3 Money-Murdering Mistakes that are Hurting Your Website's Conversions.

Look.

I need to be brutally honest here.

Not all websites are made equal.

Yea, I said it.

Some sit there, draining precious business resources—your time, your money, your energy and produce next to nothing in results(except stress and hassle).

While other websites, when done right, can be ruthless money-generating machines, raking in fresh clients for you every single month without you having to lift a finger.

Call it a money tree if you will because if you set your website up properly, it will grow you juicy cash flows ripe for picking.

But before we can get your website to produce sales like clockwork, first we need to talk about mindset, which cleanly transitions into the very first mistake you could make on your website.

Read ahead to learn the 3 ways your website is losing you sales and how to effectively solve them.

The very first and quite possibly the worst mistake you can make on your website is:

1) Hiring a Website Designer(or designing your site like a web designer would).

Now, this might seem a little crazy. “A web design company telling me not to hire web design?” and while this might sound counterintuitive and like we are putting ourselves out of business, we still stand by this principle.

Think for a moment, you’ve had the amazing idea of growing your online presence and you start working towards your business’s face on the internet—a website. You can already imagine other people going on your website and looking at everything your business offers… but let’s pause for a second.

What exactly do you want your website to do?

While it’s up on the web, grabbing eyeballs, what sort of outcome is your website supposed to achieve?

Is it supposed to be like a work of art that showcases the prestige of your business with how modern, minimalistic, and sleek it is? While these types of sites look good they have the functionality of a paint job on a car. Shiny on the outside and will grab some attention, but nobody buys a car because the paint resonated with them.

So then...

Do you want it to be more like a business card? Supplying potential clients with your name, contact information, phone number, and maybe a little punchline or motto on the side? There is undoubtedly some use to that, however, business cards were made to be quick and dirty because business people are usually busy.

That, however, is not a problem on the internet. People are perfectly ok with sinking hours into surfing the web, hours that could be spent looking at your website and being convinced to do business with you.

So… let’s get to it. What is the point of having a website on the internet? If it isn’t to help grow your business then I don’t know why else dedicate all the time, money, and effort into building one. If done right, websites can bring in the biggest thing your business needs to grow: more customers.

This is the exact reason why hiring a website designer is the biggest mistake you can make on your website because you don’t need museum-worthy design, what you need is sales. And while we would be the last to say that design isn’t important in creating sales, it's not the only factor. Think about the last time you bought from a website because the layout and the animations were nice?

Yea, me neither.

Unfortunately, the problem with most designers is that they are so busy focusing on the look of a website that they forget the purpose of building one in the first place.

So, when building or hiring out for your website, focus on what your website needs to help grow your business: A salesperson, not just a designer.

While this is mainly a mindset shift, I understand that simply turning the dial and “becoming a salesperson” isn’t that simple and sales itself is a topic that people write textbooks about.

For this reason, I am also including a free copy of my new pdf report, “21 Money-Doubling Online Sales Hacks” which will tell you exactly what you need to know in 2022 to turn your website into a money-generating machine, or even what to look for when hiring a website agency. You can snag a copy in the form above to the right here: 21 money doubling sales hacks.

On to the second way your website is killing your sales.

2) Your Reviews are Too Good.

Can there really be too much of a good thing? With reviews, studies point to a money-murdering yes!

Potential customers spend 5 times longer if the site has some subpar reviews(PowerReviews). The reason for this was that sites that had less than perfect reviews seemed more authentic to viewers.

On top of that, 82% of potential customers will specifically look for negative reviews on a website. This happens because we subconsciously know that the 5-star reviews will tell us exactly what we want to hear, but the 3 stars will tell us what we need to hear.

The internet has been around for a while, and people know better these days than to fall victim to overly enthusiastic 5-star reviews as those can easily be faked.

The last thing anyone wants to experience is purchasing a product or service, exciting themselves by reading the glowing reviews and the promised results only to get it and realize that they were lied to.

The power of negative reviews is so strong that simply having a few 4 stars or even 3 stars increased a business’ sales by 85%. This is because of the authentic feel less-than-perfect reviews give to your product as your customer knows exactly what they are going to get from your business.

So to recap: Don’t make your customers skeptical of your business by having questionably positive reviews. Showcase the good, the bad, and the ugly(but not too ugly either).

As for the last money murdering mistake your website has, this is something oftentimes overlooked by many business owners and even website designers even though it is unarguably the most important aspect of your website for creating revenue.

3) The Calls to Action are Weak or Simply Non-existent.

The Call to Action(CTA) is the single most important element on your website. It is the one element(most often a button)that is responsible for every sale/booking/or client action on your website(if you would like an example, look at the video above, or the numerous buttons on this website).
Without it, your website would be like a car without an ignition—you can see it and it's there taking up space and your money, but you won’t actually get much value out of it.

