Monday 3 February 2014

Exit Splash Review

Exit Splash is a piece of software that you can add to your website to help increase your exit traffic conversion rate, it is much more than a simple popup script. David Guindon, the creator of Exit Splash, implemented the following features: a warning window that asks if your visitor if they are sure that they want to leave; a visual image that gives your visitor an alternative to leaving; an audio message to persuade your visitor to take action; a final page that offers a discount to increase the chance of a sale.




Improving Conversion Rates
You might be asking your self right now that why should i buy a website exit soft ware but the major benefit is Improving Conversion Rates and this is one of the best ways you can do this great task.

After you have optimised your website and attracted a large number of inbound links by one means or another. The results of this are that your site now appears on the first page of the top three search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo, for your chosen keywords or phrases. You have cracked it! Now you are getting hundreds of visitors a day to your website. Unfortunately very few are staying to browse your site and even fewer are purchasing your products or enquiring after the services you offer.

You must look closely at your site to find the reason behind this if you wish to improve your conversion rates. There are two immediate actions you can take. Have you optimised your site for the search engines or your visitors? You should always optimise your site for your visitors as they will provide you with your income not the search engines. The search engines are simply a means to an ends.

It is better to have twenty visitors to your site 15 of whom purchase a product or service than it is to have 500 of whom only 5 make a purchase. When developing your site keep in mind your potential customers and put text into the site that they will appreciate, like and find informative. Never write your copy with the search engines in mind and those omnipotent algorithms. Algorithms do not make enquiries or purchases people do.

If your copy is attractive and readable and encourages real people to contact you or buy a product then it is highly likely to be equally attractive to the search engines. When writing your copy you should not be trying to ‘sell’ your product or service with blatant over the top advertising. Be more subtle. You are fulfilling a wish or a need or solving a problem so be informative. People have carried out a specific search so the need is already there you have to now give them the information they need to convince them to purchase of you. So as always the content is the key to making sales as well as attracting the attention of the search engines.

You must work hard at getting this content right. The second line of investigation is to analyse your sites visitor statistics carefully Look at each visitor and how they arrived at your site. That is what search terms did they use? What page did they land on? What pages did they navigate through? What page did they exit on? What area of the World or country did they come from? If they made no enquiry or purchase, look at their search phrase, and where on your site they went, and attempt to calculate why they left without making that enquiry or purchase. Was it because their search was not appropriate for ypour actual product or service? Do you not perhaps provide your service to their particular area? Did they miss or could not find exactly what they wanted on your site because of badly designed navigation paths? Or is it perhaps because the text is simply not up to standard?

If you think it is a structural problem then you can alter this so that people find it easier to navigate to places on the site that they actually want. It may also be a matter of your content so you can change this.

By constantly monitoring your site’s statistics you can dramatically increase your conversion rates, that is, convert more of your visitors into paying customers. Finally do keep note of what you do so that you can accurately monitor the changes you make to find out if and by how much they are making a difference.




Popunder Traffic

Many webmasters, including myself have a dislike for popups, popunders, exit consoles, and the like. In the early days of the Internet they were the tactics used by unscrupulous and unethical webmasters, some of which created popup/under after popup/under in an endless stream that at times ended up crashing a user’s browser.

This gave all popups and popunders a bad reputation. So bad in fact, that a whole industry cropped up to create software that blocks both popups and popunders. Microsoft has even installed a popup blocker right into its latest version of Internet Explorer.

A ton of articles have been written about the evil of using popups and popunders and enough people have downloaded and installed some form of popup blocker that most of the unscrupulous webmasters have moved onto other methods. (Such as installing spyware on user’s computers as they enter a website, but we will leave that subject for a future article.)

There are of course still webmasters out there who misuse every tool that comes along. They will not put the same effort into making money legitimately on the web as they will to create ways to trick people into clicking something. These people will always find a way to cheat with any new or old technology that comes along.

However, there are many legitimate companies and honest webmasters that use the same technology to serve their customers in a good way.

I still have to be convinced that popups will ever be a good idea. I don’t like popups of any variety. The normal popups that jump up in front of the page I am trying to view irritate me. The ones that slide in from the side or the top or the bottom of the page annoy me as do the webmasters that claim those aren’t really popups. They don’t deserve a new name.

