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. In medicine, if you go into the Emergency Room with chest pain, best practices dictate you’ll receive an electrocardiogram (EKG).

On the web, best practices include adding meta data to your web pages, chunking your information into easy-to-read bites, and adding ALT tags to your images. Are you using unique meta data on each page or are you using the same title on every page throughout the site? Time to go back and start honing that meta data.

2. Clear Value Proposition
Why should I buy from you instead of the guy on the next website? What do you have that compels me to choose you from all others? A clearly-stated value proposition.

Your value proposition differentiates you from your competition, and clearly states how your offering is better than anyone else in the world. You offer three books and a 15 minute consultation. Your competitor offers two books and a 30 minute consultation. It’s up to you to clearly tell me why I should pick you.

3. What’s In It For Me?
The WIIFM chant never changes. Your website isn’t about you (unless you’re Barack Obama or Michael Phelps!) – - it’s about how the customer will benefit from buying your product or hiring your services.

For example, if you’re selling a new computer system with the fastest processor ever made, what’s in it for me is the ability to run multiple applications at the same time, or play computer games at a faster speed. Does your site focus on client benefits, or you?

4. Call to Action
I analyzed an author’s website to try and improve the non-existent book sales. Guess what? There wasn’t any BUY button on the site. Even if you wanted to buy the book, you couldn’t!

Don’t be shy about asking your site visitor to do what you want by having a clear call to action. Ask them to call you now, e-mail you within the next 24 hours, click to buy, or purchase at today’s discount. Use action verbs, and even if the call to action is obvious to YOU, make sure it’s obvious to your site visitor.

5. Usability
One of the best books written on usability is titled “Don’t Make Me Think“. That says it all. If your website visitor has to click through five levels of navigation before finding important information, you’ve got usability issues.

Keep your most important items no more than two clicks down in navigation, and remember – it’s more important to have clear and easy navigation than almost any other factor – - a site visitor who can’t find what they’re looking for because your navigation is fuzzy will never return.

What Next, Marketing Author?
View your site through new eyes. If you were a visitor to your website, could YOU easily find what you want? Do you know what to do? Would YOU choose YOU?