Get intimate with your website visitors (become a mind reader), make keyword research a whole lot easier and increase your conversions…

Hey there,

Let me ask you an honest question. (And I’m not really just asking passively because I want to know your true answer in the comments section below.)

Are you getting really, truly intimate with your website visitors?

“Getting intimate with visitors to my website Jim… say what?!”

I know, I know — it’s not what you think.

This isn’t about asking anyone out for dinner, engaging in deep conversation or even getting physical.

In fact, once you do what I’m about to discuss with you — your website will become way more sticky (appealing) and you’ll begin to develop an army of serious fans (perhaps even fanatics) that bookmark your site, check back more often to see what you have to say and even sign up on an update/newsletter list (the ultimate way to engage and stimulating visitors to return to your site).

I’m certain you nor anyone else would be opposed to having more repeat visitors that frequent your site and possibly even buy things (your own or affiliate products) based on your recommendations along the way — would you?

But before you even say a word on a web page (or rethink the words or copy currently on your site), you’ve got to take the steps that ensure you are bonding, connecting and resonating with the deepest desires of your audience.

Put that together with my previous article about making sure you write like you speak — and you’ve got a magnetic combination.

In essence, what I’m talking about here is that you must first get intimate with your website’s visitors and step inside their thinking before anything else follows. There’s a saying… “walk a mile in your customer’s shoes.” The same goes for your visitor’s shoes. And that is what you must do in order to gain your visitor’s trust and become truly effective in conveying the message on whatever topic your site is about.

There are some huge benefits to what I’m about to discuss. In fact, what will be discussed here is one of the “Ten Commandments to Successful Keyword Research that Simply Anihalates Your Competition” that all NicheBOT users gain access to in the Training Library. So what are those benefits you’ll receive from doing what’s mentioned below?

1. Your keyword research becomes 25 times easier to perform. That’s right — you’ll literally discover the keywords your visitors are using out in the real world and even discover some you may not have even thought about.

2. Your web pages and sales copy will begin to resonate with and relate to your visitors, drawing them into your message and getting them involved in your site in a sort of hypnotic fashion. Again, when you know what their deepest desires, concerns and objections are, you can speak directly to those and blow away any road blocks that may hinder your visitor from trusting what you have to say. (Trust is the number one obstacle you must overcome with your visitors when they arrive at your website.)

3. Your website’s ability to convert more visitors with the same amount of traffic will rise — and who wouldn’t want that?

And before we get knee (neck) deep in this, let’s discover who exactly uses what I’m about to discuss?

• Fortune 500 companies do this (in the form of focus groups) before they ever bring a product, concept or idea to market
• Expensive copywriters that get paid $10,000 or more to do a salesletter will do this before ever writing a single word of web copy

So I’m going to ask you again… are you really, truly getting intimate with your website’s visitors or are you simply creating web pages that speak to what you think is going on in the minds of your audience? In essence…

Are you somehow finding out what the primary group of your website visitor’s concerns are?

Are you uncovering what your audience’s desires are to properly fulfill their needs?

Do you know whether your market is male or female? Young or old?

Do you know what inspires, drives and motivates the crowd of people you’ve identified and are speaking to on your web page?

If there is both a male and female version of your market, do you know what desires each segment has? Surely both men and woman do not think alike and their wants and desires are different.

Are there any roadblocks or objections your website visitors have to buying your type of product, service or offering? In other words, have you identified them?

Bottom line — do you know and have you discovered what makes your primary target website visitor tick?

I can say with confidence that 80% – 90% of small business owners that have a web presence are unaware of what makes their primary visitors (audience) tick. And with that in mind, it can be literally impossible to create web pages that effectively communicate to the wants, desires and objections of your web audience in order to gain the trust needed to get more of the write clicks, convert more visitors into newsletter sign-ups and, last but not least, make more sales.

This is why I urge all NicheBOT subscribers to make certain they take at least one full day or 8 hours to scavenge around the net to get a feel for and identify who their visitor is.

It’s almost like becoming a profiler for the FBI when tracking down criminals on the run.

So how exactly does one get intimate with their web audience, identifying what gender, who exactly the audience is and also find out what they are thinking? Well, there are human traces to be found all over the Internet. So let’s you and I go find and identify them.

1. Discussion forums – people like to gather in flocks that have like interests. Discussion forums are like magnets for people with like interests and, therefore, a great place to gather information about your target visitor.

Marketers often say that forums are a waste of time to hang out and great distraction from getting real website promotions done. That may be so. But when used properly, they are also ripe places to do consumer research and probably the best place to identify what questions people are asking on a specific topic and how the most active members in the forum are answering those questions.

Not only is a discussion forum on a given topic great for discovering ideas for product creation (look at the most responsive threads), they also have search functions to help you pinpoint and find specific questions that are being asked. Forums also rank very well in the search engines and draw in good organic traffic. So there’s an endless supply of questions on highly trafficked forums.

How does one find forums on a given topic? Simple. Just go to Google.com and type in your subject area followed by the word “forum” or “forums.” Then once you’ve identified a forum, you can head on over to Quantcast, type in one of the forum URLs you found to locate other related forums and find ones that are the most trafficked. (Quantcast has a measure of how much estimated traffic each directory carries.)

