Is there anything better than a beautifully designed website?

Actually yes, there is.

A beautifully designed website that converts.

Chances are, you might be using a website or landing page that just plain sucks at converting visitors into completed goal actions, or in simpler terms – conversions. As the old saying goes, “you can have all the traffic in the world, but if your website can’t convert that traffic, then you have a crap website.”

I’m not actually sure who coined that saying, and I might have just made that up. But, it’s true nonetheless.

If you’ve been wrestling with your website, trying to improve it’s conversions and you’ve found yourself hitting a brick wall then I want to help you fix it.

Today, I’m going to reveal my all-time top 5 design ‘hacks’ that are guaranteed to boost sales and conversions, and make your business look amazing in the process. And best of all, you’re going to love them.

But first, who am I and why listen to me?

I’m not here to talk about me, so I’ll keep it short. I’ve been designing high converting websites and landing pages and everything in between since 2005. I own and operate Boost Design, a successful design studio that focuses only on high-converting design. You can see my AwesomeWeb portfolio by clicking here.

Over the years I’ve learned and experimented with tonnes of design tricks and ‘hacks’ that can seriously bolster up conversions and help improve a business’ bottom line.

Before we dive into the meat of this post, let me ask you a few quick questions.

What would a 20% increase in email list subscribers mean to your business? What about an extra 1% on top of your salespage conversions, or a 150% increase in lead inquiries?

I’m not sure about you, but I know these figures can be business changing.

And, of course, I’m not guaranteeing you’ll see the same results, but if you follow along and implement these design features into your website and business then you’ll be well on your way.

Before we move forward, I just want to say that you don’t need to be a design pro to implement these features into your websites and landing pages. The design customisation level in many WordPress themes and page builders is at an all-time high and you should be able to do a great job with those alone.

However, I am biased and I do totally recommend hiring a pro designer to do this once your business has reached a certain level.

Now with that said, let’s dive into my five top design hacks and features:

1. High-Converting Typography

Typography and the fonts you choose to use on your website can have a huge impact on readability, which directly ties in to your conversion rates.

We’re at a time now when choosing fonts has never been easier and the volume of good, clean fonts – both free and premium – at our disposal has never been higher.

Free fonts sites like Google Fonts and Font Squirrel and premium font marketplaces like TypeKit and MyFonts means you’ll never be stuck finding the perfect font for your brand and website.

But when it comes down to it. Selecting typography for your website can be a fine art in itself.

You need to consider font families, sizes, weights and whether or not to use a serif or a sans-serif font.

It can all be a bit daunting, but luckily I have a few pointers for you.

Typography Do’s and Don’ts

• Don’t use anymore than 3 font families on your website. Choose one for your headlines and subheadlines and one for your body text and paragraphs. You might also wish to use another font family sparingly, such as a script font for use in promos and secondary graphics.
• I recommend using a clean sans-serif font as they’re optimal for screens and hand held devices like phones and tablets. Serif fonts, the fonts with ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ extruding from their characters are better suited for long-form reading, that’s why you’ll only ever see serif fonts being used in print books and e-readers.
• For screens, a good font size for body and paragraph text is between 15 – 18px. At this size it’s not too small to be uncomfortable and not too big to have your users scroll or swipe unneccesarily.
• Visit your favourite blogs and websites and take note of the font families they use. A good tool to find out what font a website is using is a plugin called Fount.

Body and paragraph fonts I recommend

Proxima Nova

A common reasonably priced premium font, but absolutely perfect for body text. If you want something slightly different and less common, I’d suggest the Proxima Nova Soft alternative.

Calibre

An exquisite font and one that will set you back $50 per font style (eg. Regular, Bold). Calibre embodies professionalism, modernism and if you’re business is brand-savvy, it’s a great option to consider for both body and headline typography.

Roboto

The ‘official’ Google font and one that’s similar to well known Helvetica, Roboto is a good standard font, although there’s nothing particularly special that I like about it, it just does it’s job.

Droid Serif

Sometimes you can get away with using a serif font on screen, and very rarely can you do that. But the free Google font Droid Serif does just this. If you must use a serif font on screen, this is the one.

Circular

If you have a spare $1,000 lying around to spend on one font family, then you can’t go past Circular by Lineto. Outrageously expensive, but all the more beautiful, Circular is gaining traction as a popular font with it’s use in the Air BnB logo.

Body and paragraph fonts I recommend

Oswald

Another free font and one that’s as common as a rainy day in London, Oswald is thin, stylish and allows you to squeeze a lot of characters on one line making it great for long sales page headlines.

Gibson Bold

A premium font that you can buy or sync from TypeKit, Gibson Bold is fantastic for big, bold, in-your-face headlines. However I wouldn’t recommend the other weights in this family, they just don’t look that great.

Sofia Pro

Another premium font, this is one of my favs. It’s clean, modern and perfectly balanced for headlines. I’d go with the Black weight for headlines.

Montserrat

Another free, and as such, over-used font, Montserrat is another one of those Google fonts that does it’s job, however I’m put off by how common it’s used.

You now have an education on typography and some options to consider when it comes down to font selection. Implement the advice and the fonts discussed here and I’m sure you’ll see some nice lifts in conversion and readability which will reduce your bounce rates too.

2. Killer Color Combinations

Ahhh colour. Who doesn’t appreciate colour, apart from goths?

When it comes to choosing what colours to use in your websites and landing pages, there really are no hard and fast rules. Choosing your colour palette is completely up to you, your brand and your target audience.

But there are a few do’s and don’ts to keep in mind.

Color Do’s and Don’ts

• Never use more than 5 brand colours, unless your branding is rainbow-centric, which it probably isn’t. A good number of colours to use is four, with a shade and highlight for each colour. Your brand colours should be made up of a primary colour, a secondary colour, background colour and an accent colour.
• Consider your target audience. If they’re predominantly male, you should probably steer clear of pinks and purples. Health industries work better with calming colours and smart use of whitespace, whereas fitness is can be quite open ended depending on demographics. I could talk about colour psychology until I’m blue in my face, but the rule of thumb is this, common sense prevails. You wouldn’t use a pink colour palette on your male body building website would you?
• Always take note of the colour codes you use. At a bare minimum, you should have your HEX code recorded, and if you plan on using your colours off-screen you should note your Pantone and CYMK codes too. Failure to do so leads to an inconsistent brand over time. A big no, no.

Creating a Killer Color Combination

If you don’t have a creative bone in your body and couldn’t coordinate a colour palette to save your life then don’t stress. There are tools and apps out there to help you.

Here are a few of my favourite places to find inspiration when I’m designing a new brand for a client:

Adobe Color

Previously known as Kulur, you can explore a library of cool user submitted colour combinations. Be warned, this can be a massive time suck because it’s just so much fun to browse.

Color Hunt

Similar to Adobe Color, but easier to use, color hunt features beautiful colour combinations each day and allows you to even submit your own.

Coolors

A super cool app for any budding colour enthusiast. Just hit the space bar to load up a new palette until you’ve found “the one”.

Colors by HailPixel

This simple app is like an oversized colour picker that let’s you move your cursor across the screen to change the colour. Simple, beautiful and great for inspiration.

3. High-Converting Photography

We’ve come a long way since the days of cheesy, over-used, cringe-worthy stock photography.

You know the ones I’m talking about, a corporate team sitting around a boardroom table with big, perfect, teethy grins and picture-perfect formal business attire.

Thank the stars we’ve moved on.

Nonetheless, the right photography can be a powerful weapon for increasing conversions in just about any medium. Your Facebook ads, websites and landing pages can all benefit from a strategically placed photograph.

When choosing your photography you need to consider where you’re using it. If it’s for your main website ask yourself, does it support your brand or does it cause disparity?

If you’re choosing photos for Facebook ads or landing pages, try and use one where the subject faces towards your headlines or prominent copy. This has the ingrained pyschological effect of forcing your users’ eyes to where the subject is facing or looking and has been proven to increase conversions and engagement.

Just take a look at this Sunsilk ad for example:

But how do you go about getting your stock photography? What website should you use? There are so many options out there and so many pros and cons of each that it can be a tad bit daunting in itself.

Let me try and unpack it all for you by recommending my favourite stock photo sites and the pros and cons of each.

Deposit Photos

This is my goto stock photo site. Their range is massive and their quality is pretty good. It’ll take you a little longer to find the right image compared to the more expensive sites, but in my opinion it’s worth it.

iStockPhoto

The grand daddy of stock photo sites. Their range is huge and their quality is impeccable. But expect to pay a premium for just one photo. A great option for agencies or those working with high-end clients and projects.

Stocksy

If I had to choose my favourite stock photo site based on quality alone, Stocksy would easily be my first choice. Their range is super modern and relatable. However their prices are still on the high end of the scale.

