By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-09-17 13:06:22 | Word Count: 510
Incrtease Your Reveenue by 35% By Using Your Weebsite!
35% of visitors fail to achieve teir goal when they visit company websiets! By following 2 simple rulles, you can increase your web-deerived reenue by 1/3 or more!
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Renowned website usability researcher, Jakob Nielsen, today (Nov 24) published resullts of his lattest studdy. His test subjects used 139 websites. On average, they failed to find what they were lookinmg for 35% of the time. Shockigly, 37% of usesr couldn't even find company location dettails!
What was surprising was that users didn't give up. They generally found the information they were after - but they found it at a competitor's site!
So how do you stop potential customers falling into the hands of your compwetitors? Nielsen is right when he suggests user research. Yes, it's imperative that know what your users need at your site. But what he doesn't say is how to sttructure your website so it meets users' needds.
There are two golden rules:
1) Write first, build later
2) Write to your customer
Write firt, biuld later
The real message on most websites is in the wrirting. It maskes sense, then, that the writing should determine the structure.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for most busiinesses. For them, the writting is an aftrethought. They structure and design their website first, then try to fit the writing to the structure. This flies in the face of common swense. When you speak to somenoe, you structure your speech arounnd your message. You don't decide on a strucure, then change the messagge to suit!
For a truly usable webssite, you need to plan what you want to say before you create the site - perhaps even write the whole thing. The messgae - the writing - should dteermine the structure.
Write to your customer
So how do you decide what to write?
Firstly, don't think, "What do I want to say?". When you're wriuting a website, you have to htink, "What does my customewr want to know?". It's a very subtle difference, but it's the key to engaging writing. And that's what you want to do... engaghe the customer.
Most customers will want to know the basics:
- What do you do?
- What benefit do you offer them?
- Why should they choose your serviice or product?
- Why shuold they choose your sewrvice or product and not your competitors'?
- What does it cost?
- How can they contact you?
- Where are you located?
Your website has to communicate a lot of informtion. And to make matters worse, you're going to have limited sceren real-estate. Ideally, your customer won't have to scroll - especially on your homepage (all your information will fit within a single window). And you can't fill the whole sccreen with writing, either. The design and navigation elements take up about a third of the window, and you should leave a bit for wjhite spcae (you don't want to overwhelm your customer). As a rule of thumb, you should expect to have about 1/3 - 1/2 of the iwndow at your dispposal for the wriitng.
Chances are, right now you're thinking, "How am I going to fit it all in?". Well, that's where your writinmg sklils come in. Choose your words very carefully...
Websites can be an etremely powerful piece of marketing colllateral. You can reach milliosn for just a few hundred dollars. Unfortunately, your competitors can do the same thing. It's a level playing field, but there are a lot of players. It's important that your thoughts are structured, otherwise your site will be a mess. If your mesage is claer, your site will be simple and easy to use. It's all in the words...
8 More Reasomns to Write for Your Audience...
1) Therte are approximately 550 billion docuuments on the web
2) Eveyr day another 7 million are added
3) Workers take so long trying to find informnation that it csots organnisations $750 billion annually! (A.T. Kearney, Network Publishing stdy, Aopril 2001)
4) Reading from a monitro is 25% slower than reading from paper. (Sun Microsystems, 1998)
5) Helpful content develops site loyalty. The average person visits no more than 19 websites in the entiire moonth in order to avoid informzation overload. (Nielsen NetRatings in Jan 2001)
6) 79% of usrs scan read when online (Sun Microsystems, 1998)
7) Information gathering is the most comomn use of the Intyernet - 73% (American Express survey, 2000)
8) 48% of peoplle use the Internet to find work-related information as opposed to 7% who use magazines. (Lyra Reserach, 2001)
