WordPress is awesome. As one of more than 75 million users of this ever-popular CMS, I am aware of how it can unleash the real power of your online business. At the same time, WordPress is not for the weak of heart. Unlike website builders like Weebly and Squarespace, WordPress has a learning curve that you need to overcome first before you can truly position your business to succeed.

In fact, if you haven’t inundated yourself properly with this content management system (CMS), then you run the risk of losing money with your business’ WordPress site!

Money, in this case, comes in the form of website visitors. Also, it’s not just the volume of visitors you can generate with your site; it’s also about your ability to convert them into customers.

In this article, I will discuss with you the reasons that explain why you’re losing money with your site by not doing the things stated below on your WordPress site.

 

Launch effective email campaigns

As a permission-based marketing tactic, email marketing is built upon the trust and faith placed by your subscribers to your brand. They won’t have signed up to your list if they don’t trust your brand.

That confidence has paid dividends over the years in favor of email. For one, it’s 40x more effective compared to social media when it comes to making a sale. Also, for every dollar spent on email, you can expect an ROI of $38.

Therefore, by churning out a sustainable list building and email marketing campaign, you can foster trust with your audience in hopes of converting them from fair weather visitors into loyal customers or clients!

However, the results of your email campaigns rest on their quality and how targeted your subscribers are about your niche. If you have yet to build an email list, then you can start by signing up to GetResponse’s Free List Building Mini Course. This guide will help you develop your list building strategy from scratch so you can attract people who are genuinely interested in your business to sign up to your list.

As a WordPress user, you need to be aware of the different plugins that you can deploy on your site to convert visitors into sign-ups. This GetResponse post lists down the top list building plugins to help funnel more subscribers into your list.

Finally, get help and inspiration from the top email marketers in their respective fields. There’s no one-size-fits-all advice on how you should develop your campaigns, To build a sustainable email campaign, you must absorb as much information as possible from these folks.

 

Observe best practices of creating high-converting landing pages

Landing pages are your site’s bread and butter. Much of your earnings will come from how much you can convert and squeeze from these pages on your site. When done right, you can earn up to 1 million dollars from your landing just like Moz did with its SEO product. The number depends on the type of product or service you’re selling and your target audience. However, you want to make at least something out of the effort you’ve put into building your landing pages and refining your sales funnel.

I have written a GetResponse article about the psychology behind landing pages that convert well. Below are the most important things you need to learn from that article.

 

Storytelling

Draw from your personal experiences to hook readers into whatever you’re selling. Gaining empathy and tugging on their emotions through your story will help them become more receptive to your message.

 

Call to action

Include a single CTA for each of your landing pages to prevent your visitors from getting confused with multiple offers. Also, creating eye-catching, can’t-miss CTAs is a must if you want to increase your conversion rate.

 

Social proof

People gravitate toward peer recommendations. After all, 92% of consumers look up to user reviews to help them make informed decisions about a product. By featuring positive feedback from customers about your brand, you create a favorable impression on visitors, which could lead them to become customers down the line.

Opt-in offer

To make the decision easier for your visitor to commit to your page’s call to action, give them a freebie. It’s what Brian Dean did to increase his conversion by 785% in one day. By providing added value to your CTA, you can convert much better.

If you want examples of killer landing pages for your inspiration, you can check out this KISSmetrics post containing 100 case studies of landing pages that increase their conversion rate. You can apply some of the tactics they implemented to help you conduct tests on which versions of your landing page convert the best.

Also, WordPress users shouldn’t miss out on the different landing page plugins they can use to building their squeeze pages to great effect.

 

Scale and improve CTA

We’ve talked about CTAs earlier, but its importance in drawing money from your audience can never be overstated. Calls to action are what brings your audience down your sales funnel. By clicking on a button or filling out a form, they are ready to take a leap with your business and pull out money from their wallets.

This reason is why you need to conduct A/B testing on all your CTAs.

If you are not generating enough conversions from your landing pages, part of it has something to do with your CTAs. Is it not big enough attract attention? Is the choice of color for your CTA button wrong? Is your copy not drawing enough eyes to your CTA? You can put all these factors to the test with A/B testing.

 

 

Take a look at these case studies from this Platonik post. It should you help you get ideas on the CTA elements that you need to scale and measures. Also, this post from GetResponse should give you actual A/B testing methods to replicate on your own.

Mashable provided some great A/B testing tools to help you get started. Almost all of the tools mentioned aren’t exclusive on WordPress – you can use any of them on any website platform to help improve the performance of your CTAs.

 

Make your site load faster

Time doesn’t cost a dime, and yet it is the most expensive thing that WordPress users can waste. According to KISSmetrics, ¼ of visitors leave a page if it loads longer than four seconds. Imagine if you attract a thousand visitors a day on your site – 250 will have already left your slow site. That’s a lot of visitors that you could have turned into customers!

To remedy the situation, you need to make your site load faster.

The main causes dragging your site’s loading speed are as follows:

Theme

Ideally, minimalist and lightweight themes like Genesis or Thesis Frameworks let you prioritize speed and performance. They are in contrast to themes loaded with unnecessary features ingrained in the theme. Aside from the ones mentioned above, choose WordPress themes that are SEO-friendly and those that offer minimal features. You can also resort to using plugins instead of built-in features from themes to supercharge your site.

 

Cache plugins

Instead of browsers requesting to load files from your server every time they visit your site, cache plugins stores files in the browser’s cache. Whenever browsers load your site, they will get the files from their respective local drives instead. Putting less strain on your hosting server makes loading your WordPress site much faster.