Unsplash

Perhaps you don’t have any cash to dish out on stock photos? No problem. Checkout unsplash for a beautiful range of free to use photography. The only problem I see with unsplash is their photos can be a bit impractical at times as they predominently feature landscapes and urban scenes, but I do believe this is starting to change.

Pic Jumbo

What? Another free stock photo site? Yes, yes indeed. Pic Jumbo has a great selection of practical free to use photography but their volume isn’t quite as big as unsplash’s.

When it comes to stock photography, again ask yourself, does it compliment my brand and is it strategically positioned to compliment any content or important copy features within the medium?

4. Your High Converting Home Page Layout

Chances are pretty high that you have a ‘hub’ website that acts as a central holding silo for all of your content and links to landing pages and squeeze pages. Chances are also pretty high that your website layout isn’t optimised to meet your business goals in the form of completed conversions.

Below is a wireframe of a conversion-focused home page layout. [A wireframe is an image or set of images which displays the functional elements of a website or page]

5. Website Navigation

A simple header with your logo and no more than 6 menu options and optional social icons works best. Don’t get tempted to use trends like the ‘hamburger’ menu on desktop sites – This will hurt your conversions and user experience.

Every website is different, but I’d recommend the following pages to include in your navigation.

Start here page:

If your website and blog is content heavy, you can use this page to introduce new visitors to your website and direct them to the most popular and relevant categories using a stylised, user friendly sitemap.

Alternatively, you can use this page as a squeeze page that provides a lead magnet related to their problem and your solution.

Products / Services Page:

Next item along in the navigation would be the perfect place to showcase your products or services page and link out to any external (or internal) landing pages you may have for each product or service. If you have multiple products and services, a drop-down menu would be ideal for this.

Case Studies / Testimonials / Portfolio Page:

Your customers and clients want to know your solution works right? Depending on your business, place a case studies, testimonials, results or portfolio page in your navigation menu to build trust with new visitors and show them that you actually deliver value.

About Page:

Yep, the infamous about page. This is your chance to talk about yourself, your company, your products, services and any awards and accolades you’ve achieved and is a must for your navigation menu as it builds trust and reduces friction.

Blog Page:

Almost any business can benefit from content marketing and doing so will result in long-term website traffic, and if done correctly, lead generation in the form of content upgrades, opt-in widgets and so forth. If you blog (which you should!), it’s a definite must for your navigation.

Contact Page:

An absolute no brainer, your contact us page should always be in your navigation. If it’s missing, expect trust and conversions to go missing too. Give your visitors multiple ways of contacting you. Think email, phone, Skype, business address, social media, homing pigeons… You get the idea.

The Hero Area

Not to be confused with a full-sized homepage screen, your hero area should take up a large chunk of the fold and it should strategically make it entirely clear about what it is your business does, whilst acting as a vehicle to collect new leads via a lead magnet.

As you can see, the headline is short and sums up exactly what the business does. There’s a space for a professional image if this is for a personal brand website, or it can be replaced with any other image or even an intro video.

The next feature you will notice is the area for the lead magnet. The idea is to display an ecover of your lead magnet with a short headline, some supporting text and finally a button that when clicked will open a popup with your opt-in form. There are many tools out there that can do this such as Popup Domination.

The ‘Authority’ Bar

A common design feature you’ll notice on many websites owned and run by authority marketers is the ‘Authority Bar’. The purpose of this bar is to obviously build trust, authority and credibility. It’s there to say “Hey, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to [TOPIC] and I have the trust of these major publications and networks to back me.”

If you’ve been featured or guest blogged for any respectable website, blog, magazine, newspaper, or publication then this area is your chance to demonstrate your expertise.

The ‘Most Wanted Actions’ Box

So by now you’ve made it clear about exactly what you do and the problem you solve, you’ve provided an opportunity for visitors to join your tribe and you’ve showcased your expertise with the authority bar.

Next step is to direct visitors to your Most Wanted Actions (MWA), in order of the easiest action to take, such as a lead magnet download, to the higher-level actions such as joining your high ticket coaching programs.

Each inner MWA box or icon should link out to it’s corresponding landing page or squeeze page that then takes over and encourages your visitor to take that particular action or conversion.

The ‘More Info’ Box

Some website visitors need nurturing before they trust you with access to their inbox or their hard earned money. The ‘More Info’ box is designed to provide further background about your business and the problem you solve for your avatars.

A good combination for this area would be to provide a video, sub headline and a paragraph or two of supporting copy to speak to your visitors and provide a more thorough insight into your business, products and services.

Blog Posts

Again, if you’re using content marketing as a channel to reach your audience, it’s a no brainer to include your most recent blog posts somewhere on your home page. There are many ways to aesthetically present your blog posts and multiple layouts to choose.

My favourite however has to be the card-style grid layout. It provides a space for a feature graphic, a title and it allows visitors to quickly scan your blog posts to see which piece of content is most relevant to their immediate needs.

Testimonials and Short Case Studies

To back up your authority, influence and value you should consider adding an area to your homepage that includes 4 – 6 testimonials from some of your existing customers or clients. This will only contribute towards building more trust and demonstrate that the work and products you provide actually deliver results.

Bottom Lead Magnet Box

According to many heatmap studies, not many visitors will scroll down this far on your homepage. With the boxes and modules already listed above this area your visitors should be well on their way to exploring your products, services and content.

However, you still shouldn’t neglect this last effort to encourage visitors to join your tribe.

This bottom lead magnet area will help you do just that. Use this space to showcase your lead magnet, provide a headline and two or three paragraphs of supporting copy alongside a lead magnet cover graphic and call to action button that opens a popup opt-in form.

The Website Footer

Ahh, what can I say? We all know what a footer is so it goes without saying that it should be the final box or area on your website.

As standard practice goes, adding your logo and relevant site links alongside SEO links, contact information and social media boxes and icons is the way to go when crafting your footer.

So that’s a typical high-converting home-page layout in a nutshell and it’s suitable for almost any kind of business model. If you take the time and investment in setting your website up this way, I can almost guarantee you’ll be seeing a huge increase in your bottomline within a few months time.

Keeping Design Consistent with a Style Guide

So far we’ve discussed typography, colour, photography and your high-converting home page layout. Once you’ve nailed down all of these creative elements you then need to put the effort in to keeping it all seamless and consistent.

That’s where your brand style guide comes into play.

A style guide is a document that explicitly states how your brand should be represented visually in terms of logomarks, typography and brand colour palettes.

If you’ve never used or adhered to a style guide before I’m sure you’re well aware of the degenerating process your website and other creative material take. The first month everything looks great, but 12 months in and your brand has taken on a Frankenstein appearance and nothing is consistent or matches up. It’s in shambles.

The way to avoid this is to create a simple brand style guide that lays out strict rules and criteria for your logo, colours and typography.

Below is an example of a simple style guide template.

In your style guide you should include all of the different logo variations you use, including inverted logos and black and white logos, along with up to 5 brand colours (and their shades) and the fonts you’ve chosen to use in your branding.

Once you have your style guide built out, don’t let it sit on your hard drive to collect cyber dust. Instead, whenever you hire a new employee or contractor who are tasked with any creative work, make sure your style guide is the first thing they see.

When you, your employees and contractors work with your style guide your brand is guaranteed to stay consistent, seamless and beautiful for many years to come.

I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and that you’ll implement one, two or all of these design features into your own business and websites. If you do, I can guarantee you’ll only see positive results.

And remember, when your business reaches a certain level you should definitely consider hiring a pro designer to help you with all of this. I’m currently available for design work myself so please feel free to checkout my AwesomeWeb profile and reach out with any questions you have.

Read more: ‘10 Design Elements All Big Blogs Have In Common’

The post 5 Design Features Guaranteed to Boost Sales and Conversions appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

To shed light on all those issues that slow down your website, we invited Stavros Papadakis to lay out his process for speeding up slow websites.

What Makes Your Website Slow?

You should definitely check my previous post with 16 ways to speed up your WordPress website.

Although this post provided a quick checklist with the best tweaks to optimize the loading time of your WordPress website, there are still many issues that can slow down your website.

If you have enabled compression on your htaccess file, combined CSS files, moved Javascript files to the footer but you are still not happy with the loading time of your site, then check these 18 common issues that slow down your website.

1. Super-heavy websites

There is no doubt that a 3MB page making 180 HTTP requests is going to be slower than a 1MB site with 60 HTTP requests.

Do you want to optimize the loading time of your site?

One of the best ways to do that is by minimizing the size of each page of your site.

Although you can optimize your images, combine CSS files, minify Javascript files and apply many front-end optimization tweaks, having a 3MB site is going to make your site slow and the users of your site unhappy.

21MBs are a huge load for your server and your browser.

While you are designing or redesigning your site, you should do your best to load only what you need and nothing more.

In others words, you should always ask yourself:

Do I really need 8 big images at my slideshow at homepage?

