“I’m getting traffic, but why aren’t more of my website visitors buying?”

If you’re asking yourself this question, you may want to consider revamping the sales copy on your website.

Well-written sales copy captures your visitor’s attention, communicates the uniqueness of your product or service, and convinces them why they should buy from YOU instead of your competitors.

Think of your sales copy like your best sales person, working for you around the clock 24/7 to promote and sell your products.

(And keep in mind that “sales copy” doesn’t necessarily mean hyped-up car salesman-type lingo. If you sell a product or service on your website, the content on your website IS your sales copy.)

Here are three quick fixes you can make to your sales copy today that will help you convert more website visitors into paying customers:

Tip #1: Write a compelling headline

The most important copy on your website without a doubt is your headline. It’s the first thing that visitors see on your site - and it needs to grab them by the eyeballs, convince them they’ve arrived at the right place and persuade them to stay on your site and read further.

Don’t waste your valuable home page real estate with a headline like:

“Welcome to my website!”

This tells your visitor absolutely nothing about you or what you have to offer.

Instead, use your headline to communicate the BENEFITS of your product or service – in other words, how what you’re selling will solve their problems and make their lives easier.

Check out this great example from one of our customer’s websites, BlueWonderCloth.com:

Say Goodbye to Harmful Cleaning Chemicals, Fumes and Vabors that
Leave an Invisible Toxic Residue on Your Countertops & Surfaces…

Clean Green & Clean Naturally with Blue Wonder
Microfiber Cleaning Cloths, Towels & Mops that
Magnetically Attract Dust & Dirt

As you can see, this headline is packed full of irresistible benefits that customers can expect to receive if they buy these products.

Tip #2: Add 3-5 powerful testimonials

If you want to establish credibility with your customers and close the sale, it’s important to offer proof that your product or service will do what you say it will.
The best way to offer this proof is to feature testimonials from happy customers on your home page or another prominent spot on your website.

Try to avoid adding general testimonials line such as: “I liked your widget, thanks!”

The most effective testimonials will describe the exact results your customer experienced by using your product or service – in other words, how did it make their lives easier?

Here’s another example from BlueWonderCloth.com:

“The Blue Wonder cloth is amazing! What a great time saver and chemical reducer. I save money by not having to buy chemical cleaning products each month, plus they are better environmentally and for health reasons too. No more breathing smelling chemical fumes. I’ve been using them for 3 years and I just love these cloths.”

It’s always best practice to confirm with your customers that it’s ok to use their testimonial on your website. Also, see if you can get permission to add their name (even if it’s a first name and last initial) and their city and state to the testimonial for added credibility.

Tip #3: Offer a strong guarantee

Do you stand behind your product 100%? Prove it to your website visitors with a strong guarantee and watch your website sales soar.

Examples of effective guarantees are:

• “Try it completely at our risk…”
• “Take a free, risk-free 14 day trial…”
• “Simply return it within 30 days for a full refund, no questions asked.”

Some entrepreneurs are afraid to offer money-back guarantees, fearing they’ll see a flood of refunds in their email inbox. But considering that you’ll most likely get more sales than you would have without the guarantee, the reward far outweighs the risk.

Good copywriting that converts browsers into buyers is vital to any successful business.

When writing sales copy for your website, try to keep it simple and to the point. Add a headline that highlights the benefits of your product or service, include results-packed testimonials and offer a risk-free guarantee to your visitors, and you’ll already be ahead of 90% of your competitors!

Written by Elizabeth Southall, Conversion Specialist at CityMax.com and chili connoisseur.

Natalie Sisson is a Kiwi Entrepreneur and adventurer. As Founder of WomanzWorld.com, she is passionate about getting more women into business and helping aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey. Check out her most recent blog at Forbes!

Many small businesses are dabbling in Social Media to create more visibility for their brand, products and services. Some are even using it to generate leads and sales. If you’re not taking advantage of these amazing free tools to benefit your business yet, start here.

