Fairhead Creative Insights

We’ve come up with 5 essential ingredients of successful websites. Do you use them all?

When helping websites grow in sales and influence is the focus of your whole company, you get to thinking…

…“what essential ingredients determine whether a website’s going to be successful or not?”

Beyond bringing traffic to a site.

Beyond converting traffic into leads.

Beyond nurturing leads into customers.

We’ve come up with 5 essential ingredients of successful websites.

My question to you: Do you use them all?

If Content Marketing is hot right now, Content Upgrades are even hotter. Iceberg Upgrades are a cool alternative.

Ahoy!

We’ve talked before about how having the right Content Marketing strategy is crucial.

If you’re familiar with “content strategy”, you’ll have heard of this technique’s baby brother:

“Content upgrades”.

If Content Marketing is hot right now, Content Upgrades are even hotter. They focus on promoting extra value for your readers.

Except, most of the time, they do the opposite.

But here’s a bold suggestion. What if we left ‘hot’ behind, and went for a way cooler (literally) idea?

Enter: Iceberg Upgrades.

Hands up if you’ve ever traded your email address for a free ebook, whitepaper or super-top-secret-tip. How often does it live up to the hype?

Hands up if you’ve ever traded your email address for a free ebook, whitepaper or super-top-secret-tip.

Most of you, I suspect.

Now, leave your hand up if the thing you received gave you what you wanted without trying to sell you a $47 ‘upgrade’ to actually get to what you thought you were getting in the first place.

A lot of ‘helpful’ content online feels a bit slimy. Titles that are too good to be true, with content that gets your attention but never delivers until you register for some expensive ’thing’. Which also happens to hold back on the real content until you buy yet another ‘thing’.

Here are three things you must do to make sure your content doesn’t fall into this category.

Your product or service is great. So why are people visiting your website but not buying?

If you own a website, you’ll have experienced this feeling. You made–or have access to–a product or service you really believe in. Enough to dedicate a part of your life to working on.

The value is clear. To you. So why are people visiting your website, but not buying?

If they visited, surely they saw your offer…surely they saw how beneficial it could be for their life, or their business, or their cause.

They were right there on the site – what happened?

There are two things that need addressing for your target audience to start buying. And only one of them is your website. This is assuming you’ve got a solid offer, and you’re addressing the right audience.

Let’s go through each section. First, your website.

Business owners: be honest with yourself as you read through these. Are you doing all of these 7 examples?

Which of these 7 are you falling short on?

As a business owner of any kind, you probably know how important it is to keep thinking about your customers. You do want to keep those customers, after all, right?

There are some tell-tale ways of spotting whether businesses are really thinking about their customers or not. There’s a lot of obvious ways to tell, but we won’t be covering any of those here. We’re going deeper.

So, business owner: be honest with yourself as you read through these. Are you doing all of these 7 examples?

What is user testing and how businesses can quickly implement it to increase sales and conversions.

Luckily for you, your competition isn’t likely to be using User Testing. And they’re missing out.

It’s one of those things that often gets written off as a “thing to try later”. That could be due to perceived costs, and a misunderstood ROI.

You’re a business owner though. Not a UX specialist. So I’m going to avoid getting into the psychology of such things, or make this a How To post. I’m going to focus on showing you how User Testing can benefit your business. I’ll make it a part of your process, and make sure it’s successful.