Do I have to display 20 portfolio items at homepage?

Should I show 12 testimonials of happy users at homepage or 3 testimonials will do the trick as well?

Loading all these data makes your site look nice but your site will be slower as well due to all these data.

Do you want to have a slow loading site? If not, then minimize the data loaded per page of your website.

2. Non-optimized images

Do you know that 80% of the time that it takes to load a website is controlled by the front-end structure?

This is an amazing fact of web performance optimization.

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Focus on that.

You can try to optimize your database or PHP code but if you ignore this fact of paramount importance, then your website will be slow.

A 460KB PNG file can become 90KB by optimizing it.

If you have 10 non-optimized images at your site, then you may add 2-3 MBs of extra page load.

If you do not optimize your images, then the loading time of your site can be severely affected.

The good news is that most of the JPG and PNG images can become 40% or even up to 80% smaller without losing image quality by optimizing them using Photoshop, ImageOptim or a third-party tool such as Kraken.

3. Excessive usage of ads

Google Adsense and other similar services can be an extra source of income for you but they can also slow down your site.

A website that loads ads in header, to the right sidebar, in the body of the post and at the bottom of the page using 2 or 3 different ad services, is going to be much slower than a website with only 1 ad in the right sidebar or in the body of the post.

Not only are the ads annoying for most of the users but they will slow down your site as well.

Please check the following screenshot from a client’s website.

Do you really need all these annoying ads?

Believe it or not, there are 4 different ads in it, one ad at the top of the screenshot, the video which is an ad, an ad to the right sidebar and another ad at the bottom of the page! Needless to say, those ads are annoying for most of the users and slow down the loading time of your site as well.

To sum it up, ads should always be used with caution. As long as an ad does not generate money, it should be removed.

4. Wrong dimensions for your images

You should not scale images in HTML, you should resize a large image and use the resized image instead.

For instance, let’s assume that you have an image that it is 1200px x 600px and you want to use a “smaller” version of it e.g. 400px x 200px.

In that case, do not use the original image and scale it down by changing width and height dimensions in HTML.

You must create a new thumbnail image by resizing the original image from 1200px x 600px to 400px x 200px and use the new image which is smaller and will load faster.

I have come across many sites that used to load a 256 x 256 facebook image of 150KB instead of a 32 x 32 facebook icon of 2KB!

5. Pointless redirects

I have one quick quiz for you.

Which one of the following images loads faster, A, B, C or D?

A. http://www.domain.com/image.jpg
B. http://domain.com/image.jpg
C. https://www.domain.com/image.jpg
D. https://domain.com/image.jpg

Did you choose A? Wrong.
Did you choose B? Wrong.
Did you choose C? Wrong.
Did you choose D? Wrong again!

The right answer is that it depends on your site!

If your site is https://www.domain.com, then by calling the non-HTTPS version of the image (http://www.domain.com/image.jpg), there will be an extra redirect from http://www.domain.com/image.jpg to https://www.domain.com/image.jpg by the browser in order to load the image.

If you are using the non-www version for your site (http://domain.com/), then you should always use the non-www version for your images as well (e.g. http://domain.com/image.jpg instead of http://www.domain.com/image.jpg).

Browsers do not like this kind of pointless redirects.

Pointless redirects will slow down your site

By using relative URLs for your files (e.g. <img src=”/image.jpg” />), you can easily get rid of this common issue that slows down the loading time of your site.

6. Wrong server location

If the traffic of your site is mainly from USA or UK, then your site should be hosted by a hosting company located in USA or UK respectively.

The closer the server is to the visitors of your site, the faster your website will be.

Needless to say, if you get traffic from all over the world, then I highly recommend you to use a Content Delivery Network or CloudFlare so that images, CSS and Javascript files are loaded from a server closer to each user’s location.

7. Dodgy shared hosting plans

No one wants to pay $$$ for hosting a site but serving a WooCommerce site with 40 active plugins or a Magento site with 5000 products via a shared hosting plan that costs $5 per month is a recipe for disaster.

You should always invest in a good hosting company to get the best loading time for your site.

If your site is unavailable or slow, then you may save a few dollars per month by using a shared hosting plan but you will lose much more by losing your clients (a user that visits a slow loading site will not revisit this site).

If you have a heavy WordPress site using Woocommerce or many active plugins, then I highly recommend WP Engine and FlyWheel (affiliate links).

You should not expect to get 200.000 unique visits per month to upgrade to a VPS, this will never happen while you are hosting your site on the same overloaded server with hundreds of sites on it.

8. Excessive usage of social media scripts

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc) scripts add a DNS lookup, a set of Javascript files and a few images as well whenever they are added in a page.

Although many of those sharing options should be available at the end of your posts so that your users can easily share your posts, it does not make sense to load all those sharing options at every single page.

What’s the point of loading those social media icons in every single page e.g. at the contact page or at your category pages?

Showing 5 different social media counts for each post on homepage or category pages adds a lot of load to your site. How important is it to show counts on these pages? Do you need to show Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and LinkedIn as well?

Too many social media scripts can kill the performance of your site

Would you be best of just showing 1 or 2 that perform well for you? If you don’t get many shares, is there much point showing any at all?

You should always think twice before adding any social media options in a page of your site.

9. Wrong file type for your images

If you need transparency for your images then you cannot avoid the PNG file type BUT if you do not need transparency, you should never save your images as PNG files because they are much bigger in filesize so much slower than JPG images.

Minimize or even eliminate any heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down the loading time of your site.

You should also try to avoid saving images with text as content because it can be a time-consuming process to edit the text on images and generated images are much heavier as well.

Use JPG as your default. It’s the smallest and fastest loading file type for most of the files.

10. Not taking advantage of dedicated services

There is a big number of popular services that can reduce the load of your server.

Do you have videos on your site? You should use Youtube, Wistia or Vimeo.

Do you have many comments on your site? You should use Disqus, IntenseDebate or
Discourse.

Do you use jQuery, jQuery UI, AngularJS or Mootools? You should load them via the Google hosted libraries.

Do you use WordPress and display popular posts? You should use Jetpack which does that automatically for you.

You can also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your images from it instead of your site.

If your site is getting significant traffic and you load many images and videos, the loading time of your site can be optimized drastically by balancing your site’s workload with the above-mentioned tricks.

11. 404 errors

If you try to load a file which does not exist or the browser cannot find then the loading time of your site will be affected by this 404 HTTP error.

You should always check for any 404 errors during the rendering of your pages in order to achieve the fastest loading time. You can do that either by checking the generated waterfall of your site using Webpagetest and GTMetrix or by using the network tab of browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

If Webpagetest shows any red lines on the waterfall then you should immediately troubleshoot and fix those 404 errors.

404 Errors Can Ruin Loading Time

This kind of errors can really ruin the loading time of your website especially if you serve your site via a shared hosting plan.

12. Not caching your site

Every content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento) uses a database in order to save a big set of data on it.

Although this is great for managing your site, it also means that it adds extra load on your server in order to generate each page every time it is requested.

You can solve this problem by using caching.

If you use WordPress, then you can either use a caching plugin such as
W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache or ZenCache or use a managed server hosting company such as WP Engine and FlyWheel (affiliate links) which take care of caching.

Needless to say, Joomla, Drupal and Magento offer caching options as well which can help a lot by providing cached versions of your site for consequent site visitors instead of generating each page over and over again.

Caching your pages can drastically speed up your site

Caching is a no-brainer for any database-driven website. Even a 10-minute caching period can optimize the loading time of your website drastically.

13. Hundreds of HTTP requests

Every CSS file, Javascript file or image loaded on your site is a HTTP request. The more HTTP requests your site has, the slower your site will be.

Although you can try to combine CSS and Javascript files, to inline CSS files and to use CSS sprites for small images, if you implement those tweaks and you still have 150 HTTP requests, then you should obviously try to declutter your site by removing content from it.

246 HTTP requests will slow down your site no matter how optimized it is

I know it is tempting to display a lot of content in each page of your site but please keep in mind that “less is more” so try not to load so many images or scripts.

14. Bad server configuration

If you are on a shared hosting plan, it is quite common that they do their best to serve as many sites per server as possible.

They usually do that by disabling features such as compression and KeepAlive among others.

Enabling HTTP Keep-Alive allows the same TCP connection to send and receive multiple HTTP requests, thus reducing the latency for subsequent requests.

Compression reduces the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser.

If you are on a shared hosting plan and your hosting company has disabled compression and Keep-Alive, then you should switch hosting company as soon as possible.

Keep-Alive and compression should be enabled on your server

15. CSS imports

CSS imports are a nice way to import CSS files on the top of a new CSS file e.g. importing a CSS reset file but it adds additional delays during the loading of a web page as well.

You should avoid CSS imports, whenever possible.

16. Loading unnecessary files on each page

You should load CSS and Javascript files only when they are required on a page of your site.