What exactly is Social Media?

It’s a phenomenon experiencing incredible growth and for that very reason alone you need to have a social media presence and strategy.

Here are examples of Social Media sites:

• Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
• Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
• Social Networking. (Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
• Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.
• Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.

Basically any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media. Let’s get started!

Exercise 1: Laying the Foundation

Sure, you’ve hung out on Facebook®. Followed some folks on Twitter®. Made a bunch of connections on LinkedIn®. But now it’s time to make these networks work harder for you. These are the three most powerful social networks to be on both personally and professionally, so at the very least you should have set up a profile on them.

What you need for your profile:

1. Got a photo? Make sure people know you’re not a faceless business. Use this on every profile.
2. Make sure your profile represents your personal brand. If you haven’t already, create your personal paragraph that sums up who you are and why you’re awesome.
3. Include as much as you’re comfortable sharing about yourself. The more you add, the better these tools can help you connect. But remember there are some things colleagues and clients don’t need to know.
4. Include searchable keywords, but don’t get spammy. Think about words that you’re customers would use to search for you and your business and add 5-6 of these.
5. Keep it current. Update your profiles regularly. Set up a system to store your login information to refer to easily, plus bookmark each site on your browser (Firefox or Google Chrome are the best).

Exercise 2: Strengthen your Core

Kick off your new social media regimen by developing new habits and cleaning up your memberships:

• Make sure your Facebook®, LinkedIn® and Twitter® profiles are up to date. If you don’t have one then set one up today.
• Create a Google® public profile. This will give you access to alerts and rich information down the road. And your Google profile makes it easy for the public to search and find you. If you don’t already have one, start by opening a Google account.
• If you haven’t already set up a Google Alert for your name and your business at a minimum so you know where you’re being mentioned and featured on the web.
• Use the same name on each site to make yourself easier to find. For example I use NatalieSisson and WomanzWorld.

Put aside 30 minutes for each exercise this week and you’ll already be feeling great.

Best of luck in your quest for social media fitness!

Having a rough go of it? You might want to take a look around you.

In one of Seth Godin’s recent posts, Expose yourself…, he points out a very basic truth about human nature that we tend to forget: we are strongly influenced by and believe what surrounds us.

Unfortunately, it’s just as easy to absorb the negative as the positive – sometimes it seems even easier.

Consider this within the parameters of your small business. Take a good look at what’s around you and if there’s a continuously negative influence, you might want to consider making some changes. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Do you surround yourself with friends, colleagues, coworkers, or employees who boost you up and believe in your business?
• Are your business goals shared with others that can help you achieve them?
• Do you interact with people whose skills you admire and that you can learn from?
• Do you have clear metrics that you can measure success against and/or improve?

You’ll be surprised what can happen when you’re surrounded with the right energy.

What tactics do you employ for keeping positive? Or, for cultivating positivity within your small business?

Foursquare, if you haven’t yet heard, is the newest social media craze that is driving business revenue. Users “check in” with their phones at locations and businesses around town, and are subsequently earn points, “mayorships” and badges for their loyalty. It becomes a fun and competitive game that encourages people to try new places and revisit old favorites – while increasing repeat customers and branding.

Gabe Zichermann, of tech blog TechCrunch takes a look at how three other businesses (Facebook, FedEx, and Amazon) could incorporate more fun to encourage consumers to buy: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/27/facebook-fedex-amazon-fun/.

As a small business, what could you do to increase enjoyment for each of your customers’ experiences? Is it a free widget with their 10th purchase? Could you be using Foursquare or another “fun app” for your business?

Welcome back our Website of the Month! This month’s spotlight is on Ken Levine from Southern Missouri Mule Outfitter & Equine Supply (Somomule.com).

Ken retired as a federal law enforcement agent in 2007 to focus on his love - outfitting mules. As a trained ferrier (horseshoeing) his hobby quickly became a business after he set up his website using CityMax.com.

