Re-read your own stuff ocassionally
It sounds funny doesn't it? Of course, we read what we write.
I've got a site that hasn't quite made it off the runway yet, it needs a lot more substance and content but while doing that I wanted to get to the bottom of my 80% drop rate on it and find out why so many people were leaving so fast.
I had the novel idea of reading my own landing page as though it were not mine.
Wow, did I discover something interesting...
My landing page was "poke my own eyes out" boring and dry! That might be the reason lol.
So I went back and rewrote the whole page basically and made it much more lighthearted and fun to read.
I added more images, broke up the paragraphs in to smaller chunks, titled those little paragraphs with larger font and changed their color.
The power of color is huge too. Don't underestimate this.
I looked at an artists color wheel and changed my paragraph titles to one of the complimentary colors that corresponded to the existing color theme on the site. I'm not sure of the psychology on that one but the page seems easier to read.
That's it. Then I went back to working on other stuff. That was about 3 weeks ago. Since then I have been watching my drop rate fall (no pun intended lol) continuously everyday.
It went down 20% over the first night and has been sliding steadily since then. It now sits at 12% this morning!! That's a 68% improvement in not very much time. Sweet.
The visitors "time on site" has doubled from 4 minutes to almost 8 minutes in the same 3 weeks. All the other stats with this site are slowing improving too. The return visits are 32% now when almost no one was coming back previously.
Anyway, my point is just that it's good to think about and critique our sites from the visitors point of view (especially if the stats are in the toilet).
Pretend you don't love your site and read it (out loud) as though you are the surfer and just found it in a search result.
It's amazing what you might find. Make it fun and interesting and people will want to stay.
Have a terrific day or night everyone!
Update: Only 24 hours later that drop rate is now at 8%.
Recent Comments
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Good advice, I've found the more I write, the more lighthearted and humourous my content has become.
Totally! I agree..I take it all (and myself) way less seriously now.
I think that's where my million word product reviews come from ;)
I have a "shopping" type site also and I posted a set of salt and pepper shakers from Amazon that came with the warning that they are not microwave safe. (when was the last time you microwaved S&P shakers?)
I thought that was too funny and put a joke in the post about hot pepper, made myself laugh lol :))
Very good advice! It certainly does help to look through our visitor's eyes and see for ourselves what it is we're really saying to them. :)
This is a great idea. Your writing style changes over time and when I look at some of articles I've written a year ago it becomes really obvious. I've had to re-write a few myself:)
I agree completely, I've read stuff I wrote at the beginning and just had to give it a nice burial and start over. It was pretty bad!
Also as one gets to be a better writer over time then revisions are necessary too.
I found that I was trying WAY too hard at the beginning to get it right, and write "properly" for the search engines. I was missing the whole point of writing for real people. It's so much easier now.
You really nailed it there. Trying to hard for the search engines. I imagine it's pretty typical for most newbies.
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Reread... redo
Definitely!