For instance, if a specific Javascript file is needed only on a single page, in that case, you should load that Javascript file only at this URL instead of loading it on every single page of your site.

If you do not follow this simple rule, then you can end up loading 30 CSS and 40 Javascript files on a page which needs only 3 CSS and 4 Javascript files so you are making 63 extra HTTP requests and adding many hundreds of kilobytes on the page size.

17. Loading heavy files on the background

Many sites used to load big background images which are hardly visible.

Do you really need a 500KB image loaded on the background? You should try to use CSS3, whenever feasible or use a background color instead.

It is also a bad practice to load sound files on the background while your site is loading.

Most of those techniques are slowing down your site and should be avoided.

18. Not using an expert

My goal was to give you enough information to get started fixing the slow loading pages of your site.

Optimizing the loading time of your site is a win-win situation for you and everybody who visits your website. Faster sites means higher conversions, better search engine rankings and a more enjoyable user experience.

It’s best to hire an expert when you want a job done well.

Amateurs can follow best practices but do not know where to begin.

An expert will fix the actual problems that slow down your site.

Whenever an amateur does not know the real problems of your website, they will recommend a pointless temporary solution such as moving hosts, changing theme, installing a different caching plugin or even switching CMS.

Many of my clients have wasted their time and money on amateurs who had just installed a caching plugin without fixing the actual problems of their site.

You should always keep in mind that each website is unique so different speed optimization tweaks have to be applied per site.

To sum it up, optimizing the loading time of your site should always be done by an expert who will perform the speed optimization tweaks with surgical precision.

Imagine how happy your users will be to see super fast loading times!

If you want to hire me, I’m happy to help you. See my portfolio and contact me on AwesomeWeb today!

The post 18 Things Making Your Website Slow appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

For months, even years, we weren’t 100% satisfied with our shopping cart solutions. We tried everything from Clickbank and PayPal to JVZoo, you name it. But none of the solutions gave us exactly what we needed.

We needed to setup and run split tests with the click of a mouse, we needed to be able to quickly create and list products, we needed to be able to create upsell funnels and needed to provide affiliates with custom affiliate links…

Nothing covered all bases in a simple manner.

To make it worse, most solutions charged us a percentage for each sales. The more we worked, the more we made, the more they took.

At our wits end and on the verge of creating our own solution, last October we got an email from Brian Moran inviting us to beta test his new Shopping Cart solution, SamCart.

After logging in for the very first time, I had our first product created and listed for sale within the first 30 seconds – no joke.

Today I’m going to show you the 10 reasons why you should dump your current shopping cart solution and get started with SamCart today!

10 Reasons You Should Switch to SamCart Today:

#1. Ease of Use

Your current shopping cart has 20 different steps just to list a product.

With SamCart, you can create and publish your first product in under a minute – literally. Their simple design and user friendly interface make selling digital products online simple.

Here’s how to list your first product with SamCart:

Step 1: Open an account.

Step 2: Log in to the dashboard.

Step 3: Click ‘Products’ on the lefthand menu.

Step 4: Click the blue ‘New Product’ button on the top right of the page.

Step 5: Fill out the fields that popup (Product name, Short description, Thank you page redirect, Billing Frequency, Price).

That’s it, you’re all set!

#2. Split Testing

Not one of our former Shopping Carts offered the ability to easily split test our checkout pages and sales funnels. As any successful digital marketer tells you, split testing is your bread and butter.

This was one thing that immediately stood out about SamCart, and like everything else about this shopping cart software, they made it easy to do.

Here’s how to setup split tests with SamCart:

Step 1: After creating and listing your products, select one that you want to split test.

Step 2: After clicking the product you wish to split test, locate the “Upsell Funnels” section under the “Customization” tab and select a funnel from the drop down menu.

Step 3: Click “Split Test” and add other upsell funnels you want to test between.

I told you it was easy.

#3. One Click Upsells

Again, this was something that used to take valuable time out of the day. We always have an upsell that adds value to our products because this enhances user experience as well as conversions.

SamCart nailed this too!

After making a purchase, customers are presented with an upsell allowing them to add a product to their cart without providing all that order info again.

Look how easy it is to create a 1 click upsell:

Step 1: Click “Upsells” on the lefthand side of your dashboard and then select funnels from the drop down menu.

Step 2: Click on “Upsell Funnels” on the top right…

Step 3: Click the blue “New Funnel” button, add your funnel name and a short description, then click “create funnel.”

Step 4: Select how many upsell upsells you’d like to add from your product list and then select “enabled”. You’ll have the option to add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.

That’s it! Your customers will go through the upsell funnel just the way you set it up. I’m telling you, everything about SamCart is awesome!

#4. Branded Checkout Pages

As it turns out with many of the other carts out there, the checkout pages look nothing like your brand. This can be intimidating and sometimes means the difference between a sale and a bounce.

Every one of SamCarts landing page templates is customizable, and designed to convert. No more generic carts – your checkout page is an important part of your marketing strategy.

#5. Multiple Templates & Variable Elements

I’d bet the shopping cart you’re currently using, only has one style of checkout page. Am I right?

That’s lame.

SamCart provides you with several high converting templates to choose from. Each template is designed by marketing professionals with several years of experience in digital sales and a firm grip on what sells in today’s market.

On top of that, most of the elements on your checkout pages can be customized, this just adds to the effectiveness and convenience of split testing.

And since you’ll be split testing everything, this is a great way to truly see what works for your demographic to increase sales.

#6. Fully Responsive

A major chunk of our traffic comes from mobile devices. And this is something that’s likely also true for you. In 2014, there were more than 1.2 billion mobile users surfing the web. Mobile is becoming a bigger and bigger chunk of your online traffic.

Every single SamCart checkout and upsell funnel is mobile optimized. So there’s no reason to reduce conversions because people are trying to act on offers they saw while checking gmail on their phones. Brian told me that many customers are already seeing 10-30% increases in sales.

Is your current checkout page mobile optimized? If not, you’re losing money.

#7. Quick Page Loads

People have very short attention spans online, and one of the easiest ways to lose sales is by having a page that takes too long to load.

I noticed that with other shopping carts, I’d find that some of our checkout pages took more than 3 seconds to load in some cases. That’s ridiculous.

Quick page loads allow users to smoothly move through your funnels. If things take to long to load people will get distracted, lose excitement and possibly the desire to purchase all together.

Page load speed should NEVER be an issue, and with SamCart, it’s not.

#8. Guarantees

Guarantees prove that you’re willing to stand behind your product. While it’s standard to have a guarantee on your sales page, it’s not so common to see them on checkout pages.

This gives your customers a sense of security and can be the final selling point that enables your user to complete the sale.

Every SamCart checkout page comes with a section to post any guarantee you have.

#9. Security

With so many instances of hacking online and even in the media these days, it’s more important than ever to secure your own as well as your customers data. Every SamCart checkout page is SSL encrypted, meaning your customer’s data will be safe and you’ll have one less thing to worry about with your business.

#10. Bonus Section

Having the right bonuses to accompany a good product can make or break your offer.

When you have a customer on the fence, oftentimes a reminder of the great product and offer they’re getting is enough to finish the checkout.

SamCart nailed this too, as each checkout page comes with a prominent section dedicated to reminding your customers of exactly what they’re getting.

There you have it, the 10 reasons why you should make the switch to SamCart today.

Click here to get started.

Enjoy,

David Aston

-Team IncomeDiary

The post Your Shopping Cart Sucks – 10 Reasons You Should Switch to SamCart appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

So you’ve got your website up and your sales page is live with a great offer, but your visitors aren’t converting very well.

You’re looking at your traffic stats and comparing them to your sales, and you’re starting to feel disappointed and annoyed.

Could it be that your sales page is missing one or all of these 9 essentials?

I learned the hard way what not to do when selling products online and this article will help you understand how to dramatically improve your sales page conversion rate – even if you’re just starting out.

Today we’re going to look at nine things most sales pages are missing and why they’re destroying your conversions.

But before we get started, it’s probably a good idea to understand what exactly a conversion rate is. Some of our readers are so new to making money online that they’re not even clear on this point.

What is a Conversion Rate?

A conversion rate is the percentage of your prospective customers who follow through with a specific action you want them to take. For instance, a website can track the following kinds of conversion rates based on the amount of visitors the website is receiving:

• The percentage of website visitors who call the company.
• The percentage of website visitors that buy something from you online.
• The percentage of website visitors that fill out a form.

There are several ways to increase online conversion rates, let’s look at nine of them:

#1. Prove It

You can make claims about your business to your prospective customers, but they’re probably not going to swallow everything you feed them whole. In addition to your claims, always try and include social proof! Social proof might mean customer testimonials, 3^rd party website reviews, and even case studies. Prove to your prospective customers that your existing customers are doing well.

