There are many simple changes you can make to your
own site to increase the bites you get from prospects. Let’s look at
setting objectives, targeting headings and graphics, utilizing each page
area of your site, calls to action, and more. Here are ten quick
website changes that will take you no more than 30 minutes each to
implement.
1. Figure out your site’s objective
What is the business goal of your website?
Surprisingly few freelancers have a clear answer. If you don’t know the
ultimate objective of your site, then the site is a liability rather
than an asset. Any clients you get from it are purely accidental.
So the first thing you need to work out is the
purpose of your site in terms of your business goals. Let me offer a
word of hard-won advice here: the primary objective of your site is
probably not to make sales. That’s because the vast majority of
prospects will not decide to hire you on their first visit. Repeat
visitors are more likely to hire you. So your site’s primary objective
should probably be to get prospects to come back.
2. Figure out each page’s objective
Needless to say, each page on your site must have an
objective that relates back to your central business goal. You need to
map out how your pages contribute to this goal, placing their objectives
into a logical thought sequence for prospects. For example, it doesn’t
make sense to ask someone to hire you straight from your homepage—he
won’t yet know enough about you to make that kind of commitment. It
makes sense to ask him to learn about your services, maybe; or to learn
about the problem that he faces which you can solve.
I suggest two objectives per page, because very
often a prospect will be interested in achieving one or the other of
them, depending on how informed he is. On your services page it’s smart
to have an objective for someone who has seen enough to know he wants to
talk; and another for someone who is still thinking and wants to learn
more about you. By presenting an either/or decision, rather than a
yes/no one, you are more likely to get a positive response and so
capture both prospects.
3. Fix your masthead
If you don’t have a masthead that clearly
articulates where your prospect is as soon as he arrives on your site,
you’re going to lose an awful lot of potential clients. Someone who
can’t figure out where he is won’t stick around.
Nearly all websites do this wrong, and freelancers’
sites are no exception. Take a look at your masthead now. Does it
articulate where someone has come from when landing on your website?
Does it use the language your prospect would use? It’s generally best to
have both a logotype and a tagline, even if your company name is
self-explanatory (like “Mac’s Web Design”), just to set your prospect at
ease.
4. Develop prospect-centered headlines for every page
As an average rule, only about 20% of the people who
read a headline will read the copy. The purpose of the headline is to
increase that number as much as possible. If you don’t have a good
headline on each page, then prospects won’t read your copy.
To ensure they do, you need to convey value. To do
that, you must engage with what your prospect is thinking. When he
arrives on your homepage, for example, he’s thinking about his problem,
and certainly not about you. He doesn’t know you.
Yet, a huge number of freelance sites have giant
headlines saying something like, “Hi, I’m James, and I love web design”.
Nothing could interest your prospects less. Just as in real life,
talking about yourself turns people off. Unlike real life, though, this
faux pas will cost you a lot of money.
5. Speak normally
Assuming your headlines get your prospect into the
page content, you now face another hurdle. If your copy doesn’t speak in
the way your prospect would speak—and if it doesn’t talk about the
things that are most interesting to him—then he won’t read it. In real
life, if you walk up to someone and start talking in a very strange way
like a brochure, or if you start talking about yourself, it turns people
off; they think you’re a little bit special and they try to leave.
Don’t make people leave your website. Check that
your copy is talking about your prospect and his problems. The number of
times the words “you” and “your” appear should vastly outweigh the
number of times the words “I” and “me” do.
6. Ask for an action
Calls to action are critical. If you don’t ask
people to act, they won’t. People actually want to be told what to do on
a website; they want to be given specific actions to take, so they
don’t have to figure out what comes next and how to do it.
If you rely on your navigation to get people around,
then you’re going to find that a lot of them don’t get around; they
just leave. Calls to action that reflect the two objectives on each
page, and move prospects through a logical sequence on your site, will
dramatically increase conversions.
Make sure your calls to action are weighted, so one
of them is visually dominant over the other. This helps prospects decide
which to click. One orange CTA and one gray one will do better than two
orange ones.
7. Make your navigation boring
One of the worst blights for prospects is branded
navigation. For example, your about page has some cute name reflecting
your obscure origins, or your contact page is called “Carrier Pigeon”.
If prospects don’t know what a navigation entry means, they won’t
experiment to find out.
People almost never click links if they aren’t
confident about where they go. When prospects don’t find the word
“Contact” in your nav bar, they don’t click the carrier pigeon. They
find a freelancer who does have a contact link. So make your navigation
as boring and predictable as possible.
8. Make it readable
Sensible typography is crucial to engaging
prospects. If they can’t read your copy, they’ll leave. There are five
things you need to check here, and although you might need the help of
your web designer, most themes will let you do this stuff yourself:
All your body copy should be aligned to a single
left margin. If it’s not, it’s harder to read, harder to follow, harder
to pick out as body copy in the first place—and people will read it
less.
Make sure it’s at least 16 pixels in size. You might
think 16px looks big, but that’s just because you’re accustomed to
smaller fonts, because a lot of web designers think 14 and 13px fonts
look swish. If your audience is over twenty, you’re going to lose
readers below 16px; it’s that simple. 16px is the minimum.
Have a reasonable line-height: the distance between each line of text should be 130% to 150% of the text size.
Check your measure: the width of a line should be no
more than 75 characters. After this the eye has trouble following one
line to the next, and your readership drops off again.
Make sure your copy is set black or dark gray on
white, and not the other way round—where fifty per cent of the people
who would read it, won’t.
9. Check your images
Images have only two purposes: to tease a prospect,
or convey value. An image must present some kind of situation where your
prospect thinks, “Ooh, what’s going on here? I want to read the copy
and find out”; or it must convey value more clearly than the copy itself
could—for example using a chart or a product image, where even if you
used several paragraphs of copy you couldn’t get across the point as
clearly and forcibly.
Any other kind of image is a waste of upload
bandwidth, and a waste of your prospects’ time, because its visual
dominance means prospects are looking at it, rather than reading your
copy. And if they’re not reading your copy, they’re not buying your
freelance services.
10. Create a footer
This final suggestion sounds incredibly simple, but
you’d be surprised at its effectiveness. A footer with your full contact
information—that’s your physical address and your phone number (and
even your fax number if you’re a time traveler from 1980)—will incline
many people to trust you. They scroll down to the bottom of the page to
make sure you’re a legitimate company that really exists in the real
world, and not some kind of scam in cyberspace.
If you have this information in your footer, people
feel much more comfortable with you—especially older people who, like my
own father, are still a little bit concerned about using their credit
card online because as soon as they enter it someone, somewhere is
magically going to steal it. Source: Freelance Switch
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