12 ways to maintain your website and increase sales


Are you a business owner, a blogger or a freedom business specialist? Does your business have a website? Today, every Tom, Dick and Harry in town owns a website. But what separates the chimps form the champs? What can make your customers feel that your business is legit? How can they trust you and if you are a blogger, how can you gain more followers?  

In this blog post, I am going to give you 12 ways in which you can drastically improve the trust elements of your website and how these changes will help you increase sales. Having a website is important, but the key factor in sustaining online is maintenance. If you are not periodically maintaining your website, this article is a must read. By just maintaining your website on a regular basis, you can profoundly leap ahead of your competition and dominate the market.   

In this blog, we will show you examples of top performing websites and how they constantly ship update as often as twice a day. But what exactly should you be updating? How can you make sure that the changes you are making are good changes or bad ones. Here is the list of 12 things you can do right now to keep your website high performing.
 
1. Improve the copy on your website
Copy is nothing but written content on your website. Most websites have such BORING copy. The simplest way to improve the copy on your website is to follow a simple formula. 

1. ATTENTION 
2. PROBLEM DEFINITION
3. AMAZING ATTAINABLE SOLUTION
4. PROOF AND CREDIBILITY
5. CALL TO ACTION

The best way to grab attention on your website is to call out the PAIN elements of your customers. Your service or product is most likely solving a pain point. If you can grab their attention in a form of a strong statement or powerful question, you can definitely grab your users attention. For e.g. you can say:

Are you struggling with ....
Do you feel frustrated with ....
Imagine never having a headache ...
Have you ever ....

Starting with a question, is one great way to capture a users attention. The 2nd, is to use pain words like:

Frustrated
Headache
Agony 
Pain
Grief
Torture
Hurt
Shattered

The more you can pin point the emotional feel of your customers, you can capture their attention very easily. Having talked about attention, the next thing is to describe the problem vividly. Describe to them what exactly is the problem. If you can describe your customers problem better than they can describe it, you are building trust and engagement. After which, you need to describe how your product or service will be a great solution to their pain, give you proof and credibility and finally ask them to take some action

This simple formula  can drastically help improve the copy on your website. You can always try to improve the copy once in few months to make it even stronger, better and engaging. 

2. Improve speed
Improving the copy on your website will always help to build on engagement. BUT many websites even if they have great content, if the load time is too slow, your users are not going to have  a great experience. Every once in a while, check if your website can be improved. Remove slow performing plugins, reduce the size of your images, make sure  your website is not loaded with too many iframe elements or advertisements. By making your site perform faster, you will drastically increase the trust element and users will also have a great experience using it.   

3. Improve user interface
Make sure people can navigate through your site easily. Make sure they can find what they need on your site a smooth experience. If they cannot find what they want, they might get frustrated. The last thing you want is your users to feel frustrated in finding information on your website.   

4. Improve user experience
This is where you should always try to maximize your periodic maintenance. Many websites have poor navigation elements. Sometimes, links don't work, or the header is too big, text fonts are too small, text is not legible. By periodically improving the user experience on your website, you will be able to gradually increase the conversion rate from visitors to customers.    

5. Keep adding valuable content (blog)
One of the best ways to keep your blog up to date is by posting valuable content. Many websites have a blog section, but most websites don't maximize the potential of their blog. By writing content that your customers want to read is a great way to get started in writing high quality blogs. 

Blogging is more like farming rather than hunting. By constantly adding valuable content, you slowly would start to be an authority in your customers eyes. You would start to build a reputation, a following and authority. It is one of the best ways to become and be perceived as an expert in your domain. 

6. Fix bugs periodically
No website is perfect. At the end of the day every website is a software application. Keep updating your software and upgrading it. It makes your website more secure, new updates would fix glitches and improve performance

7. Improve on your marketing online and offline 
To promote your business you need to market online as well as offline. A combination of both can be very useful. For e.g you can do referral marketing, content marketing, social medial marketing, direct mail campaign, pay per click advertisements, etc. The more you market the more you will be inclined to update your online presence. 

8. Update pictures
Don't keep the same picture on your website for too long. Keep updating it. Add infographics, or stock pictures. But periodically improve the look and feel of your website. 

9. Update videos
If you do not have videos on your website, highly recommend using videos.as a form of showing your content. Many users might prefer to watch a video rather than read. Having videos can cater to such audience.  

10. Update content
Make sure you are presenting your content using different methods. You can add images, infographics, video or even have a completely different way of presenting content like  a flash animation or an interactive infographic.  

11. Make it mobile and tablet friendly
Is you website easy to view on mobile and on tablets? May users are now browsing on their mobile phones. Make your site work well on all devices. This can drastically help improve the experience on your website. 

12. Persuasion
After following the steps above, would you be able to increase the conversion rate of your website? The updates might work, but there is a deeper underlying reason what makes website's sell. It is how you influence your visitors and persuade them to become your customers. This is the goal of your website and website maintenance helps to improve and fine tune persuasion. 

There are 6 main elements that can help you to influence people through your website. From the book, power of influence by Robert Cialdini, 
1. Reciprocity
2. Authority
3. Liking
4. Scarcity
5. Social Proof
6. Commitment and Consistency

Conclusion:  

Please comment below if you have questions, ideas or how you can apply it. At ANTSAND, we apply everything we preach and teach. What we put out is based on our experience, our failures and success. We love to be transparent, as it really brings out the best in us. 

We will soon be creating a $5 monthly marketing package for our readers. You can pay us for one cup of coffee every month, and in turn we give you strategies, ideas, tactics, mindsets and exercises, you can apply in your business immediately. If you want to know more about it, just type in the comments below, "Coffee with ANTSAND". We would love to hear your feedback.

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Written by Anthony Shivakumar
Founder, Lead Marketing and Software Developer at ANTSAND

Anthony has a Master Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has worked in major software firms for the past 15 years and currently runs his own software and marketing company.

He continues to write articles related to marketing, programming, sales and growth hacking.

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