Somomule.com is a retail sales outfitter for horses and mules, selling pack equipment, tents and even Amish tack for backcountry pack saddles.

“It was very easy to figure out, and I don’t have any HTML knowledge,” said Ken. “In two and a half years we went from zero to making six figures a year from the business. My wife quit her bank job and we have more time to run our farm now.”

Ken’s site currently receives around 5,000 unique visitors per month. He offers this advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: “You need to be dedicated to your business idea and be organized - be on top of everything. From shipping to selling, this has been a labor of love with thousands of hours going in.”

You can tell the man truly enjoys what he does! Congratulations again to Ken and Somomule.com, our March Website of the Month.

Key to every successful business website is having the right product to sell at the right moment in time. A good source of intelligence about what is hot and what is not is Google Trends.

For those that don’t know, Google Trends provides a tremendous amount of data about people, products, or concepts. Want to know what is going to be the hot seller? Ask Google. As noted in this blog, “search volume data (how much people are searching for a keyword or term at a point in time) is a great measure of how interested people are in a particular topic over any given time period.”

At CityMax.com, we use Google Trends for a couple of different things, including search engine optimization and PPC research. However, in looking at Google Trends the other day, we noticed an interesting correlation that “scientifically” proves what we’ve been maintaining for the past 10 years: Entrepreneurs Make the World a Happier Place.

Well scientifically proven may be a bit of a stretch, but we thought we would share our observations:

Our search started with the concept of “happy” (see below for the trend report since 2004). The concept of “happy” ebbs and flows around the holidays, in large part to “Happy New Year” and “Happy Holidays” no doubt. But what piqued our curiosity was the relative volume of news mentions at the end of 2007 and the start of 2008… mentions that have been increasing relatively constantly since that time.

This chart surprised us a little. After all, aren’t we still in the midst of a recession? Isn’t it all a doom-and-gloom, the sky is falling, run for the hills, depressing kind of world that we live in right now? Why is ‘happy’ trending upwards?

Take a look at the keyword concept “recession” to see both the massive spike in the volume of search surrounding the concept as well as the mentions in news. Yep… the recession is in full swing (though interestingly it is on a downward trend).

Given this increase in “happy” in the midst of a recession, we asked ourselves, “What makes us happy?” Responses came from across the company: customers, success stories, getting a product out the door, selling. In other words, what makes us happy is winning.

So we ran the “win” and “lose” search concepts through Google Trends and here are the results:

Six years ago, “win” was searched for with much greater regularity than “lose”. In fact, “lose” has recently overtaken “win” for the first time in Google Trend history. But the same uptick occurs for news mentions, correlating to the increase in happy. We guess it stands to reason, that news mentions about winners might happen to mention that the winners are happy.

So was this the answer, or was there something deeper? We dug into things further with a few search concepts that are dear to our hearts: the life of the entrepreneur.

CityMax.com of course is passionate about entrepreneurism as evident by our homepreneur contests, our entrepreneur spirit days, and our website builder that speaks to early-stage entrepreneurs.

We started with a simple search for “small business” (see below). And there was our first “ah-ha”, the same uptick at the end of 2007 and start of 2008. What was interesting is that this uptick also corresponds well to the searches around “recession” and recessionary concepts. Captain Obvious might state that if people are worried about the economy and losing jobs, they might very well consider starting a small business of their own.

3

What happens when you search for the concept “entrepreneur” and “self employed” within Google Trends? You see the same spike in mentions in the news and you see a rolling average increase in the total number of searches.

So, in our opinion, this proves what most entrepreneurs and small businesses know intrinsically: when you are an entrepreneur and running your own business, happiness is often a result.

Do you agree? Are entrepreneurs happier than most? Let us know in the comments below.

Written by John Lyotier, VP of Marketing at CityMax.com and avid reader of stats, charts, and graphs.