Make Your Website Sell: More Money for Less Work

If this sounds ambitious then I promise it can be done courtesy of the wonderful Pareto Law (or the “80:20 Rule”).

The Pareto Law states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort and you can find its effects in many areas of life.  For example:

• You wear 20% of your wardrobe 80% of the time
• 80% of computer crashes are caused by 20% of bugs
• You occupy 20% of your house 80% of the time
• 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers

Interestingly this also works for websites: 80% of your visitors will only see 20% of your website and 20% of your visitors will account for 80% of your website’s sales!  So what does knowing this mean for you?

It means that in order to make your website 5 times more effective you need to find the 20% of pages that most of your visitors see and do everything you can to improve them.  (You can identify these pages by using special online software such as, Google’s free tool, Google Analytics.)  The key thing to remember is that every improvement you make will show itself five times more than any other page simply because more people will be seeing it.

So, what can you do to improve these critical pages?  First, if they are not your sales pages then you must make sure they direct your visitor towards the pages that do sell your products or services.  If they are sales pages then consider; writing a better headline, making your contact details more visible, emphasising the benefits of your business, deepening the amount of information you present, adding a video and so on.

Every improvement you make could represent a five-fold increase in your website’s performance.

And finally, there’s also a spin off benefit for you and that is you will only need to spend time improving the top 20% of pages on your website and not every page.  The result of which is your time will be five times more productive.  Gosh, one of life’s win:wins!

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.