Nancy Hendrickson

Fellow authors – in addition to my career as a non-fiction author, I’ve spent close to 10 years doing website analysis for corporate, higher education, and personal websites.  Increasing your conversion rate (the number of people who purchase your book or service, rather than just looking) is a must for authors, whether self or traditionally published.

Below you’ll find the five steps I typically take to increase website conversion.  Try it – and let me know how this works for you.

1. Best Practices
Wikipedia states that best practices are the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing a task, based on procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people.

If you were browsing in a bookstore and the person next to you – - let’s call him Leo – -  picked up a book you had written, you’d probably tell him you were the author, and before long a full-blown conversation would be in the works.

Leo would ask you about writing the book, you’d ask Leo about his interests . . . and a connection between the two of you would be established.  This doesn’t guarantee Leo will buy your book, but it does guarantee he’ll remember you.

Answering potential client e-mails works the same way. While autoresponders are effective tools, I don’t believe they can replace a personalized e-mail when a “Leo” is inquiring about your services. I would rather cut and paste the “canned” info into a personalized e-mail rather than having everyone who asks about my services get an autoresponder response.

Getting personal is part of relationship marketing.