I love the way the real life customer testimonials from ExpertPhotography.com fit so appropriately into their sales pages.

#2. Transparent Contact & Support Information

Having a telephone number, email support link, and live chat option can dramatically increase trust in a website. It makes it look like there’s a real business behind the website, and that there are real people to get in touch with.

IncomeSup makes getting in touch incredibly simple and obvious as you’ll see on the screen grab below…

I’ll let you in on a little secret… We hit record sales the very first day we used SnapEngage (live chat client) on one of our software websites. I highly recommend you try it for at least 30 days – it’s free.

#3. Credibility & Trustworthiness

Showcasing “trust” seals from organizations like the Better Business Bureau and security firms like Verisign will almost always increase conversions. Again, this makes your website look like a serious business with serious validation.

Bills.com makes sure your eyes keep moving down the sales page and that their credibility sticks in your head as it’s the final thing you see on the page.

#4. 100% Customer Satisfaction Guarantee

When you offer a guarantee, it gives customers a lot more confidence in what you’re selling. They know that they can get their money back if they find your claims aren’t true. Also, if you have a better guarantee, like 90 days compared to 30 days, then that will help too.

People want to know they can get their money back, and they want to know that they will have plenty of time to try out your service or product without any risk.

#5. Headlines

A headline is probably the first thing your visitors are going to see. It should compel them to read more, instead of exiting your site. If you can capture their attention with a headline, then you can keep them reading. If you can keep them reading, then you are more likely to convert them. Don’t underestimate how significant of an effect a good headline can have.

And here is something to remember…

“80% of emotional impact will be determined by the first 20% of the copy.”

Hire a seasoned copywriter just to write your headline, if that’s all you can afford. If you need additional inspiration, here are 10 great headlines examples that got us 10 million readers.

Here is a great example of a sales headline that PopupDomination used for years and years – that converted like crazy!

#6. Calls-to-Action

Even if you’ve gotten your web page visitors to stay on your website and read what you have to say, you still need them to buy. They might want to buy already, but that’s not enough. You have to make it really clear to them – how to buy, why they should buy, and that they should buy right now. Include a call-to-action at the end of your sales letter, or right near your purchase button.

CrazyEgg.com has an incredibly simple landing page with a great call to action being the first thing you see. An extremely easy way to do this and make it look professional is with a nifty little software known as OptimizePress.

#7. Simplified Website Layout

When visitors come to your web page for the first time, they want to be presented with a simplified website layout – not a whole lot of clutter, flashy graphics, or annoying distractions. Show them clear navigation and a straightforward sales path like the team at ManPacks.com, and you’ll have a better chance at making them stay.

OptimizePress is a WordPress plugin and theme that allows you to create clean and professional landing pages, membership sites and blogs, without having coding or design knowledge.

#8. TOS/Privacy Policy

When you include a link to your TOS/Privacy Policy, it shows prospective customers that you take their private and financial information seriously. A trust seal at the bottom of the site, near those links, is even better. Show your prospective customers that you will protect their information just like Basecamp.com does with their “Not-so-fine print.”

#9. Social Media Builds Trust & Sales

Even if you don’t close a sale right away, if you build up your social media fan-base, followers, and friends, you’ll be able to interact with them on a daily basis. Giving away free content and direct interaction builds trust and will help you close future sales. Go for the long-term approach, don’t discount building up a list, a social media fan base, and an army of loyal blog followers if content marketing is a part of your overall sales strategy (it should be).

Proudly display your products, fan count and/or social shares to your existing fans and potential customers just like EJ does on EJCarrion.com

Word of warning, if you have a small social following, this method could end up hurting your conversions rather than improving them, so test it and see how it works for you.

Remember, having an intuitive and user friendly website can be the difference between a bounce and a conversion. For more ideas on how you can can increase conversions, check out the 7 website design features that will increase profits and usability.

-David Aston

The post 9 Things Most Sales Pages Are Missing (fix these today to increase conversions!) appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

In 2010, Google confirmed that site speed is one of over 200 indicators that impacts search rankings. Their data shows that when pages load slowly, people spend less time. Yet most of us put little focus into making our websites faster.

Maybe fine-tuning the inner speed triggers of your WordPress website is too daunting.

To shed light on cutting your load time in half, we invited Stavros Papadakis to lay out his process for speeding up client websites.

If your load time is more than 3 seconds or your page size is over 2MB, that can be a big problem that’s costing you money, both in lost sales and server fees.

There are many free online tools such as WebPageTest, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom that can help you identify issues that cause slow loading times and bad user experience for your site.

Here’s how to take charge of your website’s performance.

1. Enable compression

Compressing your CSS and Javascript files will help browsers download them faster.

Gzip compression can easily reduce file sizes from 200+KB (non-compressed) to less than 40KB (compressed). As long as your server has compression enabled, take advantage of it.

You can be sure that your users will experience a drastic speed up of your site for both desktops and mobiles by enabling compression at your server.

Add the following snippet of code at your .htaccess file in order to enable compression for static files.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php text/php text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript text/x-js

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

2. Optimize your images

Images are the main culprit for slowing a website. Always optimize your images (especially those above 50KB) before uploading them to your website.

The optimal way of optimizing them is to use Photoshop or any other image manipulation software. Save images for web with image quality up to 60%.

You should also use progressive images for JPG files because progressive rendering of images provides a smoother user experience.

Please check the following two images, they look the same but the left one is non-optimized and is 80KB and the one to the right is optimized and it is only 18KB, 4 times smaller.

Non-Optimized Image

Optimized Image

3. Move Javascript files to the footer

Although Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools and Prototype are awesome because they extend your website’s functionality, they can also block the rendering of your pages.

Browsers don’t start loading the content until all the Javascript files in the header of the page have been downloaded.

An easy way to solve this problem is to move your Javascript files, those which are not required during the initial page rendering, from the header to the footer of the page.

If you use WordPress, you can move script calls from header.php to footer.php at your theme and use true as the fourth parameter whenever you use the wp_enqueue_script function.

Move JS scripts to the footer of the page

4. Make sure that you have KeepAlive enabled

Apache (the most commonly used server for shared hosting plans at low-cost hosting companies) has a great “feature” called KeepAlive which keeps connections open for more than one HTTP request.

Make sure KeepAlive is activated at your hosting company.

If you have access to your httpd.conf file, enable KeepAlive by making sure that you have “KeepAlive On” in it, otherwise just add the following piece of code at your .htaccess file.

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
 Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

Enable KeepAlive for your site

5. Merge CSS files – Inline small CSS files

Browsers only handle so many HTTP requests at the same time. When this limit is reached, some files wait while others are downloaded.

By merging all your CSS files into one CSS file only, the page renders much faster.

If you have CSS files which are less than 2KB, then you should inline them instead of making an extra HTTP request.

WordPress has a few great plugins such as Autoptimize and Better WordPress Minify that can be help you merge or even inline your CSS stylesheets.

Merge CSS files and Inline them

6. Enable caching

Caching drastically improves the load time of pages that do not change that often.

By enabling caching at your site, your code doesn’t keep generating the same page over and over again. This way the user experience is much better and your server can handle more traffic.

W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache are just a short selection of free WordPress plugins that provide different kind of caching e.g. page caching, database caching and object caching among others.

W3 Total Cache plugin provides page, DB and object caching

7. Use a Content Delivery Network

Whether you use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal or a custom-made PHP or HTML site, I highly recommend configuring a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

A CDN is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the internet.
When a client visits your site, static content like images and CSS files are served from the server that is geographically closest them so they are rendered much faster.

By the way, the load on your server is also drastically reduced thanks to a CDN.

CloudFlare is a free CDN and DNS provider among others. MaxCDN is also a great and affordable option to optimize the loading time of your site. They are both as good as they can get.

CloudFlare is a free Content Delivery Network

8. Minimize the number of HTTP requests

The more HTTP requests you have, the slower the loading time of your site will be.

Combine your CSS files, merge Javascript files, and combine images in data sprites among others to make as few HTTP requests as possible.

When I work on a client’s site, one of my major goals is to minimize the number of HTTP requests loaded per page.

Merge CSS files, use data sprites or data URIs in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests

9. Choose the correct file type for your images

Use JPG as your default. It’s the smallest and fastest loading file type.

Use PNG only for images with text (JPG rasterizes text which makes it blurry) or if you need a transparent background.

Minimize or even eliminate any heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down the loading time of your site.

Although the following two images look the same, there is a huge difference between them. The one to the left is saved as a png file and weighs 102KB and the other one is a JPG file with a size of 18KB, that’s right, 6 times lighter!

Image saved as PNG

Image saved as JPG

10. Fix your 404 errors

Believe it or not, any missing file generates a 404 HTTP error and will definitely slow down the loading time of your site.

Always check for any 404 errors during the rendering of your pages to achieve the fastest loading time.

