Tired of low conversion rates and fluctuating or low income, no matter how hard you hustle?
Been there!
It took me years to dial in website optimization, I didn’t even know the word to Google when I first started!
Not many people know this, but there are 7 core places within your website and your funnel that make all the difference in your business.
These 7 core places are where you generate leads and convert leads into sales. This is where you ultimately grow your business.
These are money creating spaces that are make or break for your income!
We’ll go through each of these 7 core places, so you’ll be able to find out how to optimize each one to propel your online business success.
What is Website Optimization and Why Is It Important?
Website optimization is where you continually adapt to incrementally improve the key performance indicators that drive the income for your business. An optimized website will work on autopilot for your company, continuously delivering you leads and sales.
Content is critical, but if your content does not convert and earn you money, you will eventually have to get a J.O.B. and quit pursuing your passion.Gone are the information marketing days when you could just blog and make money, you have to catch up to the times and turn your website into a well-oiled lead and sales generating machine.
7 Best Website Optimization Techniques & Tools
Before my wife and I understood website optimization and figured out why we were struggling with consistent income, we almost tossed in the towel.
We were blogging and did not yet have a handle on the ways to optimize our website for conversions.
In a drafty cabin one winter we looked at each other and said “Is this worth it? Should we just focus on advancement in our jobs and toss this dream to the side?”
Not fully knowing what we were missing, we decided to commit to the business and figure out how to make it work.
How did we go from inconsistent income to consistent income?
It took many thousands of dollars in courses, and many years of trial and error but we finally learned what we were missing. We weren’t making a priority of optimizing our website for conversions.
And now it’s your turn! No more wasted effort. Begin generating results! Watch this video where I walk you through these 7 core places and read more about each of these website optimization techniques below.
Apply these website optimization techniques to grow the lifestyle business you want to create!
1. Opt-In Funnel
Do you have an email list going?
If YES, how quickly is it growing?
If NO... WHAAAAT??? You’re missing out, my friend!
This is the absolute first step in optimizing your online business growth!
Whether you’re blogging through WordPress or creating an audience on YouTube, you need to be growing an email list.
How you go about this list-building thing depends on the content method you’re using.
If you’re starting out with a podcast or YouTube, your homepage could actually be your opt-in page.
If you’re going all in with the written word and doing blogging with WordPress, then you need a sub-page to place your opt-in page in.
For example, mine is at milesbeckler.com/free-course. So my homepage is not my opt-in page.
When I was first getting started with my YouTube channel, I was barely able to put out a video!
It took me 6-months to be at a place, in my head, where I could create my first lead magnet.
So you gotta get that opt-in page up and running, here are the some of the internet's great optin pages to model.
2. Split Test Your Opt-In Page
“Miles, do I REALLY need to split test?”
It is a “really”. If you want to optimize your income and reach your business goals.
Did you know that Facebook split tests their platform continually? Still today?
They have to dial in how to get people to spend the most time on their platform to keep showing more ads.
Amazon split tests. Walmart. McDonald’s. Every huge company does split tests.
And you have to do the same.
When split testing, there are a three basic things that you need to focus on:
Your Offer
What’s good about testing your offers is that you get to weed out the weak ones from the solid ones.
It took me 3 offers to dial in a successful one for my business.
First I created an offer called “Abundance Meditation”, which was followed by a “Facebook Case Study”. So I had two active offers, and when I split tested to check which one’s performing better, I found out it was the “Facebook Case Study”.
After some time, I introduced my free course, and did another split test. So among all three offers, it turned out that my free course was performing the best.
It takes running multiple offers and testing them against one another to find that right offer that your audience connects with, but once you dial that in, that’s where you begin to seriously increase your lead conversion.
Once data determines the offer you need to put on your opt-in, you move the next place to optimize.
Your Headline/ Copy
Next, you want to split test the headline on your optin page.
Is your headline conveying the burning desire of your audience?
Is it attracting your audience and generating leads for you?
Just because you think you’ve came up with the best headline ever that doesn’t mean you should stick to it forever.
