10 Easy Tips For Making Sales On Your New Website

Written by Shmuel Aber, CEO of the Saber Team.

Making sales on a newly built website is notoriously difficult. Slow traffic means few sales. No online reputation means there is no trust factor. And often, most of the budget has already been spent on building the website.

Even if you sign up with a highly-respected SEO Firm, it will usually take months until you start to see the signs of success flowing to your website.

So how can you bring early success to your new website?

I’ve been in Website Development and Digital Marketing for over 12 years and here are my top 10 tricks and hacks to ensure that the early visitors to your website actually turn into real leads (and then conversions).

1. Start a Conversation

At the very start of your website journey, you are going to want to collect as many leads as possible. Make sure that every page – without exception – is optimized to start a conversation with your potential customer.

Rework your website so that your customers are strongly encouraged to reach out and begin a dialogue.

Once a conversation has started, it will be so much easier to turn them from a lead into a customer. The hard part, though, is to convince them to approach you.

Once the website gets popular and you don’t have the time to deal with every potential lead, you can always pivot the website to only encourage serious leads to reach out. (But that’s an article for another day.)

Here are some of my favorite hacks that will help get customers to start a conversation:

• Don’t put a lot of options into the contact forms. Put only 3-4 field boxes and make only the email field a “required” option. (You specifically want the email field as opposed to a phone number, because customers are more hesitant to provide their phone number than an email address.)
• Make sure that every page has a clear way for the potential customer to contact you. 
• Put the phone number in a prominent place on the top of every single web page.
• Top Pick: Let your potential customers know that you will respond to all emails within 1 business hour. If they know that they’ll get an instant answer, they will really be encouraged to fill out the form.
• If the page is long and has lots of information, place multiple “call-to-action buttons” throughout the page that encourage customers to buy or contact you.

2. Add Testimonials and Reviews

Getting leads before you’re established is hard for many reasons, but especially so because your customers will need to decide to move forward with your company in spite of the fact that you have no online credentials or recognition.

The best way to capture early customers will be by showing off your other happy customers. 

Here’s how it is done:

As soon as you make your first sale, reach out to the customer and beg them for a review. If they can leave the review on a third-party website like TrustPilot, SiteJabber, or Google My Business it is even better. 

Add those reviews to the website (ideally accompanied by pictures of them and their purchase/service). 

Undecided customers will feel so much more comfortable buying from your website when they see how happy you made your previous buyers.

One of our clients, Estate Diamond Jewelry, has used this technique over 500 times over the past few years. It really works.

3. Run Promotions

Promotions and sales work wonders for a new website. 

But – and I cannot stress this enough – the discount needs to be awesome in order for it to work. 

Playing games like up-marking a product and then “discounting” it back to the regular price will not work, neither will offering a promotion on a product that no one wants.

If you want to make waves, you will need your buyer to think that they are stealing from you. The opportunity needs to be so good that they will feel guilty if they don’t share the deal with their friends and family. That’s the only way that it goes viral.

Yes, you will probably lose money from the promotion, but if done correctly, the loss can be far more effective than anything else you could have done with that money.

One of our customers, for example, started offering one of his leading hotspot internet devices at over 50% off MSRP. The loss he takes on the hotspot is an incredible trade-off for the massive jump in overall traffic that his website now gets because of that one promotion.

4. Start a Mailing List

Mailing lists still work wonders if you do it correctly.

There are, however, a few critical rules that you should know before you start your mailing list:

• Let your audience know how often they will get emailed above the signup form. If they know that they will only get 1 email per month, there is a much better chance that they will actually subscribe.
• Don’t put the mailing list form, button, or link in an inappropriate location. If you put the sign-up form, for example, on a serious sales landing page you may get your mailing-list subscriber at the cost of a real customer who was ready to buy. That’s a serious downgrade.
• Focus on one targeted message per email. If you try to cram multiple announcements and messages into a single email, none of them will be heard.
• Quality images showcasing your targeted message will do wonders for driving traffic to your site. 

5. Pick Only One Social Media Platform

Getting started on a social media platform and earning your first 1,000 followers is really tough.

