Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

One of the things we learned a few years back is that turning viewers into users is pretty important in growing an online business. As anyone who runs a forum-based website knows it can be frustrating to see so many “lurkers” who simply read the online conversations taking place without ever contributing. On the revenue path, a vistitor usually needs to become a user before they can become a customer - any webmaster’s ultimate goal.

Here are three things you can do to graduate your visitors to users:

1. Offer something of value for free. Some sites promise free stickers in the mail if you sign up for an account, others dangle email coupons for subscribers to newsletter lists. Review App gives registered users access to online features like wish lists and the ability to post photos. Users won’t sign up just to be on your email list - give them a reason to take the next step.

2. Hold out your best content for registered users. This is similar to the idea of offering something of value mentioned above but it can oftentimes have a much larger impact. For example, on one of our web projects we routinely saw about 200 users sign up for accounts each month to access online “members only” features like those above. We then decided to make a key piece of information on our site - directions to bike trails - available only to registered users. We instantly went from 200 registrations a month to 2,000 and today the site is registering more than 100 folks PER DAY! Since the information left off is minor in relation to the other content available our search engine-visible content is  affected very little.

3. Make it easy to sign up for an account. You’ve seen it before - a sign up form that scrolls for pages and pages just to get a free account. Some sites may even require a credit card to start a “free trial” while other sites’ sign up forms are choked with marketing offers for seemingly unrelated items. The shorter your member sign up form, the more likely folks will get through it and become users of your site - so keep it simple! Review App new user forms ask for 2 things: an email address and a screen name - that’s it.

Giving your visitors a reason to become users and making it easy for them to do so is a great way to improve the number of folks entering your transaction funnel. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to increase your user base!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 7:55 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Review App. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.