Tables were skewed, pictures half covered up, the drop down navigation didn’t work, etc.

I actually thought this guy was playing a trick on me — no one would EVER take this site seriously.

When I commented to the client that his little joke was “very funny,” I quickly found out that this was no joke.  That was his REAL site.

After talking to him a few minutes and pulling the site up in other browsers, it didn’t take too long to figure out that he was having some serious browser compatibility problems.  He had built the site for Internet Explorer, and it was a work of art in that browser platform, but it was all messed up on nearly every other browser I tried.

Despite all the advances of internet technology, all browsers are still not created equal when it comes to how your site is viewed.  Browser incompatibility represents a huge challenge for anyone building a website.  Browser compatibility issues can affect your images, JavaScript functions, style sheets, links, navigation, and page layout.

AND it can totally kill your website profits and subscription rates!

Internet explorer, for example, tries to figure out what you meant to put in your code and fills in the blanks.  In other words, if you’ve used incorrect HTML code in your webpage, Explorer will try to make the corrections or fill in the blanks resulting in a page layout that may not be what you intended.

So obviously, you’ve got to address this issue with your website — Which can be a total pain in the rear.

Your first stop should be to check your website in a variety of browsers.  There’s three ways you can go about checking browser compatibility:

1.  Download and install all those browsers onto your computer and view your website in each browser.  This would be a total pain in the neck and totally unnecessary.

2.  Purchase browser compatibility software or a service.  There are lots of great services out there to choose from if you Google it.  I wouldn’t suggest this option unless you have a lot of websites or your build websites for your clients.

3.  Use a free service online like www.browsershots.org.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t really need to check your website in every browser in existence on the planet — that would be ridiculous!

The last time I checked, 99.2% of internet users only used seven browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6- 14.9%
• Internet Exploere 7 – 18.7%
• Internet Exploere 8 – 7.1%
• Firefox – 47.3%
• Google Chrome – 6%
• Safari – 3.1%
• Opera – 2.1%

Of course, these numbers change as new browsers come on the market, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

So I guess that I’m suggesting that even though technology continues to improve, browser compatibility STILL matters and you should definitely check your websites for compatibility!

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Lowering Your Price To Compete

This is a strategy that a lot of product owners mistakenly try in order to increase sales and gain more customers.  It sounds right — lower your price so that your product is less expensive than your competition.

Unfortunately, this strategy almost never works and will actually result in fewer sales, not more.

People don’t necessarily buy the cheapest product.  They usually buy the product that appears to be the best value for their money.

In addition, lowering your prices means less profit.  Earning less profits per sale may mean that you have a hard time keeping your business afloat.

Here’s a better strategy for pricing your products:

1.  Remain Competitive

You may not want to be the lowest priced product in your niche, but you do want to be competitive.  Take a look at the competition and what they’re offering.

You can’t price your product in a vacuum.

You’re competitors will help to guide you in your own pricing strategy.  You can take a look at the most expensive competitors and the bargain basement competitors and get a pretty good feel for what the market will bare in your industry or niche.

Once you know what your competition is doing, it will be easier to create a pricing strategy that gains a share of the market and creates sales.

2.  Create A Perception Of High Value

The best way to compete on price is to create a higher perceived value of your products compared to your competition.

You may even be able to charge significantly more for your product if you can prove to your potential customers that your product is better than anything else on the market.

The best way to create a higher perceived value is to pile on the bonuses.

Your product may be priced at $97 when the rest of the competition is priced at $47, but if you offer bonuses worth an additional $2,000 you’ll be able to easily convince potential customers that your product is superior.

Perception is everything.

3.  Test Prices

One of the best ways to price your products to compete for massive sales is to test different price points.  There are software products that run on your server that will allow you to test different prices — and they’re well-worth the money.

You’d be surprised how often you can actually charge a lot more for your product than you’d expect.

The idea is to find that “sweet spot” where you’re maximizing profits, not necessarily sales.