When your potential customer clicks that CTA button, something very important in the universe happens. While they have spent some time browsing your site and experienced everything you’ve built for them to see, none of that actually produces any result until that prospect decides to push your CTA button.

As soon as that button is pressed, they’ve made the important decision of moving along in the buying process with you. So, one of the primary goals of your website design is to make that button as appetizing and easy to press as possible, because it is responsible for transitioning website visitors into paying customers.

On the flip side, the end result of a website without a highly converting CTA is fewer interested buyers taking the action you want them to take on your site, which means fewer sales, and an enormous dent on your bottom line– enough to make your business shed a few tears as cash oozes right out of the bloody hole a poorly converting CTA creates.

SO I cannot stress how important it is for you to get your call to action buttons right!

While CTA psychology is a substantial topic, the most crucial aspects you need to have on your CTA to increase conversions start with:

A) Your CTA Has to Steal Eyeballs.

Like a peacock proudly spreading its feathers to make the world know it's there, your CTA needs to be the most attention-grabbing feature on your website. It should subconsciously pull the attention of readers and get them interested in seeing what you are offering them.

To create this visual priority, you can do many things, however the most notable are:

  1. Make the button big.
  2. Use a background color that contrasts heavily with the rest of your site. The contrast will make it stand out. To learn about which colors contrast with each other, check out this color wheel guide.
  3. Reserve that background color purely for your CTAs. If you use this color too much on your website, it will lose its eye-grabbing appeal(as the eye gets used to it).
  4. Put your CTA where people expect to see a CTA. People are used to common website layouts, so by putting the button where they expect to see it, you make it really easy for them to take action. These spots are in the navigation bar, somewhere in the first section of the page, or at the bottom of the page.

B) The Copy(writing) Needs to Inform and Persuade.

When your future customer reads your CTA, they should know exactly what they will get when they take action. If you leave this step all up to their guessing, you will lose customers because you are making them put in extra work before they’ve even signed up to do business with you.

Make your customer’s buying decisions as easy as possible by telling them exactly what they will get when they press your CTA button. When you tell them what they will get not only do you cut out the guesswork for them, but you also can highlight some of the benefits of your product(although do keep the text on the button short).

If your CTA needs more explaining, simply add some text to the side or above the CTA so your reader knows exactly what they stand to gain from moving along in the buying process with you. This is where compelling writing can make a world of difference because in your writing you can have your future customer imagining what it would be like to experience your product or services and how their life would change.

This, however, all depends on how effective your writing is. If your writing can’t touch the hearts and minds of your readers, consider hiring a copywriter, as the written text on your website is one of the most crucial elements in influencing a potential customer to buy from you.

Lastly, one secret ninja tactic that has always succeeded in improving the conversion rate of CTA buttons is to:

C)Turn the CTA from second person to first person.

In the video above I show examples of what this looks like at 6:58, however, in practice this is a simple switch from using the pronouns “my/me/I” instead of “your/you.” This simple switch to the first person will dramatically skyrocket your conversions and the reason behind it has to do with human psychology.

When reading the CTA button, seeing first-person text just feels more personal when that voice in our head reads it back to us. By creating this more personal feel, it is a lot easier for your potential customer to imagine themselves experiencing your product or service and if they’ve already taken action and purchased in their mind, then it is much easier for them to take action in reality.

By applying these 3 aspects to your Calls to Action, you will notice a dramatic increase in your website's conversions, and in turn, your bottom line, which will take your website one step closer to becoming a money-generating machine.

Upwards and Onwards

Now that you've learned the 3 most critical money-murdering errors your website might have, you can take action on fixing them and start seeing improvements to your conversions.

Business, especially when done online, is incredibly competitive—much so that half of United States businesses fail before the 5-year mark(let alone finding true success). So having each competitive edge you can find is crucial to ensuring your business doesn't become another depressing statistic. Now for a quick recap.

Recap

Make sure you tackle your website from the perspective of a salesperson. Doing so will better set you up for building or hiring people who can create your website to be an unstoppable sales machine.

Next, do your best to create an authentic feel for your reviews. Suspiciously positive reviews will only breed skepticism in your potential customers and drive your business downwards.

And lastly, set your website up for the most success by optimizing your calls to action. This can most easily be done by making it as noticeable as possible, having the most persuasive copy possible, and using the first person instead of the second person for a more personal feel.

Upwards and Onwards,
Marvin Dominguez

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Posted by Marvin Dominguez
Marvin Dominguez Headshot
Marvin Dominguez is the Founder and Head of Growth at LevelU. Loves going on nature walks when not behind the computer and enjoys a good taco(or two) on the weekends. One thing he does hate though is wasted potential, which is why he created LevelU in the first place.