If your “waterfall” (the way the browser renders your site) looks like that (watch out for any red rows), then 404 errors are ruining the loading time of your site.

404 Errors Can Ruin the Loading Time of your Site

11. Take care of your page size

Although it is tempting to display a lot of content in each page, you should try to keep your page size to the minimum.

This is even more crucial for mobiles. Having to load a 2MB site via mobile in a 3G connection is a recipe for disaster. Take into account that users do not like to wait for more than 2-3 seconds for a page to render.

Does a new image add value to the site? If not, then you should not add it to your site. Simple like that.

Reduce the Page Size

12. Scale images

Never scale images on the fly in HTML. Create a thumbnail of the image that you need at the exact dimensions that it will be used in your pages.

For instance, if you have an image that it is 1200px x 675px and you want to use a “scaled” version at 480px x 270px, create a new resized version of the original image and use that instead.

This image links to a “big” version of the image using a scaled thumbnail instead of changing the dimensions of the image in HTML.

Thumbnail (Scaled Image) Links to Large-Size Image

13. Leverage Browser Caching

Google recommends a minimum cache time of one week and preferably up to one year for assets that change infrequently.

Set a caching policy for all server responses to static files (images, CSS and Javascript) so the browser can determine whether it can reuse a previously loaded file or not.

This is usually done by adding this snippet of code at the .htaccess file for shared hosting plans

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 7200 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
</ifmodule>

14. Optimize your database

As long as you have a database-driven site (which includes WordPress and all other CMS-based sites), then be sure to optimize your database.

Monitor your code for slow queries. If you are on a VPS or dedicated server, enable query caching and optimize your database server configuration.

Although full database optimization can be a really tricky and time-consuming process, phpMyAdmin offers you a few basic optimization options by “optimizing your tables”.

Optimize your Database via phpMyAdmin

15. Select your hosting company wisely

Choose a hosting plan that meets your site needs.

Most hosting companies apply limitations to their shared hosting plans and host hundreds of sites per server to keep the fees to the minimum.

You get what you pay for. If you have an Ecommerce site, a heavy CMS, a lot of traffic or traffic spikes, avoid shared hosting plans.

I highly recommend WPEngine managed WordPress hosting company for any eCommerce WordPress site or any WordPress site with traffic spikes.

16. Hire an expert

My goal is to give you enough information to get started optimizing your website speed.

But as you know, it’s best to hire an expert when it’s important to get it right.

One of my clients contacted me in order to optimize the loading time of his website. The website pages were taking a long time to load and visitors were complaining because the user experience was bad.

I updated WordPress to its latest version, migrated the website to a reliable hosting company and applied speed optimization tweaks to achieve the best feasible loading time.

The loading time went from 8.2 to 2.6 seconds. The first byte and start rendering time was optimized down to 0.147 and 0.384 seconds respectively and the number of HTTP requests was reduced from 96 to 78. Google PageSpeed Insights was also optimized to 88%.

Bounce rate decreased by about 10% within a few weeks. The client and more importantly the website users were happy and maintaining the site became a great experience.

To sum it up, optimizing the loading time of your site is a win-win situation for you and your potential clients.

Imagine how happy your users will be to see super fast loading times!

If you want to hire me, I’m happy to help. See my portfolio and contact me on AwesomeWeb today!

Conclusion

Everything improves when your site loads faster.

Google ranks you higher. Users are happier. Bounce rates decrease. Conversion rates increase. And you make more sales.

Stop losing traffic and money. Start optimizing the loading time of your site today.

Today I’m offering a $497 package special for IncomeDiary readers. This is half my normal rate. If your site meets my minimum qualifications, I’ll take care of everything listed in this post. Mention IncomeDiary in your message and I’ll be in touch with you shortly. Start off 2015 with the fastest website you can possibly have!

Hire me here or find other speed optimization freelancers on AwesomeWeb here.

The post 16 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website Today! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Each week I’ll ask 6 other internet entrepreneurs a specific question relating to your online success.

At the end of each weekly post, you’ll have an opportunity to vote on the best responses. This helps keep things interesting and of the highest quality.

Between the 7 of us, Josh Dunlop, Brian Moran, Nicholas Tart, Tom Lambert, Dainis Graveris, Michael Dunlop, and myself (David Aston), we’ve gotten over 150 million unique visitors, launched dozens of digital and physical products, had our products viewed over 1 billion times and earned millions of dollars and fans alike.

That said, this first question in the series is an obvious place to start because we’re first introduced to a website visually.

People are often quick to judge you based on your appearance, and the same is true when it comes to website design.

Easy navigation and a visually pleasing layout will help tremendously when it comes to converting your prospects into customers.

7 Design Features Your Website May Be Missing:

1. Members Login Area

Contributed by Josh Dunlop.

One feature I love is actually quite subtle, and that’s membership logins.

4. Email Capture Form

Contributed by Tom Lambert

An Email capture form.

Believe it or not – 90% of the people that visit your website will never do business with you in any capacity.

Capturing email addresses while prospects are on your website gives you a chance to increase those odds and nurture them with high quality content while building a relationship. Your effective frequency will vary but virtually none of your visitors will see your product or service once and be convinced to do business with you.

Adding a simple lead capture form to your website will without a doubt double or triple your effectiveness with minimal effort. Be sure to offer an irresistible lead magnet that attracts the type of people you want to do business with.

For example, if you’re an accountant and want to attract multi-millionaire entrepreneurs write a report along the lines of “7 Costly Mistakes Every Millionaire Entrepreneur Makes When Filing Quarterly Taxes” – making the opt-in offer this specific will help pre-qualify your leads before you ever send them an email.

I recommend a two prong approach: add an email capture form to the sidebar of all of your website posts/pages and an exit popup with the same offer using software like Popup Domination.

5. Threaded Comments and Comment Upvotes

6. Improve Text Readability

7. Make Sure Your Site Has Usability

Contributed by David Aston.

If you’re in the process of establishing a web asset, I invite you to ask yourself a few questions.

Ask yourself WHY you want a website and WHO will be using it.

This is a critical step in the creation process because a natural health website is going to look and feel different than a daily deal eCommerce website.

With each new startup I dedicate an entire wall in my office to outlining my new website schematic.

The navigation bar is typically where I’ll begin because this helps identify your sites main idea. Make it a point to organize the navigation buttons in order of importance (going from top to bottom or left to right).

Once you have the navigation organized in order of importance, figure out what content will be dedicated to each page. Be sure to keep your visitor in mind without overwhelming them with excessive links to “money pages.”

Remember, using colors to reflect your content and site identity goes a long way.

Dark red and bright yellow cause people to take action, blues and greens build trust, and as Michael mentioned, dark text on a light background is a must for readability.

You can discover more about empathizing color psychology in web design here.

Actually, readability’s really important and plays a HUGE role in a websites overall usability.

Be sure to use appropriate fonts (nothing too fancy) and make sure your grandfather and little brother can both read it!

If your visitors read a sentence with any difficulty they’ll simply exit your site and head on over to your competitors.

Prevent this by keeping sentences to 15 words or less and paragraphs around 2 sentences. This maximizes engagement and keeps your sites readability around a 5th grade level.

Remember you’re writing for web users not your university professor.

You can check your website / article readability by using this tool.

These methods helped me find creatively concise ways to emphasize my point and enhance usability. I trust they’ll do the same for you.

Implementation Instructions

No time but want to consume this post? Here it is in 7 quick points.

1. If you have a members area, make the link visible. Consider adding a login widget to your main site.
2. Add headlines to your webpages. Brainstorm headlines that explained both what your webpage does and why people should use it.
3. Make your call to action buttons more visible. Split test different button text.
4. Add an email capture form to the sidebar of all of your website posts/pages and an exit popup with the same offer using software like Popup Domination.
5. Add Threaded Comments and Comment Upvotes to your blog if you want to encourages more interaction between readers.
6. Change your text link styling to blue and underlined. Go over your website and look for what isn’t obvious. Just because you know how to use your website, don’t expect others to experience it the same way
7. Make it a point to organize the navigation buttons in order of how you want people to flow through your website. For example, visit the homepage, visit this page, now go look at this product, buy it, access it, got a problem? contact us.

The post 7 Website Design Features That Will Increase Profits and Usability appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Your blog sucks.

Sorry to be frank, but that’s the truth. If your users aren’t engaged, your blog sucks.

Now hold on – that doesn’t mean that your content sucks – it just means that you haven’t put these 11 blog optimization tips into place (optimization as in optimal for your users, not Google).

If you haven’t yet, then it’s time you did.

Why User Engagement Matters. A Lot.

Apart from the fact that no visitor will ever return to your blog a second time, user engagement is significant for another reason.

Bounce rate.

Simply put, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after looking at only a single webpage – they decided they didn’t want to stay and browse around. They either found what they wanted, and moved on, or hated everything about your site and left as soon as they came.

