I work at a seo at a big company and one of the things I think 99% of most people miss out on is spending the right amount of money on internal marketing. (making the product and product pages better) I'm not trying to sell anything or preach a get rich quick scheme but I can tell you for 4 years I've worked bit by bit to make my site better each day. The result is a huge amount unpaid traffic from the search engines and a lot of sales. What's my secret? There isn't 1, there are hundreds... Every day look at your website, get your family, co-workers, gardener, pool boy or weird neighbor from across the street to give you feed back. Install some type of anayltics and track the results, make changes and try to achieve a steady improvement by thinking "What can I do to make this easier and more appealing for the user." There is no magic snake oil, every product and industry is different. Here is an article I did about how I got a huge increase in sales from improving one product page. http://davidhay.org/Tutorials/designing-for-usability-user-testing-from-feedback-army-made-me-1507.html I don't work for feedback army or have any endorsements/kick backs. I don't think you really have to use them, you can use anyone as long as they give you good honest feedback.
There's no need for that, the website is already selling a product. Using ads may deter from the actual point of the website, making the user feel less welcome.
I guess the main secret is to be consistent and focused on the task of conversion. I have been looking at some articles lately on the topic of conversion. It seems that one of the most effective thing to do is to test. I tend to prefer to keep my stuff private but I can see that asking for the opinion of people around you can help have different views.
Well done,I think a website needs changing, improving, updating, all the time. Nothing stays the same over a period of time. Technology changes at a rapid speed in these days, so do we need to adjust to these changes as they go by. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I agree, testing and tweaking on site aspects is necessary to increase conversions! Every marketer should learn this.
What you have provided is a great example of 'user experience'. I think its great that you have done modifications that everyone should look back on, if the conversion is not doing to great.
This could be called as a part of Inbound Marketing Strategy , There has been done pretty effective effort towards the user engagement by improving the graphics and Site's On page elements. This is what many of us forget i.e. making the site navigation and usage more user friendly. Thanks