As a web designer, I can appreciate the hard knocks small business owners experience when launching their first products or services.  Many have worked hard to create great web content for their customers.  They have put together sales pages and articles, asked for criticism, worked through all the issues.  They have been brave, leading webinars, publishing papers, blogging often, building a following, and ultimately, launching a new item.

Nobody wants to face it. But it happens to many new offers:  no sales.

First, Give Yourself Credit for Having the Courage to Stand Up

Putting up a new product or service takes courage.  It takes guts to put your hard work in the marketplace and be exposed to the risk of the dreaded silence from buyers.

Why, despite all your best efforts, does your product suffer this fate?  Why should your product not succeed as well as the guru’s around the corner? How can the guru sell out of a $2000 product in a few hours, which may be a mere transcript of a seminar, while your hard work languishes?

You put just as much work into your product as the big-name authority around the corner.  So what is the difference?

The problem isn’t about your product.  Most likely it’s about the fit with what your market wants.

A smart businessperson falls in love with the market, not the product. Fall in love with your buyers. Watch them, listen to them, cherish them. Figure out ways to surprise and delight them.

This advice from Sonia Simone in The 3-Step Cure fo No-Sales Syndrome sounds good.  But how do you learn what your customers really want?

How can you learn from no sales?

When You Sell Nothing, You Can Learn 3 Things That Make You Stronger

Turns out, you can learn (at least) 3 key things from a product with no sales.

Insight 1: Check how much other buying is going on to meet the same need

Weigh the competition serving the same basic needs.  Check whether there is a lot of competition for an offer like yours.  Simone suggests looking for basic human desires: status, feeling safe, better power to attract. Are there other products like yours, designed for the same needs in the marketplace?  If not, it’s a good sign you may be pitching to a market that won’t support you — because it isn’t supporting anyone else.

How do other products promise to serve the basic needs of your target customers?   Those needs are the ones people are paying money to satisfy.  You’re seeing the vitality in your market.

Insight 2:  Learn to write more directly to answer a buyer’s need

When you’re ready, see if you can feel out what buyers in your market think they need. This is what they want.  It may not be what they really need.  When you have what you think is a good guess, reverse-engineer a product for that need.  Simone calls this the “Minimum Viable Product.”  It’s a way to test whether your idea for a product will work.  What if this doesn’t sell either?  Check your copy writing.  That’s your ability to help your customer see himself in a better world, with your words.  A quick formula for writing that should improve your results: The 1-2-3-4 Formula for Persuasive Copy.

Now check.  With real people — in the real world, inexpensively. In Testing Your Website Before Launching, Ian Dooley recommends a great way to get meaningful objective feedback at very low cost

• Pick Fu: this service is based on Mechanical Turk but provides a framework for getting feedback on any question in an “A/B” fashion (ie. which logo do you like best?), and the promise of “$5.00 for 50 opinions” up the top of the page was just too good to pass up!

Insight 3:  Invent trial balloons to test your fit without burning yourself out

Simone suggests taking on weekend-sized projects to come up with a product to test your fit.  You can learn a lot about your audience and your market even with a few results.  Let it go — write a landing page, email your contacts, blog, share it.

This isn’t the most comfortable process.  It’s a process of picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and starting over.  Only, the tactic is to make smaller efforts at a time.  Efforts you can sustain, repeat, and learn from.

I like the ‘product in a weekend’ idea. Do you?  I wonder how many guides there are in the marketplace for creating a high-value information product quickly.  My guess is there is a strong market for guides to creating downloadable products that sell.  To take my own advice, a good place for me to start would be to check how many guides to ‘create and sell downloadable products’ are already selling well.

Want an engaging website? Show value to visitors within the first 10 seconds.

How long do you have to make a good first impression on your website?  I always thought it was 3 seconds.  But now we have new insight from Jakob Nielsen’s article about page abandonment time. Here are hard data showing that within the first 10 seconds, most website visitors decide whether to stay or leave.