If you have a high bounce rate (70%+), Google won’t like your website, since it’s obvious that your visitors don’t like your website either.

Keeping that in mind, let’s discuss these eleven tactics you can use to dramatically boost user engagement on your blog.

1. Shorter Paragraphs

Unfortunately, your high school English teacher was wrong. On the Internet, nobody wants to read 8-10 sentence paragraphs, no matter how detailed or structured it is.

The more white space you have, the better. Your paragraphs should be short, no more than 1-3 sentences each.

Spacing out your paragraphs into smaller chunks makes it much easier on readers’ eyes. Long chunks of text often overwhelm readers – and that’s an excellent way to make them leave your site in ten seconds flat.

Furthermore, spacing out your paragraphs is an excellent way to build up to something and make an impact. Use 2-3 sentences of “build-up”, then say the message you want to convey in a single line, spaced out, all by itself.

Like this.

2. Internal Linking Structure

Not only is a good linking structure beneficial to search engine optimization, but it’s a great way to decrease your bounce rate and generate more page views per visitor.

Link to related blog posts using anchor text relevant to the blog post at hand. For example, in the above paragraph, the anchor text “search engine optimization” was used to link to a relevant blog post on Income Diary about search engine optimization tips. This is an excellent example of internal linking.

However, you can also take it a step further and outright add “Related Posts” links smack in the middle of a post, right when readers are concentrated on your content. The following is an example.

You may also like to read:
o Marketing Lessons From 5 Rappers
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However, make sure that you do not overuse this tactic. Although it can serve to engage readers, it will annoy them if you do it any more than twice per post.

All things in moderation.

3. Minimize Page Load Speed

We’ve all been at the there – admit it. You clicked on an interesting-looking link to a website and waited for it to load…and waited…and waited.

After 20 seconds, you decided it wasn’t worth it, and you left before taking even one glance at the content.

And for good reason. If a webmaster doesn’t take enough time out of his day to make sure that what his content loads fast for his visitors, then he obviously doesn’t take much time writing his actual content, either.

Not only does Google kick you back in the SERPs if your site loads slowly, but your bounce rate is guaranteed to skyrocket if your website takes any more than 5-7 seconds to load.

Ideally, your website should take 1-2 seconds to load. To put a little perspective, Google.com takes 816 ms to load – less than one second. You can measure your page load speed using this free tool.

To reduce page load times, you can try limiting the number of images per post. True, images usually engage users more than just plain text, but one image per post is usually enough.

If you do use images, use GIFs. Although the image won’t be highest quality possible, it will load extremely fast and look reasonably good.

Also use a browser caching plugin, such as the free WP Super Cache. The plugin serves static HTML files to viewers, thus making the page loading process. much more efficient.

Another free plugin that you could consider using is Advanced Lazy Load. What this does is delay the loading of images until the moment when the reader scrolls down to the area where the image is placed. This is an excellent way to increase speed and works particularly well with long blogrolls.

If you’re ready to commit money to increasing your page load speed, then you can also consider using a CDN – content delivery network.

A CDN duplicates your website content across a number of different servers worldwide, serving your visitors the content from whichever server is closest to their respective location. The increased proximity decreases the page load time. One of the most popular content delivery networks is MaxCDN.

4. Use A Writing Style Appropriate To Your Audience

I really can’t stress the importance of this enough. Always, always use a writing style appropriate to your specific audience.
On the Internet, there are two predominant writing styles. The first is a friendly, warm, down-to-earth conversational tone. The other is a professional, more formal tone.

Using the wrong style can be disastrous to your blog.

Nearly all blogs will want to use the former – the down-to-earth style. It’s a perfect fit for information-centered blogs (like blogs about fitness, Internet marketing, etc), personal blogs, and nearly everything in between.

The highlight of this style is the conversational tone it takes on. Use personal pronouns, shorter sentences, and even sentence fragments when appropriate.

The latter – a formal tone – should be used for business blogs. If you run a small or large, offline or online business, your blog would normally have a formal tone. It’s especially fitting if you provide a specific service.

The formal tone requires more serious writing, devoid of jokes, longer sentences, ‘bigger’ words, etc.

5. Avoid A Busy Look

Busy websites are killers. If you’re website is crammed full of twenty sidebar widgets, maintains 57 different plugins, and has a horrendous theme, its bounce rate won’t be all too pleasing for you as a webmaster.

You should be using no more than ONE font (although possibly two – one for the main text and one for headers). Apart from that, there should be no font changes, no font size changes, and no font color changes. Your website needs to look consistent.

Don’t go overboard with widgets either. I personally recommend having a subscription form at the top, a 20-40 words “about me” piece, recent posts, a Facebook like box, and four 125×125 affiliate banner ads. Truth be known, you don’t need any more than that.

Especially avoid images in the sidebar – they can really distract the reader from what they should be doing: reading your content.

Also do your best to ensure that images also fit somewhat with the rest of theme. Even though you’re using GIFs, try to have them as high in quality as possible, and do NOT enlarge/pixelate them.

The less you have going on, the better. It allows your readers to concentrate solely on the content.

6. Have A Subscription Form At The End Of Every Post

This is a perfect way to recycle your traffic and keep it coming back, besides growing your e-mail list.

Simply insert your form code at the end of every post with a CTA (call-to-action) to get your visitors to respond to it. It’s often a good idea to have a free subscriber-only report, video, or e-Course as an incentive for signing up.

Your CTA can be as simple as “Join XXX other people who get yoursite.com in their inbox every day/week”. If you do have an incentive, then try something like “Sign up to get your free PDF report on _____”.

The basic idea is to have some sort of call-to-action accompanied by your opt-in box at the end of every post. This is as simple as copy/pasting from previous posts.

7. Display Related Content At The End Of Every Post

This ties in partly with tip #2, about using a good internal linking structure. You should always display related posts at the end of each and every post.

There’s some psychology to back this up. When readers finish a piece of content, they look to what else they should do. Should the sign up through your opt-in form? Should they hit the back button and leave the website? Should they go ahead and browse some more posts?

Adding related content at the end of posts helps them to make a choice to browse more posts. Although you can do this manually, it’s not always a good idea. Much more efficient and appealing is using dedicated plugins for this purpose.

There are quite a few related content plugins. The most popular would be YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) – aptly named. At the end of posts, it automatically displays related posts/pages. You can choose either a thumbnail or a text link to display the post.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, uses it himself, as does Google’s Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team. The relevancy of the posts displayed is determined by their own little algorithm.

If you’d like something else, then nRelate would be the way to go. It has more placement options than YARPP and even allows you to display ads, with which you can monetize your site. However, it does require a bit more setup than YARPP.

8. Get Social

Although this is rather obvious, it’s very important, especially after recent Google updates. SEO and SMM (social media marketing) go hand-in-hand. When the big G’s spiders crawl your website, they look for those social signals that indicate your site is popular. If they find them, they reward you with a higher ranking.

There’s no other way to get your content shared than to have a social sharing plugin. My favorite is Digg Digg, simply because it takes no more than 60 seconds to set up, it looks great with any theme, is widely used by quite a few popular blogs, and it floats.

Nothing better.

When configuring the plugin, be sure not to display too many social icons. Wait – more is better, right?

Wrong. In this case, you should have no more than five icons, after which it begins to look more than a little bit cluttered..

Naturally, the top 3: Facebook Like, Twitter, and Google Plus, which leaves two left. I personally use StumbleUpon and Facebook Sharing.

Stumbleupon, especially, has begun to drive decent traffic to my website after implementing it a couple days ago.

One other important thing to consider is running and maintaining social profiles for your website. Again, don’t try to do everything – I would recommend concentrating solely on Twitter & Facebook (although you might consider Pinterest if your blog is image/photography centered).

With Twitter (a place where a LOT of marketers come to spam), always ensure that you’re actively engaging with your followers. Give, give, take should be a rule to apply. Also try to build your following in your niche – otherwise, the traffic you drive is untargeted and therefore of no value.

Facebook pages are a little bit simpler to manage. I use the Facebook Auto Publish, a neat plugin that automatically publishes new posts to your dedicated Facebook page/profile. The plugin also allows you to share from specific categories, share pages, and customize your messages.

9. Structure Your Content

A detailed linear content structure is essential for readers. It helps them to understand the topic you discuss in your blog post much better.

Excellent content often begins with an outline. Creating a small, non-extensive outline is the perfect way to both structure your content well, and write your blog post faster.

Start by crafting a stunning, catchy headline. Follow through with an attention-grabbing first sentence. Then, list the points you will be discussing in bullet point or numbered form. Add in sub-points for each point; 2-3 should be enough per. Lastly, draft your concluding statements.

Once you do it a few times, it should take no longer than 5-10 minutes to create. Aren’t your readers worth the extra minutes?

