Color Me Blue
Chris, a new consulting client, asked me to help him
increase sales on his
affiliate marketing site.
As he was describing his site and the problem, I thought,
"This is going
to be a quick fix."
How wrong I was!
His site was excellent. Other than a few minor points, it
followed all my
basic rules for a successful affiliate
marketing site.
The site was focused around a single theme in a profitable
niche, with an
excellent selection of high-priced,
high-commission products.
Chris had gone the extra mile to have his site
professionally designed,
and it was simple, elegant and
user-friendly, employing consistent
navigation and a nifty
database-driven search results system.
He was working directly with his merchant partners to create
ad copy that
offered his visitors the best possible deals.
And he was advertising in the pay-per-click search engines
to drive tons
of targeted traffic, and using hundreds of
keyword listings with brilliantly
worded titles and
descriptions.
So, why on earth were his sales so low?
I knew I was picking at straws, but during our first
session, I made a
host of recommendations for improvement,
which included:
- a domain name change
- a background color change
- reformatting the
page table size
- rephrasing offers more positively
- adding relevant
graphics and photos
- dropping poor performing merchants
- adding a
newsletter
- adding new products
- redirecting non-buyers to additional
offers
Chris implemented all my suggestions as well as a few of his
own. After
giving the new version a few weeks to prove itself,
we scheduled our second
teleconsulting session. I was
anxious to hear how well the site was now
performing.
You can appreciate my dismay when Chris told me that his
sales had
actually dropped!
Aargh!
I reviewed his site again, and it suddenly struck me...
he should try
blue links!
Why?
Because web design convention suggests that links should be
blue, visited
links purple and active links red. Although
nothing written in stone about
link color, I believe that
those conventional colors should used whenever
they
compliment site design.
I'd changed my own site links, Sage-Hearts.com, from
maroon to
blue sometime before and noticed a nice
conversion rate increase.
Sure enough, that WAS the answer to Chris' site problems...
His conversions increased 1100% almost overnight JUST by
changing his link
color to blue.
In addition to being underlined, people expect links to be
blue, and in
some cases visitors may have problems with
sites that don't conform to their
expectations.
With the average site visit lasting only about 8 seconds, we
don't have
time to waste confusing our visitors with basic
site navigation. Use
blue links if possible to keep your
navigation instantly recognizable,
unambiguous and
consistent.
Author's Resource: Article by Rosalind Gardner,
author of the best-selling "Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online". To learn how you too can succeed in Internet and affiliate marketing, please visit
http://NetProfitsToday.com
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© Copyright Rosalind Gardner, All
Rights Reserved.
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