There may be an even better headline that you haven’t been using, and once that idea comes to you, then you gotta test it out and check if it could get more clicks than the old one.
Changing just one word in my main businesses opt-in page increased conversions by 23%!
Yes it is that DRASTIC of a difference when it comes to a 7-10 word headline!
Gotta split test your headlines!
Your Layout
How does your current optin page look?
When you look at it, do you feel drawn to it? OR is it kind of like, BLAH, at best?
Actually, it doesn’t matter what you think, what matters is does it convert or does it miss?
Split test your layout, go simple, go fancy, go green, go blue, go triangles, go squares, a picture of you, a picture of nature. You gotta test the layout, test the design to discover what converts for your customers.
Here’s a video on 3 of the best converting pages on Clickbank to show you what I mean.
So while you’re split testing these three things, one after another, you gotta continue with the content creation and content marketing side of your business.
Don’t stop putting out that content because that’s what fuels your traffic and what your audience needs from you.
3. Content Overlays
This website optimization technique is most important when you’re doing the written word content creation or blogging.
Or if you have a system that turns your podcasts into blog posts, or your YouTube videos into blog posts.
Basically, if people are consuming content on your site as opposed to YouTube or podcast. You can use the same headline here that you would use on your optin page.
If you’re doing YouTube videos or podcasts, a content overlay is something you don’t really need because it’s only applicable to the written word.
So, when you are at a point when you can add it in, what you can do is to have your videos or audio transcribed, get these up as well-written blog posts, then you can use a popup for your offers or whatever content overlay you prefer.
You want to start putting out written content if you haven’t been doing it yet, because it’s what can help you become more visible on Google. And that’s an important element of content marketing.
This can be much more effective than an opt-in page once you get it optimized.
Here are the content overlay options.
Popup
It’s the thing that shows up when you go to a page, and you’re 5, 6 seconds in, when a message pops up in the screen, offering you a free thing.
That’s what you call a popup that you can either opt-in or click X if you’re not interested in the offer.
Welcome Gate
The welcome gate is where the offer covers the whole page whenever someone lands on the page and a person needs to opt-in or scroll down or click X to get to the page content.
Ribbons
These don’t take over the entire screen but appear at the top or bottom bar and are viewed while someone is viewing the page content.
Fly-In
A fly-in is a type of content overlay that shows up an offer once you get to a page and spent a couple of seconds in it.
Fly-ins often appear once the user scrolls down the page a bit and can then see them popping up.
4. Custom Homepage
If blogging is your content origination method, and you have a blog post going, then you need a custom homepage.
If you’re just doing YouTube or podcast, then your custom homepage is your only page.
So what’s good about this page?
It’s the page people visit whenever they find deep links during their search on Google. For example: they use keywords relevant to the ones you have for your pages, then they stumble upon your website by typing in the words.
I would put an opt-in above the fold. Why?
This way, each time your homepage loads, there’s an opt-in right up top.
My wife and I are actually executing this, and it works really well for us.
Pretty weird, because in our case, it’s not our homepage that is found more by people. Instead, it’s our deep links that people find when they do a Google search. But then a homepage comes in handy when users go look and want to know who you are after reading your awesome posts.
Just want to add in real quick another important place on your website that you gotta have for optimization purposes:
Blog Roll
Essentially, it’s a self-updating area that’s constantly re-introducing people to your latest blog post.
It shows the recent 6 or 9 blog posts on your website, which gives visitors a quick look at what you’re posting about. You can check out my blogroll and see it in action on milesbeckler.com, which is my custom homepage.
Actually, the main purpose of a blogroll on your homepage is for those Google spiders.
When the bots come crawling on your site, they go check if anything’s been changed starting with your home page.
Google will index your content more fast with a blog role being updated on your homepage.
5. Sales Page
Got a membership program going?
Or maybe some kind of an online/ tutorial course?
Then you gotta have a sales page!
This is the page you put up when you’re providing a service or selling a product to your audience whether it’s coaching, consultation, a membership program, or some kind of a fixed duration product like a video course or an online course.
