I don’t know how many times I say this a day but giving people too many choices will cause them to freeze up and leave your website!

One interesting thing about choices is that we think we want a lot of them, but in reality a lot of choices hinder our decision-making process. If given a choice between a few alternatives or numerous alternatives, we will most likely want as many choices as we can get. But research has shown those choses hurt the conversion rate on products. This is a classic case where what we think we want is not what we really want. We really don’t make better decisions with more choices, but we think we do. Too many choices confuse us and we end up making no choice at all.

In 2000 there was an experiment were they set up booths at a busy upscale grocery store in California and imposed as store employees. They alternated the product selection on a table so it showed six choices of fruit jams half the time and 24 jars of jam the other half.

When there were 24 jars of jam on the table 60% of shoppers passing the table stopped and tasted the jam. When there were six jars of jam on the table, only 40% stopped to taste it. So does that mean that more choices is a good thing?

The experiment isn’t over.

You would think that people would taste more varieties of jam when the table had 24 flavors. But they didn’t. People tasted one or two varieties whether there were six or 24 choices available.

And how did the selection influence purchases?

Of the shoppers who stopped at the table with six jars 30% actually purchased the brand of jam they had tried. Of those who stopped at the table with 24 jars only 3% purchased jam.

So what do we learn from this? A bigger selection attracts a bigger crowd but the smaller crowd with less choices purchases more products and that relates to more money.

A real estate friend of mine a couple years ago told me people come in all the time with a big list of what they’re looking for in a house but they always seem to settle for things that are not on the list. Other words it’s rare that someone actually buys the house that has everything on the list before falling in love with the house that has nothing to do with their list.

We want to believe that our choices are based on logical weighing of one choice versus another, but there is a lot of research that shows our choices are not logical. In fact, we are not consciously aware of why we are choosing one item over another. And after we make a choice we can’t even accurately explain why we made the choice we did. We will try to make up a reason, but it probably isn’t accurate.

In 2002 a guy by the name of Wilson showed people four types of pantyhose and asked them to select the type they would buy.  People had definite preferences most of them chose the pair that was furthest to the right on the table. What they didn’t know was that all the pantyhose were exactly alike.

When asked why they chose the one on the far right, they provided a variety of reasons including its softer or a stronger.

We don’t know what we want and the only way to find out is by testing what our website visitors do while they are on our sites.

If something is inaccessible, out of stock, unavailable, banned or forbidden then we want it more.

Showing a limited quantity or a limited time frame that something is available, invokes scarcity.

Scarcity motivates us to act.

Not only can products be scares but access to information could be hard to get as well.

Therefore it makes the information seem more valuable.

Starting an Online Business

Do you run online business?

I am not talking about making a couple sales a month with your website, I am talking about doing over a million dollars a year with your business.

If not, then do something about it.

Most people focus all their attention on the wrong things.

They want the web design and content to be perfect. That is my biggest complaint with clients. You’re not writing a novel, the idea is to capture people’s attention, don’t make this harder than it is.

Did you know that 60% of the people will not read past your headlines?

This means we need to get their attention the second they land on the site.

Step 1: Run some ads on Facebook to test images and headline variations. I recommend testing about 5 images at a time and maybe 2 headline variations.  It’s important that we have images that people are responding to; otherwise we will never get cheap enough clicks to profit.

Make sure the ads make sense. If we have an over 50 dating site we do not want to run ads with collage girls on them.
Step 2: The headline. Our headlines need to appeal to the user on a personal and emotional level. People will not respond to a clever or witty headline, however they will respond do a headline that connects with them on an emotional level. We want to touch on a need they have.  Don’t make the headline too long; people have extremely low attention spans.

Step 3: We want our content to flow naturally from the headline. We do not want to interrupt the user’s train of thought. And at the end of the content we want a simple call to action. We do not want to go crazy with exclamation points or caps, as this has been shown to reduce readership and diminishes your credibility.

When we start advertising on Facebook we need to understand that at first we are going to lose money. Facebook’s algorithms needs time to see how users respond to our ad. If people like our ads then the ad cost will go down, and we will get better ad placement.
The idea is to take advantage of Facebook’s targeting and create our own niche. Building lots of niche related ads we can get better targeted headlines to the user’s demographic and our clicks will be cheaper. I want to spend some time building individual, highly targeted campaigns.
We want to spend the time split testing our ad copy to get the highest conversion rates possible.

To make it all work we have to stay focused, there isn’t any secret technique.

Everything I’m about to show you is based on the methods I use daily to make money. These methods can be applied to any online market.

Internet marketing is about targeting hungry buyers in places where the traffic is easy to find and will yield a return on our time and investment. Nothing I am about to show you is complex however, 90% of people marketing online fail to understand these concepts and therefore struggle to make money online.

The methods I am about to show you will work and I am not going to hold anything back however, you will need to take action to make it work.

Everything I am going to show you is based on real world experience. It’s been proven to make money for me over the years.

I am going to use an affiliate marketing site because it allows me to focus on the most important part of a successful online business, which is conversion and marketing.

I will use the website http://www.siliconewristband.org as an example site.

By targeting affiliate marketing, I do not have to worry about;

1. Having a product of the of my own
2. Customer support
3. Merchant accounts
4. Accepting payments online

Our goal is to convert as many visitors into buyers.

We will be doing this by focusing our attention on a very small percent of Google searches.

We need to understand how search engines work but even more importantly we need understand how the searchers search.

I would guess that about 80% of the searches that take place on the major search engines are for research. These are people who have no intention of purchasing anything online, they are looking for information. Therefore they will not be of any use to us and we will not target them in our search engine marketing.

I would also guess that about 30% are looking for information for a future purchase. These people who may or may not make a purchase in the future, we will not target them ether.

The smallest groups of searchers are the ones looking to purchase something right now. They understand what they are looking for, have the money and are ready to make a purchase.

These people will search by product names, model numbers, and will use terms like free shipping, discount, and bonus and so on and so on.

These are the people we want to target.

There is more to a professional website design than just some pretty images; yes it goes way beyond just the look. It’s a combination of several things put together in hopes of creating the right mood that will cause a website visitor to become a website customer.

And I personally believe that it’s the job of the web designer to create that mood and make sure it flows throughout the site. Other words, if the client wants to add text or something else to the site, that will interrupt the flow of the site, the web designer should offer an alternative or explain to the client that it will break the flow of the site and could cause the sites conversion to not be as good as it could be.

A website design is a lot like creating a package for a product. A good package should grab your attention, tell about the product and get you to purchase that product.

When someone is creating the packaging for a product I am pretty sure they don’t just make it look pretty and allow the client to through some text on it and call it done.

While I’ve never created packaging for a product I’d think there is a lot of hand holding and communication back and forth between the client and the company creating the packaging. I’d even go so far as to say that the package creator’s reputation stands on the success of that package.

So why should a web design be any different?