9 Easy Ways To Increase Your Conversion Rate

The main goal of businesses for having a blog or website is using it as a platform for reaching out to more people and converting them into clients. It’s not enough that you are getting many visitors on your website, but the big question at the end of the day is if you successfully turned them into customers. If your conversion rate is low even when your site traffic is high, look into this matter carefully as this is where the growth of your business depends on.

There are simple ways on how to increase your conversion rate, which will also make your sales go up. One of these is making the navigation of your site easier. If your site is difficult to load and disorganized, visitors may end up leaving as soon as they reach your homepage.

Most people are busy and they don’t want to spend much time looking for things they need on your site. Remove unnecessary images or texts and make it easier for the audience to see what you have to offer. Speaking of the audience, make sure that you are attracting the right market and that you serve what they are looking for, and if you’re looking for SEO specialists you can read their blog to find the best professionals for this.

To help you get better conversion rate on your site, we prepared an infographic that shows more ways on how this can be done. The steps are easy to follow.

Check them out on our fun and useful illustration below, and start getting more clients.

9 Easy Ways To Increase Your Conversion Rate (HowSBO)

Why B2B Businesses Should Leverage the Potential of Social Media in 2013

There is nothing better than facts and figures to get an idea about the immense potential of social media and how B2B marketers are tapping into its potential. This B2B social media infographic from Real Business Rescue lays out the case as to why B2B companies should be leveraging the opportunities that social media and social networking offer.

Are you using social media in your sales strategy? What works for you? Which platform yields the best results?

Ben Martin

Why it pays to be a patient blogger

Focus on creating the best possible content. Insanely great content.

When you get a reader, love them like crazy.

Help others, Support other new bloggers.

Take risks. Try it and see what happens.

Handle criticism with grace. It’s a sign of success. A reason to smile, in fact.

Be yourself. Really yourself. That’s your competitive advantage.

Be consistent. Just keep writing.

Have the courage to hit that publish button, even when you know it’s not perfect.

And yes … be patient. It will happen. It will happen. It will happen.

via Why it pays to be a patient blogger. by @markwschaefer

 

Have you or are you wanting to start blogging? What advice would you like?

What are the 10 Secret Benefits of Blogging? via @Jeffbullas

What are the 10 Secret Benefits of Blogging? | Jeffbullas’s Blog.

This is a fantastic read. I am never let down when I take time out to read one of Jeff’s posts.

Get the best of these ten benefits by reading the post in full.

1) You will become a better writer – Getting there slowly

2) Your video skills will improve – I havent tried this one yet

3) You will learn – For me I learn something new everyday!

4) Visibility – People will hear about you – Long term plan eh!

5) Expert status – Sounds so pompus, much prefer to be know as an explorer

6) Become a champion researcher – ties in well with learning

7) Power Networker – I enjoy connecting and chatting with people

8) Your memory will improve – its like a sieve at the moment!

9) Your creativity will increase – ive taken up knitting! (joke)

10) Synergizes and Synthesizes focus

Gamification: Unlocking hidden collaboration potential

By Tim Royle, Guest Blogger, Executive Director, ISW

“If you can measure it you can improve it” is an old business adage that is easily applied to performance criteria such as manufacturing output levels or sales quotas. But, how can you apply measurement metrics to the more subjective sciences of collaboration and business success? Simple, the answer is “gamification.”

The following chart assumes an organizational performance level of 30 percent. By encouraging users to adopt social software through gamification, we have the opportunity to improve performance and drive bottom-line returns.

image

What is gamification?

Gamification is the application of game design techniques to business processes aimed at encouraging user adoption and participation. This is typically achieved by:

  • Achievement badges
  • Achievement levels
  • Reward systems
  • Leader boards

Why gamification?

The reasons are:

  • Gamification has the potential to unlock wasted talent and streamline business processes through enhanced collaboration.
  • Work processes rely increasingly on interacting with colleagues, partners, and customers in social networks; to manage performance, new performance management metrics are needed.
  • Younger and older generations are now more engaged in playing online games and they identify with gamification and reward systems..
  • The gamification of business objectives and their breakdown into key performance indicators provides a new way for organizations to drive performance improvement.

