What First Impression Does Your Site Make?

You may not realize it, but when a visitor lands on your site, she will make up her mind about your company within the first thirty seconds – usually even sooner. That doesn’t give you much time to make a great impression.

Your site has a very short window of opportunity to work its magic – to establish credibility, build interest, and present an indispensable solution to a problem – in less time than it takes to change a light bulb. If all of the elements aren’t there (in the right combination), you will lose sales.

In coming posts, we’ll look at they ways your site can make a great first impression, so you can retain visitors and turn them into paying customers.

First, though, I want you to start with a much simpler exercise. Find a friend, family member, or complete stranger who knows nothing about your business, and show him your website. Even if he can’t specifically tell you what’s wrong, you’ll know by his reaction whether or not you’re hitting the mark. Many times, you’ll get varying degrees of feedback, which can point you in the right direction.

This test is very important to the success of your online business, because as a business owner, you’ve probably spent hours staring at your site. After a while, you develop a sort of “blindness”to what is working and what is not working. Eventually, even the obvious problems seem to disappear… but they’re glaringly apparent to your visitors.

Stay tuned (ahem, subscribe), and in the coming days, we’ll look at some of the ways you can tweak (or completely overhaul) your site to make a stronger first impression.

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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