What’s happening the instant your website visitor arrives?

If you look at visit time in your analytics program, you may see that the majority of visits last mere moments.    People are looking for a reason to stay. Website visitors start with extremely low expectations.  Your page is presumed useless unless you show otherwise at a glance.  Your job is to prove instantly there’s a reason to keep reading.  Nielsen says it best:

The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

To engage website visitors, overcome low expectations first

What do you get after 10 seconds?  It turns out, you earn the same amount of time to do the same thing.  You get another few moments of decision time.  To engage people, your job is to quickly move website visitors from harshly judging your content, toward deciding to stay with it.

After about 20 seconds, the rate at which people leave your page sharply goes down.  After 30 seconds, the remaining visitors go away much more gradually.  That’s what Nielsen means by the negative aging effect. Website traffic lasting more than half a minute is less likely to go away.  You can see it in the curve Nielsen has drawn from the data:

After the first 10 seconds, more website visitors choose to stay instead of leave

After a visitor  chooses to stay engaged for 20 seconds, you’ve made a sort of conversion.  You have weeded your “web traffic” into engaged visitors.

Summary:
Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution.

via How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

How do you get visitors to give you more time?

Your content leverages time.  First, your content must show your visitor the most desired benefit – instantly.  Then, you and your offer must be credible. Your tone, image and promise must be something your readers choose to believe.

The job of designing and building a website is to share content that’s meaningful and believable.  That’s why I’m here - your questions about how to get longer website visits are welcome here or in the comments:

When writing for the web, you want to get positive attention and prompt people to respond.  How do you write web copy that increases conversions (visitors taking the action you want)? Here are 5 elements you can start using in your blog posts and web pages now, to make them stronger tools for promoting your business and resonating with your target market.

1.  Know exactly who your target customer is and speaking directly to that person.  Your website isn’t for everybody. It’s for people at a certain place in work or life.  Speak to that situation and those needs, with your unique response.

Here is a funny and insightful video that makes clear why knowing your target market is a must  (thanks to Marcia Yudkin of Marketing for More for pointing this out.)

2.  Use plain language.  In his post 8 Tips for Selling with Social Media, Mike Schultz says: When some people gear up their bravery for outreach, they think, “I’m about to reach out to a big-time person. I need to seem big time too!”

Resist this temptation.  Techno-babble and stiff, bureaucratic writing are big problems. Many business owners seeking website help are publishing text at a post-graduate reading level.   But 8-9^th grade is best for speed-reading on the web.

Some businesses seem to favor bulky phrases like “optimizing net operating efficiency as your workflow solutions partner.” Likewise, using acronyms is not helpful, but common. This doesn’t sound or look impressive.  Big words obscure your value.  Be real: Simple obvious language exposes your ideas instead of obscuring them.  (Mike adds: “Don’t try to come off as the BMOC. “  I had to look that up: It means “Big Man On Campus” Did you know that already?)

3.  Work with the way people search.  Use the words your customer uses in key places in your content.  Search Engine Optimization is the industry phrase for placing search terms strategically so more target customers find you when searching.  Know the simple basics and use them.

Use keywords to help people searching to find you.  The basics: Give each page its own title; do not use the same title on other pages on your site.  Put the most important words (key words) at the very beginning of the title.  Create a description for your page, leading with your keywords for that page. Place a link to related content (yours or someone else’s) using another version of the key phrase you want to match when your people are searching.  If you don’t know how to control the Title, Description or link text on your page, take a basic course on Search Engine Optimization, or hire a webmaster who knows how to place your search terms effectively.  Thanks to Chris Elmore of Elmore e-business for this reminder

4.   Give clear leads (a Call to Action).  Tell people what you want them to do next.  In other words, include a Call to Action. In the famous book for business owners, Don’t Make Me Think, Steven Krug urges people to make your message and the action you want very plain to people.  If you want people to contact you for services, show them how do this in your marketing materials. Offer easy links to reach you in your newsletter, pdf, or author bio when guest posting.  Put “call to action” on your checklist!  Even seasoned pros forget to do this (I just read a newsletter without a single link to the author’s own website.)