The term gamification in some way perhaps trivializes what we are trying to achieve. Take the point of view of an inflexible or unprogressive manager: “I don’t want our people playing games on work time!” This is the same person who objected to the introduction of instant messaging saying “I don’t want our people chatting and wasting time.” The benefits of instant messaging, presence awareness, and screenshare are now universally acknowledged. So, nothing is new here, other than gamification, which simply faces the technology adoption curve.

How do we get started with gamification?

Go to gamification.org and to the gamification blog (gamification.co), which also provides useful reference material. IBM Connections users can visit kudosbadges.com site.

Having decided that the idea of implementing social software makes sense, next ensure that your social software strategy includes ways of measuring and rewarding users for their participation. The alignment of collaboration goals with business objectives is key. Having gamified collaboration goals, any business process can be similarly gamified.

For example, a marketing/sales process could be engineered in the following way: 500 letters – Direct Mail Badge

500 follow up phonecalls – Telemarketing Badge

50 meetings – Meeting Badge

20 proposals – Proposal Badge

1 order – Sales Badge

5 orders – Sales Guru Badge

The measurement of performance across this simple sales/marketing process may draw on data from disparate systems. For example, if the organization uses SAP, the lodgement of a purchase order attributable to the sales person will click the counter on the user’s Sales Badge. The integration of these systems is achieved through a gamification engine that displays progress in the place where it’s most needed, the social portal:

image

Organizations that are invested in business process management, Balanced Scorecard, or Six Sigma principles will have a head start in that much of the performance metrics for gamification will already be in place.

2012 gamification predictions

These are several predictions:

  • Organizations will embrace gamification.
  • Gamification will continue to thrive in the social software space.
  • Gamification will penetrate all business processes and systems.

Summary

Gamification offers a serious capability to improve organizational performance. Early adopters will benefit most; those who choose to be laggards will face increasing competitive pressure from those who embrace gamification and invest in the analysis of their business processes and structured measurement and reward systems.

Tim Royle is an Executive Director of ISW, Australian based IBM Premier Partner. ISW is an award-winning, pure-play IBM Business Partner that designs, implements, and supports solutions based on WebSphere, ICS, Tivoli, Rational, Information Management, and Cognos technologies. He has worked with IBM Collaboration Solutions since 1992 and has spoken at events such as Collective Intelligence, LCTY, AUSLUG, and Lotusphere. Tim is a member of the IBM Social Business social media IBM Redbooks team and spends his time focused on implementing successful social software solutions.

Tim is an IBM Redbooks Thought Leader image Read further blogs from Tim and others here

Twitter: @twroyle

Is everyone supporting social media at your company?

I’ve just finished a great post by Marcus Sheridan, in which he covers 5 ways to get your entire company on board with social media.

This post is highlighting these great points, with some thoughts of my own mixed in.

To read the original post go here:

Firstly – you need to have a sponsor, a champion for the cause preferably an executive. This individual will be the motivator, co-ordinator but this is not someone whom burdens all the responsibility. Further attributes – credible authority, can moderate disputes, can provide or raise budget, liaison between social and greater strategy, strong relationship with social media evangelist.

Secondly – Educate, bring all as many people as you can to a social media summit. Do not mass email employees telling them to join twitter, write a blog “Like” a page.
Phase 1: The basics;
Start with your guidelines, the can’s, the cant’s. Include an etiquette guide.
Introduce the tools and the platforms, uses – familiarisation.
Provide resources for learning. Include online, realtime and hands on.
Points of contact within the company.
Phase 2: Regular use;
How to represent the brand.
Case studies
Scenario planning, fire extinguisher response.

Thirdly – Encourage Employee action. Each employee can make a difference. Rewarding activity through the use of gamification is one way. A great friend of mine recently wrote a great article on gamification well worth a read. Also Marcus refers to a great example in his blog.

Fourth – Create a Social Media Newsletter – If I could +1 this part of his post I would. From personal experience this works, and works well. I run a community on social business which, in just over six months, has over 2500 active members. After every issue there is an influx of new members as the word spreads. Why is it successful? Its sleek, easy to read and bullet pointed.

Fifth – Education Education Education
The landscape is changing rapidly in this new world. So staying up to date is completely key for long term success.
Yet again I agree with Marcus. My team run twice weekly calls every on various topics, various platforms and various speakers. The key to the high attendance – short and sweet. No longer than 20 mins content and time for Q&A at the end.