If you sell anything through e-commerce, whether it is an intangible offering like an e-book or software or something tangible like a set of golf clubs, you ideally want all of your visitors to buy your product. Goes without saying really, doesn't it?

Of course, that's not likely to happen, yet there are ways to improve your conversion rate. (In case you don't know, the conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to your site that end up taking a desired action, such as purchasing your product. It is not confined to product purchases; sometimes something as simple as an e-zine subscription will suffice.)

You need to optimise your site for doing business. I did this myself using Google's Website Optimiser.

If you have a Google AdWords account, you can access this service. With it, you can develop two or more different sales pages, run them simultaneously, and find out which one gives you more sales per unique viewer. It also tells you when it considers the results to be statistically significant; that is, when enough visitors have accessed your pages to tell which is the better of the two (or more). All you need to do is to add some code to each sales page and the conversion page (the "thank you" page) that Google provides you with.

I'm not going to bore you with all of the details of my "experiments," as they are called, but I am going to talk about one specifically. I designed a new version of a sales page for one of my products that contained video footage shown above the fold (near the top of the page, above the point where people would have to use a scroll bar to find it) that started automatically when the page was loaded. The video is of me using the product; the audio is my voice; and it's basically an infomercial. The original version had a link to a page that provided this content.

The experiment showed that the original version was slightly better, but the specific conversion that I was tracking was sign-ups to one of my mailing lists. The sales page had two desirable actions; a mailing list sign-up for a free edition of the software or a product purchase, and I had set up the experiment to increase sign-ups. However, I noticed that while the experiment was running, actual product sales went through the roof!

This taught me what I now believe to be one of the secrets to successful sales pages. Especially in the internet marketing business, it is quite common to see many long-winded sales pages. I don't know about you, but when I see one of these long pages, it immediately turns me off. I feel like I haven't got a great deal of time to read somebody's long sales pitch, much of which is likely to be bull. However, I will happily sit back and watch a video! It grabs my attention, and it draws me in. Of course, if the video is full of hype, I'll still exit fairly quickly, but if the video shows the product on sale in use and it interests me, I'm far more likely to end up clicking the buy button!

I remember buying a product after seeing an affiliate's video, where he shows how he uses that product. The video was quite a long one; I believe it was quarter of an hour long. Had I just seen the sales page for the product, I doubt that I would have purchased it.

Note that this will only work for some markets. Maybe it won't work very well for golf clubs; I don't know. I believe it will usually work well for software, but as always, your experience may vary. Also note that some experiments will take a long time to run. If the difference between the conversion rates is low, you need more traffic in order to find out which page is best. The time taken to run the experiment will also be inversely proportional to the amount of traffic you get.

If you want to develop some video for your website and you have a software product that you want to video yourself using, I am aware of three alternatives that allow you to do this, two of which are free. The one I have experience of is Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. You have to validate your copy of Windows to get it. This allows you to produce a WMV file that can be played in Windows Media Player. The disadvantage with this is that it is only likely to be supported by Windows, so anybody who uses a Mac, Linux or anything else non-Windows will not be able to see your video (though using Firefox on Windows is fine).

The other free tool that I am aware of is CamStudio. This is open source, so you can even get your hands on the source code if you need it! I have had a quick play, and if you are showing a typical desktop application then it has a lossless codec and produces better quality output than Windows Media Encoder. Tools are provided to convert the output to SWF (Adobe's Flash format) which is supported by most platforms.

Camtasia Studio is the third offering that I am aware of. It's commercial, and the price is US$299 at the time of writing. I've seen plenty of videos created with Camtasia Studio and they are all good quality. It also has a way of indicating when the mouse button has been clicked, which may be useful where it is not obvious that that has happened! This package supports many different output formats and is likely to be the most flexible. A demo version is available for free. I haven't tried out this package.

You'll need to plan your infomercial, and it's likely that you'll have to do some editing to achieve a good-quality end result; but unless you are used to it, sales pages always seem to take ages anyway. At least, they do for me! My infomercial was about ten minutes long, and it took me about four hours to prepare. I consider that a great investment in time when it won me so much business!

This article © David John Thomas for The Affiliate Marketer.