Here’s an example:  Let’s say that you can sell 100 ebooks for a $10 dollar profit on each and make $1,000.  You test out different price points and find that you can also sell the same ebook for $50 profit, but you only sell 50 of them instead of 100.  In the first scenario, you’ve made $1,000.  At the higher price, you actually profit $2,500!

Testing is the best way to find the “sweet spot.”

In the end, it’s important to remember that buyers are always much more interested in getting the best value for their money rather than the cheapest product.  Knowing that is how you go about pricing your product to compete for massive sales.

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Increase your sales

1. Nail Your Niche

I’m sure that you already know what a niche is and that it’s important in your business, so I won’t belabor the point here. Design your web site to be a targeted resource center for your niche market. You’ll gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic and increase your sales overall.

2. Fabricate REAL Freebies

Freebies are a great way to give people a taste of what you have to offer, gain traffic, and increase subscribers, but it must truly be free to work.  Otherwise it destroys your credibility and will actually reduce the number of sales you get.

Worse still is when people offer freebies that are total garbage full of affiliate links.  Make your offer genuine and you’ll improve your bottom line.

3.  Lasso Leads

Websites prove to be excellent lead generation tools and you’re missing a lot of sales if you aren’t working to capture leads for your business.  Appropriately marketing your products and services to your permission based leads can increase your sales tremendously.

4.  Track Your Traffic

Visitor analysis and complete website tracking is extremely important for any online venture.  It’s the only way to track what’s working and what isn’t for your business.

5.  Elevate Emotions

When creating sales pages and promotional materials for your products and services, be sure to engage the reader’s emotions.  Triggering your reader’s emotions will always increase your sales.

6.  Design For Dollars

When it comes to generating revenue with a website, you’ve got to design your site to make money.  It should be compatible with all the popular browsers, engage your target audience, and lead visitors by the hand to make a purchase.  Your website design should have one goal and one goal only — make the sale.

7.  Pen A Plan

Sit down and write a plan for how your website will generate revenue and gain targeted traffic.  It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but a marketing plan is a must to increase your sales.  You must plan to profit.

There are tons of other strategies that will help you increase your sales, but this basic list is a great place to get started.

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My purpose was to determine if I’m send out my email messages at the best times for each of my niches. To figure this out, I decided to start by taking a look at my website logs to see what time of day the most people actually visited my website from day to day.

As I started pouring over the statistics for each of my niches, I noticed an interesting and surprising trend…

The highest percentage of visitors to ALL my websites comes at the 1600 hour!

What really surprised me was that the 1600 hour (4:00 in the afternoon) was most popular in both business and non-business niches.

What does this mean?

Initially I was thinking that a 1600 high point made sense because a lot of people are winding down for the day at 4:00 in the afternoon before they head home for the day.  It’s a good time to catch up on email, do a little free surfing, etc.

But then it dawned on me that I’ve got website visitors coming in from all over the world and different time zones.

I even get visitors from Russia and Iran!

They obviously wouldn’t all be winding down their days at 1600 EST.

So that caused me to take a look at what countries my visitors are coming from… and not surprisingly the vast majority of my visitors in all my niches come from the US and Canada (followed closely by UK and Australia) which operate in my time zones.

Bingo!

Now I know the perfect time to send my email messages to my visitors in order to get the maximum click through rate!  It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out, just a little statistic sleuthing.

But here’s the really surprising part…

The magic hour for all my niches is 1600.

I don’t really get that because I have websites for stay at home moms, hobby enthusiasts, online business owners, parents, home schoolers, brick and mortar business owners, entrepreneurs, etc., yet the magic hour is still 1600 for all my niches!

What’s even more weird is that when I compare the statistics for different niches, they are nearly identical… usually within a few percentage points of each other.  In other words when I compare the times when people hit my site across different niches, they are nearly identical.

Take a look at the two graphs below taken from two completely different niches.

I’m not sure I understand why, but I can definitely make use of the information.

So, I’m curious… Are you finding that your website has the same magic hour as mine?

Is this just a quirk in my business or does everyone in the English-speaking market have the same magic hour for their websites?

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For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.

Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.

I’m betting that you feel the same way.

Do you have a serious case of bouncing visitors?

