Guaranteed Designs Free Paysite Tips

No I’m not Dave Letterman with a list of cards and the cool glass breaking noise when I toss them over my desk. But this month I do have for ya’ll the top 10 things that screw up a perfectly good tour:

1. Horrible picture selections: Nothing will send your surfers packing faster than crappy choices on which pictures you use. This goes for the cutout pictures of the girl(s) in the graphics and even more so for the sample type shots in a “reality” style tour. This is the one area you want to spend the extra time on, hand selecting the hottest shots. And for porn’s sake, if it’s a niche site, show off the dang niche! What’s with big breast sites that have 80% face and ass shots?
2. Horrible picture quality: Kinda goes with #1 but it is a separate issue. Don’t pic degraded movie screen caps or low rez pics. Big and crisp is the order of the day.
3. Non-contrasted join links: Make sure your join links pop off the page in some way. A contrasting color or animation to them.
4. The Vegas effect: Decide where you want to draw the viewer’s attention and focus on that. There is a horrible tendency in our industry to overdo everything and thing the page needs to look like a street in Vegas, full of flashing everything and 40 different items tugging for your attention all at the same time. You have to reel your surfer in and direct the attention flow to the main message, the content that gives him a boner and then to the join where he can get his happy ending.
5. A brand is good but…: Don’t forget, you’re still selling a tool for masturbation most of the time. Don’t get caught up in your brand or your neato site idea to the distraction of the main selling point.
6. Overcome objections: The join page needs to address several objections users commonly have. See my tip at here for complete info on that.
7. Speed kills!: A slow delivery time on your tour will not bode well for conversions. Your hosting must be fast as hell (keep your FHGs on a different server dude!) and you have to play the balancing act between crisp graphics and quick load times. Use a tool like this one to check you site speed.
8. Some folks read: Keep your main sales points to simple bulleted type sound bytes. Most people won’t read that much text so you want to keep the important stuff in more of a list format that can be scanned quickly. For the folks who will read everything you have to say, they are the type of people who don’t like marketing hype bull shit so speak in plain terms and try not to sound too commercial. Every site makes 10 million promises about how it’s the best and it’s a nice way to set off the bull shit radar. Just talk up the site like you’d sell it to a friend in a conversation.
9. If a picture is worth a thousand words…: A video is worth a million.  DO NOT skimp on your video trailers.  In today’s market your video trailer can have the biggest impact on your site of just about anything.  The editing style should be crisp, showing just enough to tease but not enough to whack off to (so many people put up WAYYY to much on their trailer).  Think MTV Cribs style editing and you’ll get the idea.
10. When all else fails: Shameless plug time… you can always hire a guy like me to just go over your tour and write up a review for it so you have a list of points to edit and work on. =]

That’s it for this month.  Happy converting!