by: AskPat 317 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 317 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Awesome! Now let's get to today's question from Alex.
Alex: Hey Pat, it's Alex from CowboyBillyTime.com. We are two music teachers, and we sell a DVD that teaches young kids how to play the guitar. First off, thanks for all the great content you share with all of us. I'm really getting a lot of great information from you, so thanks so much for that. My question is, we're struggling to break even at this point. We have some traffic, but I think our homepage on our website might not be helping us get sales. And I'm wondering if you can offer some tips on how we might tweak our homepage or just homepages in general to get more sales. So that's my question. Thanks again for all the great stuff on the podcast and we are looking forward to your book in 2015.
Pat Flynn: Alex, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. And seriously, when I got to your homepage and I watched the video, I thought you were Chase Reeves from Fizzle.co, so those of you who know Chase, go ahead and go to CowboyBillyTime.com. Check it out. I thought you were Chase for a second. But Chase is awesome and so are you. I love what you're doing here, teaching kids how to play guitar. But I'm going to help you out, because I can see why the homepage is maybe struggling a little bit to make sales. And if you're at break-even point now, or close to it, then I'm almost going to guarantee that by the time you implement these changes that I'm going to mention, you're going to see an increase in sales. And so let's go over a few things here.
First of all, I noticed when I typed in cowboybillytime.com in my URL bar here on Chrome, it denied access to me. And it wasn't until I put www.cowboybillytime.com that it actually gave me access. So something's going up there. You need to redirect the non-www to the www one. So you might not even know this but go to cowboybillytime.com, Alex, and you'll see that it just says, “You've been denied. Your country does not have access.” Which is obviously if somebody goes there, then that's not going to work out very well for them and for you.
Secondly, the first thing I look at when somebody is trying to sell something is: Where are the “buy” buttons, and how far up the page are they? How many times are they shared? And I believe you'd be able to massively increase the sales by just focusing on where the purchase buttons are. The only one I saw was in the right-hand side bar. But it looks like the one that comes from PayPal. That could be changed. And that one looks kind of looks “generic.” I'm putting that in air quotes, because people are used to seeing that and it almost cheapens the site a little when it's this like orange “Buy Now” one. You might actually do a little bit more with a more customized “Buy Now” button or something like that there.
But the buttons I'm most concerned about are the one underneath the video that says, “Add to Cart.” You can hardly even see that one. And then, I scroll down a little bit more, and then it says “Add to Cart” again. It's just a really small, I mean it's smaller font than the rest of the font on the page. It's just a simple button that says “Add to Cart” and I think it should say: “Buy Now.” It should always say: “Buy Now.” And it should be bigger, and bolder, and centered and have arrows pointing to it. This is exciting to people. You want it to be completely obvious where to click. And it's such a small button that it's very difficult to locate.
I'm happy that your site is somewhat mobile-friendly, in terms of it shrinking down, because a lot of people are probably coming from mobile to this page. But it can be mobile optimized as well. That often helps with a lot of peoples' conversions, because sometimes the experience on the phone or the tablet isn't as good. So that could actually be improved, because the videos actually don't respond like they do on most mobile-responsive sites or mobile-friendly sites.
The videos, I noticed are great. I watched the first one there up at the top, and it's really cool. I think you can actually have that video. A couple things about that video.
One, because it's just a YouTube video embed and it even says YouTube on the lower right-hand corner, people can click on that and get away from your page. You don't want that to happen. So I would actually embed this video on somewhere else, a host somewhere, and have it served here. And, yes, you wouldn't be getting views counted onto YouTube, but YouTube is a completely separate thing. You're going to have people coming from YouTube and you want people to land on this page. But you don't want people to land on this page and then go back to YouTube. So a hosting on a site like Wistia.com or Vimeo, which is probably cheaper, at least for the start here, would help you out dramatically in terms of just what people are doing when they come on this page. You give people less options as far as the watching later or the settings, and it just makes it much cleaner in terms of the viewing experience when people watch that. I'm glad there was a video there though. I was really hoping there was because I wanted to see what these lessons look like.