2. Blogs – another great platform to locate human traces of people discussing their thoughts, feelings and concerns on current hot topics that bloggers blog about. Pay attention to the comments made underneath the blog posts and you’ll find out how people think, what their concerns are, what their questions are (even on this blog right here).

How does one find blogs on certain topics and issues? Head on over to Google’s Blog Search and type in a topic to identify some of the more popular blogs for your industry and start investigating and reading them. Bookmark the interesting ones and verify the ones that are well trafficked with Quantcast. If you want to see the most recent updated blogs, head on over to Technorati and type in your topic just as you did for Google’s Blog Search. Some other blog search engines are Bloglines, Ask.com Blog Search Engine, Blog Search Engine and Ice Rocket.

3. Yahoo Answers - a great place to find more questions that people are asking on your topic or industry. Yahoo Answers has a search function right on the main page to get you started. And if you’re well versed on your topic, this is a great place to get direct traffic from your knowledge by answering others questions. Yahoo Answers uses “no follow” tags which means that you won’t get search engine credit for a backlink to your site. However, if you answer a question and give enough value to the person asking the question, those questions will be read by others that could easily draw some extra traffic to your site. Once a question is answer, it lives on Yahoo Answers, on blogs and on discussion forums forever.

4. Sites That Allow User Reviews – places like Amazon.com, CNET.com, NextTag.com and PriceGrabber.com allow users to leave their comments about specific products. And if you are selling physical products or items that can be found on sites mentioned above that allow people to comment on their usefulness, you can find out what others are saying about the products you represent as a retailer, wholesaler or affiliate. You’ll find good comments and bad comments and objections people might have. There’s nothing more blatantly honest than bringing up an objection someone has had on a review site about a product and addressing it on your web page. This kind of forthright honesty is refreshing to the consumer and will gain your visitor’s trust in a heartbeat. Besides, a smart web surfer will eventually find the same review you did.

5. Groups – this is another platform similar to discussion forums that can be found at Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. People start up topical discussions, others pipe in and you begin to get a gauge how people think and feel about your website’s topic. Just type your topic or area of interest in the search function and locate some groups that are discussing the topic of your website.

6. Twitter – the microblogging rage that has taken the world by storm. And this is just where you may find people discussing their own nonsense throughout the day that allows you to glance right into their minds. Twitter is similar to a blog but allows people to spout off little thoughts in the space of 140 characters. Fortune 500 companies are scouting and pouring over tweets (small blog entries) to find what people are saying about their brands. “Businesses, of course, are more interested in what Twitterers are buying. Dataminers like Seattle’s Visible Technologies are helping companies such as Hormel Foods and Panasonic pore through millions of tweets, finding customers talking about their products.” (See Business Week story here). To search for twitters about your topic and get even more intimate with your website’s visitors, head on over to Summize which is a real time Twitter search engine. And if you wish to follow me in Twitter, click here for my Twitter home page and add me to your follow list.

7. Surveys – as you are getting more intimate with your website visitors through the means mentioned above, you may want to take things a step further. Surveys are a way to gain the next level of intimacy with your website visitors.

Don’t know what your visitors want? Well, then ask!

If you have an opt-in list or a newsletter list, or some good traffic to your blog, you can have a link to a survey in your navigation or some other strategic location. Surveys are extremely powerful to customize your own questions and truly get intimate and inside the head of your visitors. Surveys are great for measuring what your visitors want in terms of content and fulfilling their needs. As anything, to get more of your visitors to take a survey, you should offer some sort of incentive (perhaps a bonus or some tantalizing report — doesn’t need to be long). This is especially so if you have built out an extensive survey that will take some time for the visitor to complete. Last year I did a survey with over forty-some questions that produced over 900 responses. Some of the questions were open-ended and I can’t tell you how valuable that data can be for peering into the mind of your website’s audience.

If you’re not the technical type, you can get a survey going really easy at SurveyMonkey.com. I personally use a script from Mark Hendricks called YouAskThem.com that has served me well. It’s not that technical to use, but it does require someone to install it on your own domain and you own the data it captures, unlike a third party service provider. If you have a newsletter that people join and they get put on an autoresponder, just add an extra message with a link to your survey as an easy way to get your opt-in subscribers to traffic your survey.

Conclusion – and Your Take Away

Dedicate no less than eight (8) hours — or a whole entire day — to get intimate with who your visitors are and communicating to their needs, wants and desires becomes ten times easier. No more pulling teeth to find what to say. You’ll have all the ammo you need within your fingertips.

Take notes by copying and pasting them to a text file, Word file or whatever your poison is.

Make notes of what keywords the group of people you are trying to reach are using.

Then go back to your most important web pages, such as your landing pages and salesletters, and address the concerns your target market has. Start with your most trafficked web pages first. You may also want to revisit your keyword research based on your findings.

Most of all, decide today that you will go out and identify what your website visitor is thinking, who they are and not just remain with the status quo.

Do you have any other sources you would like add to what was mentioned above? If so, we’d like to hear it below.

If you have any comments or questions, you can leave those below as well.

And lastly, please make sure to answer my original question in the space as to whether you are truly getting intimate with your website visitors.

Should you have any additional questions you’d like covered in future issues of The Keyword Informer, please visit AskJimMorris.com.

The best of success,

Jim Morris, Founder

NicheBOT.com — “Finds exactly what people search for”