This is an industry that is affected by many variables. The weather, major sporting events, college vacations, internet connections, even medical issues can affect sales. Despite all these variables, there are also a number of unchangeable factors that affect us as well.
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"The webmaster with small amounts of traffic has to use every pixel on his site to encourage the surfer to buy what he has to offer." |
One of these factors is that we just don't make sales without traffic. Once we start getting traffic to our sites, we can expect to begin making sales even though that depends on a number of variables as well.
The webmasters who have been in this industry for years command large amounts of traffic. Tens of thousands of surfers visit their sites on a daily basis. For new webmasters even a tenth of that traffic seems like an impossible goal.
For the big guys, sales are just a numbers game but the new webmaster has to make the utmost effort with every surfer. The big guys with tens of thousands of surfers can survive on ratios of 1/1000 even if conversions like that are far from encouraging for the little guys.
The webmaster with small amounts of traffic has to use every pixel on his site to encourage the surfer to buy what he has to offer. Every bit of real estate on the site has to be used to the best possible advantage to pursue those elusive sales.
Sales are elusive because the surfer thinks he can gain complete satisfaction from all the free porn that is out there. Think of the surfer as a butterfly who flits from one spot to the next, hardly waiting for a page in his endless quest for free gratification.
Sometimes the surfer doesn't even wait long enough for your page to load before he hits the back button and slips out of your grasp. Even if your index page will load in under 10 seconds, you still stand a good chance of losing the surfer. What you need to do is find some way of keeping his attention while your page is loading.
Given that most porn surfers have the attention span of a flea, what can you do to keep his attention long enough for them to see your first piece of advertising?
Untitled Page
Well you can start with the title of your site. If you're building free or AVS sites, give your site a title that will make it stand out from the crowd in the link list that the surfer is searching. A title that offers something exciting, different or unique will hold the surfer for those few vital seconds while your index page loads.
Make sure you use that title in the header tags as well. A lot of webmasters miss a perfect opportunity to capture a surfer's attention and re-enforce his interest by omitting the title from the header tags.
Why is the title tag so important?
When a page loads the very first thing that will appear is the title at the very top of your browser. If that title is interesting and catches the surfer's attention then he will hopefully stick around. If the title shows an 'Untitled' tag and the page is slow to load then chances are the surfer won't think twice about leaving.
The title is especially important if you are building a blur console. You want the blur to load behind the page to which it is attached. It may take few minutes before the surfer even sees that something else has loaded. The first inkling he may have of the blur might come when he sees the title sitting down in the Windows Task Bar. An interesting title will encourage him to open the blur while a boring title will tell him to close it without looking twice.
If you you come up with an interesting title for your site and it stretches nicely across the top of the screen. It's bound to be a winner . if your surfers can read it!
How many characters are there in your title?
Experts suggest that 64 characters is the ideal length for a title if you want to ensure that most people will be able to read it. If you shoot for more than 64, chances are that many people won't see the end of it.
The title may seem like a small matter when it comes to making sales. As I pointed out earlier, the big guys do it by sheer numbers. Webmasters who only command small amounts of traffic have to work much harder to make those sales.
When your traffic figures can be measured in the hundreds or low thousands each day, even your little title tag plays a role in attracting sales.