relationship of visitors to sales

[Steve McCollough]

I have been reviewing the libraries of various forums over the last week and am very impressed with the quality of information. My haphazard attempts at the SEO thing over the years has led to a little of this and a little of that. In recent years I took up recip link sites and was able to push a few clients into the pr5 range.

I am struck however by a continueing problem with making use of the traffic once it is coming to my sites. As indicated by Brett in 26 steps to 15k a day, "What you do with that traffic is up to you."

My impression is that internet marketing usually involves producing sales from visitors and I am not seeing this sort of discussion. Essentially what I am asking is given that I can get reasonably qualified site visitors to come around, how do I then convert this into sales. What are the pitfalls, the proven strategies, etc..

For the sake of discussion I will use a current situation as an example. Given a REGION of interest and an ITEM for sale where the ITEM is of interest in the REGION. My idea would be to make the REGION my primary keyword with all the associated secondary keywords be derived from things going on in the REGION. This should yield traffic of people in this REGION or interested in it. Now that we've gotten that far how do I interest my visitors in the ITEM?

[digitalghost]

Hello Steve, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

>>Now that we've gotten that far how do I interest my visitors in the ITEM

Remember that the reader is interested in himself/herself first. In order to build interest in the item you need to get the reader to understand how the item can benefit them.

Start with a list of the item's features and benefits. Determine a unique selling point. Then speak to the reader in an active and sincere voice and tell them how the item will save them time, money or stress.

Write your copy with AIDA in mind. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

There's some more info on increasing your conversion rate and some advice on writing effective copy here [webmasterworld.com].

Your words have to get their attention and hold their interest. Your site layout won't do it, your keywords won't do it, your navigation structure won't do it and your creative use of color schemes won't do it. All of those may help but it's your copy that is going to do the work of selling your product or service.