Again, you split test this page. There are three things you can test on your sales page:
- You can split test your offer and find out if more people want an eBook, video course, etc.
- Video sales letter vs. text sales letter
- Headline
So the idea is you start your optin page and get it up and running, then you get your offer and headline dialed in…
Then create your custom sales funnel off of this sales funnel template and rock and roll!
6. One-Click Upsell
Your one-click upsell is displayed after the user checks out.
At this point, you have someone who has become the lead, then they go in and see your offers for one of your paid products, and they go through the checkout process.
When they’re in the checkout process, their credit card payment remains open, and you present a second offer to them.
They can either click “yes” and add that second product to their order or “no” and complete the payment process and close the transaction without adding that other product.
Split testing once again has that special role in your one-click upsell where you test your offer, your copy or your headline, and your video sales letter.
If you use a video for your one-click upsell, you gotta keep it short and sweet. The maximum length is 3 minutes. Make it a long, drawn out video, and you lose the attention of your audience.
7. Custom Child Theme
This is last on the list on purpose.
So essentially, your custom child theme is the overall look of the blog.
Some people think that it’s the ultimate, most important thing about their blog and they don’t want to publish anything until they got their child theme dialed in.
But that’s so backwards.
Your child theme IS important but that DOESN’T mean you gotta keep your content marketing on hold, OR dial this in before your creating content.
The steps to success in an online business is to FIRST put out the content, and once you have a big bulk of content, THEN you can start customizing your theme.
Get your content out daily, keep working on it, then you can pretty up your website with a good-looking theme.
Never ever sacrifice your content, leaving your blog empty, just because you’re too focused on setting up your theme. That is so backwards to what successful people do.
Successful people focus on putting out the CONTENT FIRST! And once they have a bunch of content, they've got their five core pages, plus 10 to 20 blog posts, then it’s the time to think about customizing the theme, and not before!
NOW you decide how to build in ad placements (essentially short codes) so you can add your opt-in to every blog post without having to manually do so.
Those ads simply promote your products and your opt-ins.
You build a custom child theme in a way that these ad placements are embedded into every single post.
So all you do is focused on typing your post and when your posts goes live, it's got an internal ad for your opt-ins and an internal ad for one of your products. And it's got a couple of short code areas built into it that further promotes your optin.
So when a visitor finds your content, they're seeing a lot of the different options that you offer them.
While you’re being productive and creating content daily, you gotta think about your ad placement in your child theme.
How to Get Maximum Website Optimization Results
“Miles, can I do website optimization as a one-man/ one-woman show in my business?”
You can but I don’t recommend that at all.
The battle cry of successful business owners is this:
Divide and conquer.
That’s how my wife and I play the game! There are two types of entrepreneurs and we each happen to be married to the one that each of us need!
We work together to get things done and have our team on-board to help us pretty much accomplish all our goals faster and more efficiently.
So I’m the behind the scenes guy, making sure all the tech side of things are ironed out, working smoothly and going full steam ahead.
Meanwhile, Melanie focuses on pounding it out and creating content every single day, creating the products, the YouTube videos and social posts.
We divide and conquer, and that’s how we get to tick every box in our to-do list each day.
Working alongside us is our integration guy Dave Wooding, whom I’ve known for several years, and he’s done a tremendous amount of work for our business.
He helped me migrate my website off of Clickfunnels onto WordPress, and it’s working better than ever before.
#crushingit
Work on Website Optimization and Keep Your Content Marketing Going
There you have the 7 core places, on YOUR website, that you can optimize to help you generate hundreds and thousands of leads.
My wife and I have focused on each of these areas, which has helped us accumulate tens and thousands of leads and $739,578.15 in SamCart sales.
It’s not an overnight success but the sooner you begin the work, the sooner you can reap the results of your hard work and effort.
So go RIGHT NOW and take a look at the 7 core places in YOUR WEBSITE that you GOTTA optimize to boost your success. Start the work sooner rather than later.
Divide and conquer, keep flexing your content creation muscle, and let me know in the comments below if you need more tips that can further help you supercharge your business success!