Turn your Website Visitors into Customers

E-Commerce, in simple terms, is online trade – the coming together of buyers and sellers in the online marketplace, where the former strives to expand his business by catering to the needs of the latter. To make this happen, it is imperative that a businessman has a website that is appealing enough to attracting visitors.

The process of turning a visitor into a customer is simple, but often taken too casually. As a website owner, you have to understand the mindset of your prospective buyers; only then can you coax them into buying something from you.

When a user turns to the Internet to buy a product, there are certain important factors that contribute to his decision-making. At first, he scans search engines, e-zines, and other sources of information, and then makes a list of the most feasible options.

Then he starts analysing these options one by one. The age-old adage 'the first impression is the last impression' holds good weight when it comes to Web marketing. An Internet surfer wants an informative, relevant and problem-solving page. This means, if a visitor is dissatisfied with your homepage, he will not bother to venture further, and would instead move on to another website.

This reaction is justified by studies that reiterate that an average homepage loads in 48 seconds at the speed of more than 28kb, but an average visitor switches over from a page in 35 seconds. This is an indication of the low retention time of Web users. In such a scenario, you have to be able to hold someone's attention within seconds.

Once you have convinced a visitor to go through your web pages, you also have to ensure that he is satisfied with the information posted on your site, and also that he does not face too many difficulties in navigating through it. Lastly, you should provide them with ready solutions to the most trivial of their concerns, because you cannot afford to lose a customer due to certain silly issues.

Of all online marketing services, affiliate marketing is the closest to working on this principle of trade. If you are a product manufacturer, it is imperative that you join such a network as a merchant. This move can be decisive in the expansion of your business and profit-making.

A merchant has the right to choose affiliates he wants to be associated with. Affiliates, on the other hand, use their websites and other means to promote the merchant's products or services. In such a scenario, the onus of converting a visitor into a customer lies with both these entities.

An affiliate can make use of various paid or unpaid techniques to get his site listed on top of search engine rankings - the easiest and simplest way of diverting traffic to a site. Most of these networks work on a Pay per Click or Pay per Lead model, wherein an affiliate is paid for every click on a merchant's ad posted on his site or for a lead generated through him. The profitability of your merchant's business, as well as that of your own, is highly dependant on the amount of these clicks.

A merchant's work starts where an affiliate's ends. After the latter diverts traffic to the former's site, the merchant has to work towards getting conversions on those leads. He is paying for every click on his ads, and therefore would not want his financial resources to be wasted on visitors who are not interested in buying his products.

Here lies the importance of a merchant's website, specifically its landing pages. When a user clicks on an ad, the main reason is to seek more information on the product or service in question. Make your landing page appealing enough to retain those users, and then, offer solutions to their queries if you wish to be successful at Affiliate Marketing.

As per latest industry trends, about 40 percent of visitors actually go on to make purchases online, a ratio that is definitely not ignorable. Therefore, for Web business owners, the primary objective should be to increase the traffic influx on their sites. And, this will be possible only when you have a website that catches a visitors' attention long enough to make him surf through it.