When you get to the actual writing stage, you’ll find that your thoughts will flow much better, allowing you to write faster, thanks to the outline. Tag the points listed in the outline as H3, and the subpoints as H4.

However, content structure goes beyond a single post. You should also ensure that you categorize your content carefully. Attempt to maintain an even amount of posts per category, which gives your blog more consistency.

Also use WordPress tags so that users can find your content when they search your site.

10. Clear Navigation Menus

Your navigation menu is the bar across the top of your website the displays the important pages, categories, and links.

For example, Income Diary’s menu looks like (at the time when this post was written): Home | Get Web Traffic | Make Money Online | Resources | About | Contact Us

Make sure that you use appropriate hierarchy if you use subpages and categories in your menu. Don’t stuff your menus with too many different items – 7 topmost items is right around the max you should go. Use short, descriptive title attributes.

Some WordPress themes come with more than one navigation menu. Utilize the secondary one if necessary.

11. Appropriate Color Scheme

Use a harmonious color scheme that doesn’t play havoc with readers’ eyes. I recommend staying away from bright colors – particularly yellow and bright orange. These types of colors distract readers from the content.

Using colder colors, such as green, blue, dark red, or even white suit readers much better. Whatever you do, make sure that the text is black on a white background.

You can have a predominantly blue theme, but make sure that background of the actual text is still white. And your font should never be anything than black.

Black on white is what human eyes are used to – don’t mess up the routine.

Summing Up

Here’s a quick review on 11 fixes that are bound to increase user engagement and decrease bounce rate.

1. Short paragraphs – 3-4 sentences max.
2. Appropriate linking structure that includes relevant blog posts as anchor text.
3. Speed up your page loading time using GIFs for images, a few dedicated plugins, and a CDN.
4. Use a writing style appropriate to your specific audience.
5. Avoid a ‘busy’ look that tries to do too much.
6. Have an opt-in form at the end of every post.
7. Display related content at the end of each post.
8. Get social by adding a social sharing plugin and maintaining dedicated social profiles for your website.
9. Structure your content with categories, and tags. Create an outline before writing a blog post.
10. Use clear navigation menus.
11. Use an appropriate, harmonious color scheme that displays black text on a white background.

Use these simple tips, and your blog is bound to be 541% cooler.

Read more: ‘5 Design Features Guaranteed to Boost Sales and Conversions’

The post 11 Ways To Dramatically Boost User Engagement On Your Blog appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

If your homepage simply features a list of your latest blog posts, you’re making a big mistake.

It’s important to get your homepage right because it’s going to be one of the most viewed pages on your blog, but people don’t view it in the way that you’d think.

Who Visits the Homepage?

Before you decide what to put on your homepage, you need to understand who views your homepage and how they got there.

First-Time Visitors

You likely think that your homepage is the first page of your website that somebody sees. That’s probably not the case.

The only way your homepage will be the first viewed page is if another site links to your homepage, if someone tells somebody to go to www., or if you have a well-known brand.

On my blog, 14clicks, only 3.9% of my traffic starts on the homepage.

Second-Page Clickers

What’s more likely is that someone will first see a blog post, then click over to see the homepage. This person has already interacted with your site and they’re curious enough to click over to the homepage.

On 14clicks, the homepage accounts for 28.1% of the second-page traffic, which is 3.6 times more than any other page.

Returning Visitors

If someone found your site once, liked it, and wants to go back to it, they’ll do one of two things.

One, they’ll go directly to the domain. Two, they’ll search for the name of your site. In either case, returning visitors will probably start on the homepage.

On 14clicks, 58% of the homepage traffic comes from people typing in the domain directly or from Google (with some variation of “14 clicks” being 5 of the 6 most popular keywords).

In general, people find your site through a blog post. If they like the post, they’ll click to the homepage. If they return, they probably start on the homepage. Therefore, most people who see your homepage have already interacted with your blog and you need to adjust your content accordingly.

Your Homepage Needs to Answer Their First Question

“Why should I stick around?”

To answer that question, you need to communicate what your site is and who it’s for.

Eye-Catching and Concise Headline

The headline should be the first thing a new visitor sees. It needs to answer the question, “what are the benefits to me personally if I cruise around this blog?”

Put your headline front-and-center so it’s first thing someone sees when they visit your homepage.

Eye-Catching Image or Video

On the side of or below your headline, you need to put an eye-catching, trust-building, benefit-depicting image or video.

The purpose of this image/video is to elicit a positive emotional response while visually communicating what your site is all about. If you have a personal branding blog or a company that’s tied closely to your personality, put a photo of yourself on your homepage to build trust.

Good Example: JustCreative.com

Jacob Cass has a picture of himself and his headline featured above the fold. He also uses his headline to direct people to his portfolio and blog.

Tell People What You Want them To Do

After you tell people why they should stay on your blog, you need to tell them what to do next. Underneath your headline and image, put your call to action. This could be one of four things depending on the purpose and goal of your blog.

Request a Quote

If you have a service-based business and you want to use your blog to collect leads, the homepage is a great place to put a button or a link to your contact page.

Subscribe

If the goal of your blog is to get email subscribers, put an opt-in box at the top of your homepage.

If you’re worried that the opt-in box will annoy your existing readers, don’t be. In the same way that you tend to gloss over ads, once they’re subscribed, they’ll subconsciously scroll past it to the content.

Register or Login

If you have a membership site and your number one goal is to turn readers into users, place two buttons as your call to action: “Register” and “Login.”

Purchase Something

If you want to skip the whole email marketing step and go directly for the sale, not what I’d recommend, then you can make the homepage call to action “See Our Featured Product” or “Shop.”

Good Example: SocialTriggers.com

The sole purpose of Derek Halpern’s site is to turn readers into subscribers. So he puts opt-in boxes everywhere, including at the top of his homepage.

Add Credibility and Social Proof

Once a visitor knows how you can help them and what you want them to do, it’s up to them to make that decision. The best way to help them make that decision in your favor is to demonstrate your credibility through social proof.

Social or Subscriber Counts

People are a lot more likely to subscribe if they know that lots of other people are already subscribed.

If you have more than 1,000 subscribers, show that number directly below your call-to-action. If you don’t, you can show social proof with your number of monthly readers, Twitter followers, or Facebook fans. If none of those numbers are over 1,000, you need to get to work.

Show a Testimonial, Preferably from a Well-Known Source

Another way to build credibility is to feature someone else’s opinion of you and your blog. Ask your most active readers to give you a testimonial and tell them that you’re going to put it on the homepage.

What’s even more powerful is a testimonial from someone who everyone knows. This builds authority by association. But don’t coerce testimonials from people who wouldn’t otherwise read your site.

Press or Customer Logos

If you’ve gotten a lot of press or have worked with well-known brands, put their logos on your homepage. Again, this builds authority by association.

I’m torn whether or not you should link the logos to the articles, though. On one hand, it could build your credibility even more if people read those articles. On the other hand, you’re driving people away from your site right as they’re about to take action. What do you think? Comment below.

Good Example: Conversion-Rate-Experts.com

Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks, from Conversion Rate Experts, have worked with the largest companies in the world and their blog has been featured on a number of prestigious media outlets. They make that clear with client logos and press logos (which aren’t linked, by the way).

Regularly Updated Content and Deep-Linking for SEO

From a search engine optimization perspective, there are two important things to consider with your homepage.

One, your homepage should update at least slightly when you post new content. Google likes to see fresh content. Two, every page on your site should be two-three clicks away from the homepage to make sure it gets completely indexed.

Links to Latest Blog Posts

New content on the homepage, even if it’s just the headlines, is important for search engines, but it’s also important for your readers. When people come back to your blog, they’re expecting to easily find your latest content.

This doesn’t mean that your blog needs to be on your homepage. You can choose to use a Recent Posts plugin to display the headlines and excerpts from your latest blog posts.

Deep-Linking and Sitemap Link in the Footer

The best way to make sure that every page on your site is within three clicks of the homepage is to subtly link to your category archives and sitemap in the footer.

This also helps from a usability standpoint if people are looking for posts on particular topics.

Good Example: IncomeDiary.com

As you see, Michael showcases the latest posts on the Income Diary homepage because his goal is for you to consume as much content as possible. The more blog posts you read, the more likely you are to subscribe and buy something from him. In the footer, he links to the sitemap, category archives, a few popular posts, and author archives.

The Final Word

Blogs are different from traditional, static websites because almost everyone who sees your homepage has already seen a different part of your blog.

It’s important to adjust the content of your homepage knowing that they’re already interested in what you have to say. Whether it’s leads, subscribers, or sales, the homepage is a great place to convert people to whatever goals that you set for your blog.

How does this help you see your homepage in a new light? What are you going to do about it?

Read more: ‘7 Quick Tips to Make Your Blog Design More Readable’

The post What to Put on Your Blog’s Homepage appeared first on How To Make Money Online.