Due to the effort involved, many businesses make the basic mistake of trying to grab all the social media platforms at the same time. 

I can’t emphasize this enough: Don’t open up more than one social media platform at a time. I know that it’s tempting to just copy the same post/image and post it everywhere, but – and trust me on this one – it’s a really, really bad idea.

Pick only one platform. (Instagram and Tiktok are both very popular right now.) 

Before you get started, brainstorm ideas on how you can add value (or entertainment) to the lives of your viewers, and then post consistently and regularly. Interact with your followers and let the account grow organically. 

Once you’ve actually succeeded on one platform, then you can start mulling the idea of moving to a second one.

If you want to view my daily website marketing tips, follow me on Twitter.

6. Website Trust and Authority

One of the biggest deciding factors for a customer shopping online is whether their money is safe throughout the buying process. No one thinks about that safety and trust when they shop at established websites like Amazon or Walmart. Non-established websites, however, will have to go the extra mile to prove that their customer’s money is safe.

Here are some of the things that you can do (especially in the early days of your website) that will increase your trust factor:

• Make sure that you have SSL. Ask your website developer for more information, but SSL is absolutely critical.
• Sign up for BBB. It costs a few hundred dollars a year, but that little badge that you can embed into your website will go very far when trying to establish company trust.
• Once you have collected a few online reviews, add the 5-star review code-snippet from companies like SiteJabber and TrustPilot.
• Make sure that the writing on the website is sharp. If your skills aren’t up to par, pay for a professional writer to edit your website.

7. Personalize the About Us Page

This is one of the most neglected aspects of new websites, and unfortunately also one of the most detrimental to their success.

A boring “about us” page.

In order to bolster trust in your company, the “about us” page of a website needs to be packed with solid information about the company and the people behind it.

In fact, my opinion is that a few dull boiler-plate sentences about your company will do more damage to your reputation than not having any “about us” page at all. 

Your customer wants to see a full picture of the company that they are dealing with. Here are some of the things that you should consider adding:

• A two-sentence “elevator pitch” at the top of the page
• A well-written description of your company and its origins and history
• Bios and headshots (ideally taken by a headshot photographer) of the members of the team
• An office, exterior building, or onsite location photo
• A roadmap of the plans for the future of the company
• Lists, charts, and infographics that describe the success of the company

8. Mobile Optimization

Mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic in 2019 and is now holding over 56% of the market. 

It is important that all websites (and especially newer websites) ensure that the mobile version of their website looks sharp and is easy to navigate.

Also, I strongly recommend analyzing the most popular mobile landing pages to ensure that potential customers can easily buy or fill out the contact form. Many times, the purchase options and contact forms are completely not usable on mobile devices.

Last year, we noticed that one of our clients, Energy Electronics LLC, had a lot of traffic coming from mobile devices and so we coded their mobile responsive website to ensure that their mobile traffic would be to the highest standards. Here’s an example of a landing page that helps businesses with mobile solutions for their last-mile delivery workers. If you visit the link from a phone you’ll notice how clean and clear we made the mobile version of the page.

Click here to read my previous COLlive article for tips on how to rank for Google SEO.

9. Remove Non-Sale Distractions

In the early days of a website, every sale is precious, and because you don’t yet have any authority to stand on, the sooner that you get your customer to buy or to fill out the contact form, the better chance you have of acquiring that customer.

This means that you need to remove anything distracting the customer from converting. Make sure that your pages are as streamlined as possible and point all links and buttons towards the contact options or the buying options.

Even upsells and cross-sells should be very carefully deliberated upon.

10. Juicing Traffic with Google Ads

Usually, early website owners don’t have the budget to pump funds into Google Ads, but my recommendation would be to at least test the waters with a tiny budget. 

Although Google Ads (as with Google SEO Marketing) needs to be done by an expert, if the budget is low and enough basic online research is done, there can be plenty of success even if done by an amateur.

A word of caution: Google Ads can be a complete waste of money if not implemented correctly. Read my advice for Google PPC Ads for more on this topic. 

Reach out to the Saber Team to get a quote for advanced SEO and digital marketing.