5.  Use a professional quality site design: Your website has to be easy to use.  Your design has to make your content easy to understand at a glance.  Your contact information must be easy to find.  For every page, the title and description must be tagged correctly with HTML to work properly with search engines.  And the visual impression has to reflect well on your business.  Using a professionally designed and configured website will go a long way in attracting and connecting with potential customers.

Here is a checklist to help you look over a page quickly for core conversion content:

Checklist: 5 Elements for Writing Web Content for Better Conversions

1. Speak directly to the target customer (use “you”; describe the need; show the results of working with you;)
2. Use plain language (test your content in a reading-ease score tool)
3. Use good, basic search engine Optimization (Use your customer’s terms they use when seeking information.  Put them early in the Title, Description, and a link early in your opening text).
4. Tell people what to do next: reach out with your contact information and a call to action
5. Use a website designed with best practices for: (a) meaningful speed-reading and, (b) strong search engine results for your target keywords

By checking to include 5 simple ingredients, you improve the power of your website to promote your business.

And finally, her is the call to action:

Get 1 free idea to improve how your web page works for your target audience:

Email me your web page address and I’ll email you your personal free tip — one that you can act on right now.

Is this some kind of trick?  No.  There’s no catch.  You won’t get any sales pitch.  And I won’t even sign you up for any future messages (you have to sign yourself up).

The point is to show you how I can help you.  If you like what you see, the hope is you’ll contact me for more information about ways to help your business even more.

Today – June 28, 2011, I see a client’s site has been hacked — and all that comes up is a message ending: Hackerler Vurur Lamerler Surunur!!:)

Here is a screenshot of the entire hacking impact:

Site down due to hacking - we can fix this

WordPress site hacked? So what to do?

First, I did a web search on the last line of the hacker’s message: Hackerler Vurur Lamerler Surunur!!:) and the phrase “how to fix” (without quotes)

That showed about 14,000 results.  One of the results showed how to fix it

I was lucky.  The fix in this case was simply to put up a new clean copy of the theme.

However, it is necessary to prepare for the further step of restoring the database.  Therefore, these are the steps I took (and recommend) before you take any steps to recover from a hacked WordPress website:

1. download a copy of the database (go to the web host and use phpmyadmin, or use a backup tool your web host provides, most likely on the control panel of your hosting account)
2. download a copy of your public_html files, or website files (use FTP or a tool on your hosting account control panel)
3. log in to the hacked site if possible. View and copy all widget content into notepad – so you can restore them after a clean installation is set up (widgets are not stored in the database)
4. Make a list of all the plugins in place
5. Download the zipfile of the most recent release of the theme in use
6. Delete the .htaccess file for your website on your web host
7. Delete the files in the active theme of the hacked site
8. Upload the zipfile of a clean copy of the theme and activate it
9. Check to see if the content is visible and the hacked content is gone

Now that my content is back, it’s vital to take steps to prevent this from happening again.  So I am changing the username and passwords to log into the WordPress dashboard.

If at first you don’t succeed – there’s more you can do to recover

You may need to take further steps to restore your hacked WordPress website.  Here is a post, recommended in the wordpress.org FAQ on recovering from being hacked to help you do this:

Reading How To Completely Clean Hour Hacked WordPress Installation byMichael VanDeMar

My big lesson:
1) Make sure I have robust usernames and passwords for the wp administrator login
2) Make sure I have a regular backup program in place – and activated. WordPress has plenty of plugins to do this
3) Keep the WordPress core and theme files up to date
4) Stay informed about WordPress’s own guidelines for security, right here.

I hope you never need to recover from a hack attack. But if you have to, take heart. Protect yourself and set things up so you can recover if you must.