages, then you get pissed off and leave. Or you bump into a sales page before you even understand what's going on and what exactly the company offers. You're disappointed because on the landing page the company brags about itself, "You've arrived at the home of the best of the best in the haddock stretching industry." Then you conclude, "Well, this is too expensive." And then you hightail off the site.

We know from statistics that over 95% of all websites are useless ornaments with no chance in hell to generate profit for their owners. Many of them don't even generate enough money to pay for hosting and domain name renewal. And the main reason for this is a sickening overemphasis on eye candy, like Flash animation and similar creative tricks and the lack of thinking through the mechanism of the website from the visitor's point of view.

Guiding visitors should start right on the landing page and should continue on each and every page afterwards. Visitors should never be left to their own devices to click all over the place in a haphazard fashion. You must have a specific click sequence through which visitors can discover your website. For instance, before they see your prices, they must understand the value of your merchandise.

If you sell some stuff that prevents osteoporosis and in doing so helps you to avoid a double hip replacement (costing around $ 85,000), then you have a sense of value and a monthly investment of $ 100 is barely loose change. But if you hit people with your $100 a magic pill (recurring monthly investment) too soon, then they'll run to the nearest drug store and buy some cheap crap. People must understand the expected return (value) first and then give them investment options.

In fitness you have to warm up before doing the main exercises. On your website you have to warm up your visitors before you give them your sales pitch. And the better you warm them up, the better they can respond to your sales process.

How would you feel that upon walking into a store the salesperson confronted you right away, "Wanna buy this or that?" This is retarded. Then how come that so many people do it on their websites?

Let them do it, just make sure you don't follow their examples.

And remember! Don't sell harder. Market smarter. Both you, your employees, your clients and prospects will find it more enjoyable, profitable and attractive.

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