What if you were your client?

This is another good WHAT IF questions to ask from yourself. You have a business, you have ideas how to make your business successful, you have your own problems, you have your clients to worry about. But forget about it all for a moment.

Put yoursel in your client’s shoes. Imagine you’re your client who needs your service, productt or anything else. Only now you will start to see what problems your clients have or may have with your service or product. Only now you can see what you’d need more, what you’d need changing, what you’d need improved. What you would need to make your life easier, what you’d need changed to make the usage of the product easier. Think about it. Put yourself in your client’s shoes.

As I’m very much connected to the online media publishing then I’ll bring you an example from this sector. Let’s imagine you have a general-topic online magazine. By general-topic I mean without a real focus. You have volunteer writers from more than 30 countries from around the globe. You have aa comedian writing for you who has performed stand-up comedy in more than a 1000 towns in United States of America. These last things are the kind of things that might help you in promoting the magazine. But at the same time there’s two problems with these things. Firstly, your promotion efforts do not bring you as big audience as it could. Because while you say the things you have an might bring some attention, you’re not helping anyone with any problems they have. At least not in your ads. Secondly, once you out yourself in your clients/readers shoes, you’re really not helping them to get better service from you. You’re not making anything easier for them. Thus it still might be an online magazine which they found due to your advertising efforts but

1) they might not find anything else useful from the article page and

2) the navigation might be too difficult and

3) they find the overall view pretty useless. And there’s again three problems here –

the reader doesn’t get what he/she needs and

if the reader leaves the site (what he most definitely does) you don’t get more pageviews from him, youdon’t get enough advertising revenue due to just a little number of clicks from the user and little number of page views and

the reader just spends a small number of seconds on your site, he/she doesnt’t keep the domain in mind and neither will he/she shareit with anyone. So you can see a great number of problems here. As if you take each individual problem and see what other problems they include you’ll end up with nothing But the problems.

„Before you start looking for new readerss ,satisfy the existing ones”

Thinking of yourself as your reader
Firstly, presuming your online publication is not new anymore and does have couple of hundred daily readers already (most likely 95-98% of them first-time readers) you need to set up some sort of statistics systems to see how many page views they make (most likely the average will be below 2 per reader), you’ll also want to see how they got there. In case of an existing publication without too much promotion done, most of the readers come from search engines. So put yourself in the shoes if the userwho comes from the search engine looking for a specific topic. Most likely 60% of the time the reader finds himself looking at an article that doesn’t really help him/her. 20% of them made a misclick and will be leaving momentarily, 20% maybe reads he article, finds nothing else from the page and leaves as well. One some of all the people clicks on some links to other articles on ads on yoursite. That’s the scenario, the promlematic point of many online publication owners.

But other than the 20% who maybe made the misclick when coming to your site, are your potential regular readers who right now weren’t satisfied with what they saw.

It’s your task to put yourself in their shoes now. Choose different reader groups (according to what they searched for or where they came from), I think 10-20 user groups might be sufficient. Eg. People looking for porn, people looking for politics, people looking for entertainment, people looking for games, people looking for some very specific topic, people coming from a site that offers interesting article links to their visitors, people just typing in your domain to see what’s there, people who type in the domain because they already know what’s there (regular visitors), people coming to your site after seeing some of your specific ad in some PPC system (eg. Google Adsense).

You want all of those people to visit more pages than just one on your site, you want all of those people to come back to your site the next day. You want all of those people to tell the url of yoir website to their friends as well. In the current example, you really want all of those people, because like I mentioned, we are dealing with an online magazine that deliberately does not have any too specific focus. Generally speaking, it’s not a very good idea to have no specific focus, but then again, if we have such a magazine, we should use its advantages. Which in this case is – we do have something to offer for everyone. But the question is – are we able to leave the same impression to the readers. In most cases we don’t do that. Thus the low number of page views per reader, thus the tiny average length of a visit, thus the tiny number of returning readers.

It all comes down to 3 things
- Design. Is it simple enough? Is it attractive enough?
- Content. Is the correct content areas in correct places? You’ll need to test it a lot.
- Personalization. Is the design & content meant for this specific reader.

ALL these points are VERY important. Don’t pay attention to one of them and it doesn’t matter if two points have been completed perfectly. If you have a good design and related content in correct places it’s good. But if the user didin’t really want to see that page at all, maybe he thought it was something different, then he still won’t make a move on the site. Because this page IS NOT meant for this SPECIFIC reader. If you have content and it’s all personalized but the layout is crap – well, noone will even bother finding stuff. And to have design and personalization without content...well, it’s a bit utopical version if you ask me,

You’re in the interenet, you do have the chance of personalizing the visiting experience for EACH different user. And often it’s not even too difficult. You just need to figure out what the user came looking from your site. And then offer the user exactly that. That might even mean giving the person specific links to articles outside your page and still profit from it.

Now, there’s many ways to do what I just explained should be done. But I won’t be talking about them right now. But if you have a question about anything, send it in ( you can see my email address in the right side of the page) and I’ll answer the questuon within couple of days in the Q & A area.

I will be doing the things I have talked just about in my online magazine thecheers.org, that magazine was also used as a base of the example.