The newest version I really hate is the glossy ad that covers half the page over the website I want to see and you are forced to click or view the ad for the time they have allotted to it before you are allowed to see the website. I know, when you watch TV you cannot just click off the commercials and these are not different, but this isn’t TV. On TV I have a limited number of channels top switch to. Even if you have satellite TV you are still much more limited compared to the number of websites I can go to instead of waiting for your ad to finish loading.

Another “creative” type of popup is the “offcenter” popup. The one where you have to drag the window over before you can close it. Or the ones with no “x” to click to shut it down. The gurus that created these codes probably think they are really really smart and creative. Some people have way too much time on their hands and need to get a life. What do they think? “Wow, I don’t see a way to close this window. How creative! Now I must buy what they are selling!” Right.

What I have seen though is legitimate companies and webmasters that are using popunders to drive traffic in a good way. They only use one popunder per visitor. They don’t create an endless stream of them. They don’t place them offcenter or create them so they cannot be closed.

These popunders do not cover the page I am trying to view. I can close them if I do not want to visit the page being advertised. They are asking users to click something related to where the visitor just came from, so they might actually be interested in the website advertised in the popunder.

As a user, I am not bothered by these and sometimes I click through to the website being advertised if I have an interest in it. Why webmasters would want to fool me into going to a website I have no interest in is beyond me. If I am not coming there to buy something I am just using their bandwidth.

I applaud the companies that have taken the advertising by popunder to a legitimate level and will pay attention to these ads in the future. I have changed my mind about at least the use of popunders.



10 Things You Should Be Monitoring On Your Website


Every business needs to know how it is doing. That’s the idea behind exit surveys, customer feedback forms, suggestion boxes and other devices. Without feedback from the customer, monitoring inventory, expenses, revenue and other benchmarks, a business can take a quick slide down a slippery slope, without the owner ever seeing it coming – or being able to stop the slide.

Webmasters also have things they should be monitoring on their websites. Most of these can be classified as traffic related or server performance related. Here is my top ten list.

1. Monitoring website traffic
Traffic totals. You want to know how much traffic you are generating. If the line on the graph is heading down, you know you have to find out why.

Referrers.
It’s not enough just to know how many visitors you are getting. You need to know where they are coming from. I discovered I was getting a lot of visitors from a Thanksgiving site. They were all being funneled into my Thanksgiving Happiness article. Suddenly I knew I should get more links from other Thanksgiving sites. Valuable information.

Searches.
Much to my surprise, my happiness site started getting a ridiculous number of hits from the search for “hairdressers”. It just so happens I wrote a humor column on a hairdresser experience. I was surprised to see it getting so much traffic for such a generic, competitive search term. If that had been a term of a little more relevance for me, this information would have lead me to properly optimize the page and get even more traffic.

Pages viewed per visit.
If people visit only one page per visit, you have some work to convince them to visit more pages, like those that make you money.

Pages visited.
So you threw up on your site something cool as an add-on. How were you to know that other webmasters would link to it and send a whole bunch of traffic your way? Well, now you know, so add some copy to the page to pull visitors into the rest of your site.



2. Monitoring website performance

Forms.
Are they all functioning? A good website monitoring service can keep tabs on them for you. The last thing you want is to have lost hundreds or thousands of subscribers because a sign-up form stopped functioning

Shopping carts.
Slow and complicated shopping carts are responsible for an estimated $25 billion in lost sales. Make sure yours is functioning properly. A good website monitoring service can watch this for you, too.

Download speed.
Clear your cache and test your pages. Hmm. Maybe those images are a bit large. Time to compress them, or even remove some. Remember that some people are on a much slower connection than you are. I use a satellite connection sometimes, but when I don’t, my connection speed is 28K.

Server speed.
Are there problems with server speed? Maybe not where you are, but on the other side of the world. Global website monitoring can alert you to a transatlantic connection problem, so you can take it up with your web hosting service.

Server accessibility.
All the web hosts promise 99% accessibility. But is that for real? Who monitors them? By one estimate, 75% of inaccessibility is not on the hosting server, but rather on the Internet’s backbone network and in global routing. A global website monitoring service can help identify the problem, so that you can work with your web hosting company to resolve it before too many sales are lost.


Fun.
If you are not having fun, audition for that drummer position in the local band. There is no point spending your life doing something that bores you. Webmastering should be fun.

All in all, you can also learn how to get paid to review products online by clicking here

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