Leading eCommerce Consultant Admits You Should Only Listen to One Real Expert!

By Eric Graham
Posted Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Let me share with you a secret that most marketing experts and consultants don’t want you to know… (many of them don’t even understand this secret themselves.)

The secret is… There is only one true expert who can show you how to drastically improve the effectiveness of your website and your marketing. With dozens of so-called guru’s, consultants and experts ready and willing to give you (or charge you for) their advice, there is actually only one person you should listen to on a regular basis. Only one! And his name is Eric Graham… No, no… just kidding…

The only “experts” that you should listen to and trust are your visitors. The visitors that come to your website or view your ads are the only true experts. They will share their expert opinions with you by the actions they take while on your website.

Not sure what headline to use at the top of your page… You have a couple of options:
Pay an “expert” consultant like me to look it over for you and give you copywriting recommendations, for a few hundred dollars an hour.

Or…

“Ask” your visitors which one is best, by split testing each element of your headlines and letting your visitors vote with their credit cards… The one that converts to sales best wins!

Trying to figure out how much to charge for you new ebook? You can hire an expert… I can talk to you all day about advanced pricing theory and explain to you how prices with a “7” in them (such as $17, $97, $777) usually convert better. I can walk you through an analysis of the price points of competing/similar products…

Or…

Simply test 3 or 4 different prices to see which one is most profitable. Often the greater perceived value of a higher price actually converts better than a lower price. But you won’t know if that’s true for your product and your visitors until you test it. Again your visitors will teach you more about pricing than any consultant ever could. You just need to “ask” these experts by testing.

If done properly, the questions you can get your “visitor experts” to answer about your website by simply testing, is endless.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you should never hire a consultant or expert -- after all my clients happily pay me a lot of money to help them improve their conversion rates. And I am worth every penny! ;-)

But what you need to understand here is that the best experts, became experts by studying and testing, testing and testing different elements over and over until they developed a set of “best practices”. So, by hiring someone who has been in the trenches you can save time and money in the long run.

However, every website, business, product and visitor demographic is different. Just because something works at one website, doesn’t automatically mean it will work at yours. The best consultants will tell you that you still need to test everything. So in the end it’s still your visitor who’s the true expert.

Just imagine the results you could achieve over the next year, if you took the time to test only one new element every week. Even if half of the tests were failures and didn’t produce improvements in your conversion rates, you would still discover 26 ways to improve your sales. Even if each improvement only boosts your conversion rate by 1/10th of 1%, you would have improved your conversion rate by over 2.6% (and probably much more!)

Look over your current sales statistics, and ask yourself, “How much more profit would I be making if my conversion rate jumped by 2.6%?”

With most sites currently converting at an appalling 1% to 2%, a 2.6% improvement could triple your sales…

Let me ask you a question: Imagine you have a website selling information on how to learn to play the guitar, getting 1,000 visitors per day. And I came to you and showed you how I can change a few things about your page, improve your search engine positioning and triple your traffic? Would you be excited? Sure.

Then, why not get equally excited about optimizing your website for maximum conversion rates?

Many online businesses will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars optimizing their sites for the search engines. But then they waste 99 out of every 100 visitors that they spent so much time and effort getting, simply because they failed to invest in “asking the experts” (their visitors) first. Had they taken the time to optimize their site for conversion rate, before driving the traffic their results would be 10x more profitable.

The great news for you is, so few online businesses are currently testing anything! This means that you are in a position to absolutely dominate your competition by simply listening to the true experts… Your visitors!

About the Author
Want to improve your conversion rates? Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. A top authority on eCommerce & Internet Marketing, he's an in-demand speaker & consultant. Visit (http://www.web-site-evaluations.com) today for an in-depth evaluation to boost YOUR websites conversion rate!