 

Image compression

Visual content is important in today’s marketing, but you need to make sure to compress them first before uploading. An image file worth more than 100kb can slow its loading time. If you have lots of them on a single page, then expect your page to load longer than four seconds.

 

Hosting

If you put up your site on shared hosting, you should be aware of the risks you’re putting your site on. Since you’re sharing server resources with neighboring sites, your site won’t run in optimal conditions. Therefore, choosing a dedicated and trustworthy WordPress hosting provider will help you allocate all resources to loading your site. You can also guarantee your audience minimal downtime, so your site is always available for viewing.

This article details the best WordPress plugins to help increase your site speed. The post covers tools that will help you optimize your WordPress database, automatically compress newly uploaded images and those existing in your media folder and others.

 

Keep visitors from abandoning your site

Abandonment is an all too common phenomenon among website owners, especially those with online stores. There are many reasons why visitors abandon sites, some of which are in your control while others aren’t.

 

 

Regardless, unless you take the necessary precautions based on the graph above, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

However, what you can do is get them back again to your good graces.

There are two approaches you can take to prevent people from leaving your site soon.

 

Exit intent

This process triggers a pop-up box to appear on the screen whenever the mouse cursor leaves the window. Exit intent anticipates the user’s action of leaving the screen, presumably to close the browser window, in the hopes of getting their attention and converting them. Also, it makes the decision process much simpler on your site for visitors by featuring a clear CTA on the irresistible pop-up box.

 

 

Exit intent can be a hit or miss. On the one hand, Rich Page increased conversions by 316% using this technique. On the other, when used incorrectly, exit intent disrupts the user experience and annoys visitors enough for them not to come back to your site. Therefore, you need to tread exit intent carefully before you seriously commit to it.

 

Cart abandonment recovery

For variables you can’t control that encourages visitors to leave your site, you can set up an abandonment recovery campaign. Let’s say their visitors put items on their carts for checkout, but they have to leave your site due to an emergency, and they completely forgot about checking out their carts. Instead of crying over them, you can create a trigger on your automation tool that lets you send emails to visitors reminding them of the abandoned carts.

This tactic helped accessory brand Radley London get back 7.9% of sales. To further help you increase your conversion rate, these examples of recovery emails from Shopify should give you ideas on how to approach developing your email.

If you’re using WooCommerce to run your online store, then the Abandoned Cart Pro plugin should do the trick.

 

Increase security

As arguably the most popular CMS in the market, WordPress is prone to online threats.

 

 

Compared to the different issues in this post that are causing your website the bleed money, getting your site hacked is worst. With a slow site or ineffective landing pages, at least you can make the necessary adjustments to optimize them. With a hacked site, there’s nothing you can do. Unless you have a backup copy of your site before it getting hacked, it’s goodbye to your business website.

Therefore, as a WordPress user, you need to put your security system in place first before anything else.

 

Automatically backup your files

A plugin like UpdraftPlus will ease your mind from any potential attacks your site might experience. The backup files will be saved to your chosen cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and others. Once you’ve set and forgotten UpDraftPlus, you can focus on building your WordPress site and maximizing your earnings. If any attacks occur that might destroy your site, you can only set up WordPress on the server and load the latest copy of your backup as nothing happened.

 

Install a security plugin

WordFence Security is one of the most downloaded plugins and with good reason. It helps you set up a firewall to detect and prevent online attacks on your site. Using its blocking features, Wordfence can block malicious networks and aggressive crawlers and scrapers of your site for increased security. Lastly, its security scanning tool informs of the changes in your site files and keep a lookout on backdoors that cause security holes on your site.

 

Recover your site

If your site does get hacked and you don’t have a backup in place, Sucuri might help you recover what’s left of your site. Aside from its security and backup features, Sucuri removes malware and malicious code injections in your database. If someone blasted keywords on your content as part of their negative SEO campaign, Sucuri could help recover affected pages so your site gets searched back up on Google and Bing. Lastly, the site can help remove unwarranted blacklists on your site so visitors won’t receive a warning every time they visit your site.

 

Track results and optimize!

Arguably the most important part of growing your WordPress site’s income is to track and measure its overall performance. Find the pages that generate lots of traffic so you can replicate its success on your new pages. Also, look for pages that you can optimize further to increase your visitors and conversion rate.

Another factor you should track is referral traffic or websites that drive the most traffic. Finding the channels where you can focus on to disseminate your site will help you reach out to your audience.

All these information and more can be found using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The data you can track using both allow you to identify low-hanging fruits that will turn your site’s fortunes. Look no further than Jason Acidre’s post about how he was able to increase organic search traffic by 44% by targeted long-tail keywords from Google Search Console.

 

 

While no plugin will reveal information from your Google Search Console to your WordPress dashboard, MonsterInsights allows you to show Google Analytics data instead. The plugin makes data unearthed from the analytics tool less daunting so beginners can get actionable and easy-to-understand reports about their site. The faster you take action to the data provided by these tools, the faster you can take advantage of opportunities to make money with your site.

 

Wrapping it up

WordPress is easy enough for beginners to use. However, building a profitable site using it requires knowledge on your part about the inner workings of this CMS. Hopefully, the advice and suggested plugins above should help you unleash its true power so you can profit, if not at least lose money, from it.

Are there other ways that I missed above? Chime in by commenting below!

 

The post Keep Your WordPress Site from Bleeding Money appeared first on GetResponse Blog – Online Marketing Tips.

Source: getresponse