Getting Enough Business from Your Website?

Running an online business is a lot of work:

• You have to make sure that people can find your site, either in search results, advertisements, directories, or other places online. 
  
• You need people to actually click on the links to your site.
  
• Once people have reached your site, you want them to stay and browse around for while, reading about your products and possibly purchasing them, instead of navigating away after a second or two.

Most people are aware of the importance of these first two tasks: They invest time and/or money in SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure their site is found online, and they hire marketing writers to write ads that people will be more likely to click on. This is all money well spent, as it helps increase traffic to your website.

However, many people don't realize the importance of the third task: keeping visitors on your site. If your website visitors find nothing of interest within the first few seconds of arriving at your website, they will not stick around to read about your product, and your SEO and advertising investments will not translate into sales.

Note: You can use reporting tools to check how long visitors tend to spend on your website. For example, Weblog Expert Lite (http://www.weblogexpert.com/lite.htm) is free, and its Activity Statistics > Daily page reports the average visit length per day. 

Add Interest to Your Website

The Internet is full of advice on conversion optimization, which is the conversion of website visitors into customers. However, if your visitors are not interested enough to stay on your site, and they surf out after a few seconds, how will they learn about your products? How will they read your call to action? And how will you convert them into customers?

Nowadays, the trend is towards writing articles that contain valuable information website vistors want to read. The visitor's interest is a given, as they were specifically looking for this information (which is how they found the article, via a search engine); therefore, you can count on the visitor to read the article.

Writing articles is a great tactic, but everyone is writing useful articles now, to the point where the Internet is flooded with good articles. What will convince a website visitor that they should read your article and not someone else's?

One good way to add interest to your website in general (and your articles in particular), is through audio. Adding voice over to your website increases its appeal and makes it stand out from "silent" sites.

In this day and age, people often want information spoon-fed to them – they do not want to have to work  - i.e. read - to get it. As a writer myself, it pains me to see how people turn away from written text, but the fact is that today's consumer responds far more to the spoken word than the written one.

Note: Another good option is adding video to your website, preferably with voice over and music, to increase its auditory appeal.

Put Yourself in the Website Visitor's Shoes

Imagine you are a potential customer surfing the Internet, and you come across a search result, advertisement, or other link to your website. You decide to click the link and check out the website. The website loads, and you see… a wall of text, perhaps a graphic or two. Will you stay and browse around? If the text or graphics are immediately compelling, you decide to read a bit. If the text continues to grab your attention, you will continue reading, otherwise – you surf on to another site, missing the call to action, product description, etc.

Now imagine the site loads and you hear an automatically triggered voice over with music, welcoming you to the site, telling you what you will find on the site, and/or telling you about the products offered on this site and why you need them. The human voice is compelling and speaks directly to you. It is harder to ignore than text. You are much more likely to stay on the website, listening to the sales pitch.

The same goes for articles. Given two potentially useful articles, which one would you prefer: the text-only article, or the one that includes the option of listening to it?

Note: Some people find audio that plays automatically to be annoying. You may therefore want to consider using user-triggered audio, i.e. the user clicks Play to hear the audio.

Summary

In order to convert website visitors into customers, you need to keep them on your site long enough to learn about your products. A good way to do this is by adding voice over.

In my next blog post, I will discuss various ways you can add voice over to your website.

For information on my voiceover services, contact me at voiceovers@013net.net, or visit my website at http://vicsvoice.com. I look forward to working with you!