hosted by: AskPat 768 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 768, the second to last episode of the year. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
All right, now here is today's question from Joey.
Joey: Hi, Pat. This is Joey in Tennessee. My question for you is how can I have my site redesigned without destroying its income potential? I have an Amazon affiliate website which I purchased a little over a year ago, and this site earns a decent little side income. The problem that I have is that I can't really add additional content to the site because visitors can't find that content once it's been added to the site. I've added a few articles to it, but the only real way that users can access that content is via Google. I want to have this site redesigned and in order to do that, I don't want to kill what I've already got there. I really would appreciate your suggestions, and thanks a lot.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Joey, thank you so much for the question. You know, it's really interesting that you are thinking of a redesign and considering how it might kill your affiliate earnings. I would love for you to consider how a redesign, which I think is smart, can actually enhance your affiliate earnings, which it can. Now of course, it could go either way, but you'd have to redesign it in a way that would actually enhance it. There's a number of ways to do that.
The first thing I would actually ask yourself is okay, on the existing site, what is working really well? What are the offers that most people are clicking on? What are the products that most people are buying, so that you can make sure that when you create your new website, you're incorporating those top products there, and making it even easier for people to find them and click on them.
Maybe you even include more reviews about those products, or whatever, videos about those products, and make them stand out even more, because typically what happens on any website, you're going to find that most of the income comes from the small amount of products. This is the 80/20 rule, right? 80% of the income that you have is probably coming from 20% of the products that you offer, so make sure those 20% are shown and take up maybe 80% of the space in the real estate when you redesign.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when you do the redesign, you don't necessarily need to feel like it's permanent. There's always changes that could be made, and you can always even revert back to your old design. You can do what you can to try to improve it, test it out for a week, see what the numbers are like, and even after a couple of days if you see that, wow, this is not going the way that you wanted it to, you can just revert back to the old design so that you can start over and try again.
That's the nice thing about doing business in this way, because you can make changes and adjust and adapt if you need to, and you can always go back to where you were. That's the cool thing, so take some risks and put yourself out there and try to see what you can do to enhance this even better. I think it's smart that you want to make it easier for people to get access to the content, because that's stuff that could be shared, and those things take and play a role in search engine optimization, which will ultimately help your website overall anyway.
Yeah, so I wouldn't approach it with that limiting belief in that mindset of “I'm giving myself a chance to have things fail.” You're actually giving yourself a chance by doing a redesign to make things even better. What if you could increase the conversion rates by even one percent? One percent might not sound like a lot, but let's say that you have a hundred people visiting a website, and one person is buying for every hundred people. Well, if you want to double your income, you just increase the conversion rate by one percent to two percent.
Now twice as many people are buying or clicking or converting, so yeah, there's a lot of opportunity. It's all about the conversions, getting those products in front of people's faces, and just enhancing what's working on the new redesign. Joey, hopefully that helps. I want to wish you all the best. You can expect an email from my assistant in the next couple months to collect information so we can send you an AskPat t-shirt because your question was featured here on the show, Joey.
For everybody else out there who's listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show. . .probably going to happen next year because tomorrow's question's already recorded. . .head on over to askpat.com. You can ask right there on that page.
Then finally, here's a quote to finish off the day from one of my favorite peeps, and that is Walt Disney. He said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again, and bring their friends.” I love that. Take care, and I'll see you in the next and final episode of 2016 here on AskPat. Thank you, bye