So the first thing you need to do to find out if you’ve got a serious case of bouncing visitors is to determine your bounce rate. This is really easy to do if you use any kind of analytics software on your website… which you definitely should. By simply logging into your website analytics, you can see how many visitors are coming to your site, how many pages they looked at, and if they left your site shortly after arriving to it.

In Awstats, for example, the software offers a section that calculates the amount of time each visitor is staying on your site called “Visits duration.” If visitors are staying less than 30 seconds, then you have a serious case of bouncing visitors.

If you use SBI (my favorite host), then you can get a pretty good idea of your bounce rate by doing a few simple calculations.

For example: 123,784 divided by 381,149 gives you an overall bounce rate of 32%. That may sound high, but it’s actually a very low bounce rate.

Unfortunately, most hosting services don’t offer advanced analytics software as part of their packages because most people just don’t know what to do with all that data. That’s why I highly suggest that you invest in your business with analytic software that gives you a really clear picture of what your visitors are doing on your website… including bounce rate. Here are a few options (that I’m not affiliated with) that you can look into:

http://www.statcounter.com
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.webtrends.com

If you have a high bounce rate…

Before you get yourself in a panic over your bounce rate, remember that this is really just a yardstick to measure your website against. There are a lot of factors that can affect your bounce rate, including where the traffic is coming from, purpose of your website and specific landing pages, website design, and your website goals. You have to keep all these things in mind as you determine if you have a problem on your hands.

If you’re concerned about your website bounce rate, here are a few questions that you should be asking yourself:

1. Is your website compelling? You never know for sure what page visitors will land on when they visit your website, so it pays to look at your website as a whole and decide if you’ve presented yourself in a compelling and interesting way. Offering visitors lots of interesting content within your niche is a great way to engage your visitors and keep them at your site longer.

2. Is navigation easy? There’s nothing more frustrating than to click through to a website and find it nearly impossible to find anything on it. Navigation should be easy and intuitive so that visitors can immediately feel at home.

3. Is your website or landing page broken? Sometimes a high bounce rate can be directly related to a website issue. Visitors can easily be driven to the back button is your form is broken, images are missing on the page, or the pages are taking too long to load. Another big issue could be browser compatibility. If your website looks broken in Firefox, for example, then any visitor who uses Firefox will be put off by your website. Any of these factors can chase your visitors away before they even have a chance to look deeper into your site.

4. Are you targeting the right keywords? Keywords are something that I harp on a lot, but this is another situation where it pays to do your keyword homework. If you’re attracting visitors through the wrong keywords, then they won’t be the kind of highly targeted visitors that you need… and they’ll leave your site very quickly. This goes for paid advertising, organic SEO, Adwords, etc. Keywords are still your best bet to lowering your bounce rate.

5. Do you tell visitors where to go? Okay, you may be thinking H-E-double toothpicks, but I was referring to using a call to action, pointing them where you want them to go on your website, and setting up a strategic path for them. Visitors are more likely to dig deeper into your website if you’ve gotten them interested in “what’s next” on your website.

6. Where are your visitors coming from? This factor is probably the biggest one to consider if you have a high bounce rate. For example, if you advertise extensively in PPC’s, then your advertising could be seriously affecting your bounce rate. In addition, when your traffic comes from article marketing, link exchanges, search engines, forums, etc. it all affects your bounce rate. Once you know where you’re traffic is coming from, then you can make adjustments to your marketing in order to reduce your bounce rate.

Is bounce rate really that important?

I think it’s pretty important, but you’ll have to make up your own mind where this factor fits into your own business. In my view, anything that gives me clues to what’s working or not working on my websites is well worth investigating.

As with anything else in your online business, you really have to keep the big picture in mind. There are so many factors that can affect your bounce rate that you could drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out. In addition, different types of websites can actually produce bigger bounce rates. For example, blogs typically have a higher bounce rate than simple content driven websites.

You might be able to correct a high bounce rate with something as easy as simplifying your website navigation or changing your header graphics… making the whole thing well worth it.

To me, it’s all about the bottom line. If the bounce rate affects my bottom line, then it’s worth my time. How about your?

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