Now the thing is, the video is a minute and a half long, which is great length, but it's just you talking the whole time. It's great to see you there. You have the hat and the colorful scarf and the guitar and you're playing. But you could also put some b-roll on top of that of kids actually playing guitar, so that their parents can visualize what their kids are doing and how happy they are. And how they're actually strumming the guitar. You could continue talking with the same thing but you could show that b-roll of you teaching kids or some of the lessons for example, too, which I see I believe at the bottom there's some lessons at the bottom of the page, but that should be in there in that one video, too, because you want people watch that video, get really excited, and then find that really clear, easy call to action, which is that “Add to Cart” button.
Now, again, that “Add to Cart” button should say “Buy Now,” because that seems like the only thing that you have on the page to sell right now, so adding to cart is kind of adding an extra step in there that they don't necessarily need.
So those are just a couple of the quick, big things that I see. Now, I also have to comment about the font. For some reason, it's just kind of not best practice to use Comic Sans. Which, I understand for the kids' purposes, it looks playful and there's a lot of colors on the fonts, as well. A lot of the stuff is underlined. I want to click on the things that are underlined, that's sort of what people have been trained to do when something is underlined, and everything that is underlined here is not clickable. Oh, except the checkout page, which is good. But, here we go again, I actually just accidentally clicked the “Checkout” button, which was a link in the middle of one of the paragraphs, and it took me to the “you are banned” page again. So this is actually www.cowboybillytime.com/cart, and that, for whatever reason, says that I am banned. It says “You are banned. Your country is banned.” So something's going on here. You got to get this fixed because this is obviously ruining the experience that your audience has.
But again, keep the text all black except for the links that you want people to click on. I understand that you are highlighting Cowboy Billy, and highlighting the words “kids” and things like that. I get that, but you got to go with what people are trained to do online, and that is click on the colored stuff and underlined stuff, which is cool.
I like how you have the “as seen on” sort of top mommy blogs and daddy-librium, I mean, I think that's really cool for social proof.
Now the big final thing here that I wanted to save for the end, that I'm sure a lot of people are thinking of, is what about access to a portal where they can get the training online. Now, a lot of people are trying to still sell these DVDs online and not as many people have DVD players. I imagine that a lot of people are not buying because it is a DVD, and also not buying cause they can't get it instantly. They'd have to wait for it. And that's one of the benefits of having your content online. So getting a membership platform up there, for example, to house that content in those videos, it's going to actually make it probably a lot cheaper for you too, because then you don't have to ship them out any more. Although I can understand maybe giving people the option to have the DVD version as well, or maybe just to send them the chord book an stuff, I think that's really important. But you can also have that be printable as well.
The last thing, sorry, the other one was the second to the last thing, which is a big one, you know, you just have the DVD, but what about access online? That's really important. That's going open up a whole new wave of people who don't have DVD players who can watch this. And also, this big image of the DVD here in the middle of the page, it says, nice and colorful, Cowboy Billy Time, I want to click on that. I was clicking on that. I was like, please take me to the sales page. Any time you have a product on your sales page, especially if it's in a blog post, for example, and you are talking about this product, just have that be clickable. Have that image of that product you're selling be clickable. I do that every time I mention something on Amazon, and I show an image of it. That image is my Amazon affiliate link, and the same thing should be done for your own products as well.
So, Alex, that's a lot of information, but hopefully that helps you with your homepage. And, again, everybody out there go to www.cowboybillytime.com and you can see what it's like now. If you're watching this in the future, maybe it will be a little bit different.
Another thing I would recommend doing for the homepage is getting involved with something like Crazyegg.com. Crazyegg.com is a great resource for anybody out there who wants to see where on your page people are clicking. It will give you heat maps on what parts of the page people are looking at the most, which ones are cold, and things that are not being used. It will help you clean up the page as well, and it'll help you understand what's being used the most so you can feature those things even more. So again, that's Crazyegg.com. So Alex, again, thank you for having your question featured here on the show. An AskPat t-shirt is headed our way, and I wish you all the best of luck, and I love what you're doing here. And for those of you listening, if you have question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
And, as always, I want to end with a quote. And today's quote, as I leave you today is from Zig Ziglar. He says, “Stop selling. Start helping.” And in terms of a homepage, make it easier for people to buy. Help them out, you know what I'm saying. All right. Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of Ask Pat. Thanks guys.