The Natural Evolution of an Infusionsoft Fly Trap

Maximizing the effectiveness of my company website for identifying interested clients has been the top priority for me these past few months. This means modifying and adjusting our www.LarryJacob.com website to maximize its ability to:

•   attract and entice potential customers to learn about our company and the services we provide,
• establishing our team’s credibility as a highly skilled Infusionsoft services delivery team and
• encouraging our prospects to contact us.

Metaphorically, I am setting up a web—just like a spider does. This web is designed specifically for identifying and capturing interested customers. Sorry, if you are an Infusionsoft user, you are the fly.  The idea of creating a fly trap isn't elegant.  Just watch one of those up close Discovery Channel programs.  But just like a spider needs food to live, our business needs customers buying what we sell in order to thrive and fuel our growth.

Let me give you a little history.  I’m a blogger.  I enjoy writing and sharing my knowledge on the Internet.  It’s a great way to showcase my expertise and establish credibility.  Since I’m blogging anyway, I make a point of plugging keywords and phrases like:

•  Infusionsoft consultant,
• Infusionsoft consulting,
• Infusionsoft certified consultant,
• Infusionsoft expert, and
• Infusionsoft help.

These are terms my potential customers could use in a search to find someone like me to help them with their Infusionsoft needs.  I make a point of using those keywords in my writing more so than I might otherwise.

If you visit my site, your first impression is it’s a 14 page site which includes a portfolio section with 20 reference websites and a page where you can read my blog posts.  No big deal...on the surface.

However, if you dig a little deeper you will see much, much more.

I’ve included a screen shot of the site’s Wordpress administration dashboard.  There you’ll see the site contains 107 posts and 63 pages.  Going back to my fly trap analogy, a large percentage of these pages serve as bait.  They are pages that exist only to attract customers looking for Infusionsoft help via the search engines.

Last fall, as I arrived at the gym for a workout, I got my first confirmation that what I was doing could actually work.  I picked up a phone call from a number I did not recognize. It was from someone who had found my site by searching for Infusionsoft and Evergreen Business Systems.   I wasn’t highly ranked at the time but he told me he reviewed the pages on the search results looking for someone who didn’t look like an information marketer.  That led to almost $4,000 in business. Many of these pages are close duplicates of each other.  For example, I have written several blog articles where one uses the term “Infusionsoft consultant” and the other one uses “Infusionsoft expert.”  The articles are written so they are 15% to 20% different otherwise the search engines will penalize you for publishing the same content twice.  One targets one term.  The other targets the other term.

You can understand why this motivated me to examine how people were interacting with my site.  I now needed to know how to get people moving through my site in a way that served me best.

Before you can do anything, you have to have some basic analytics installed on your site.  The ones I’ll discuss here and the ones I configure for all the Wordpress websites I build for my clients. These are as follows:

• Jetpack by Wordpress
• Google Analytics
• Infusionsoft Analytics

Jetpack is a must because it provides you with Site Stats—it’s an easy to understand view of your site’s traffic statistics, all right there in your Wordpress dashboard.

Google Analytics is also a must.  This is the de facto standard for measuring and analyzing your site’s statistics, but it isn’t the easiest to understand and master.  It provides you with data you can use to help understand your traffic sources. Also, it includes data used to improve the information you are providing to people doing a search for you.

Infusionsoft Analytics is priceless because it provides you with exact page visit information, including the time spent on your webpage, for any visitor that has filled out a form on your site.  More on this in a minute.

Jetpack is pretty much self-explanatory.  Once installed, you get a bar chart showing daily, weekly, or monthly traffic numbers.  It will tell you which pages are the ones getting the traffic and which sources are sending you the traffic.

Google Analytics takes a little more work to understand.   When you log into Google Analytics for your site, it can be overwhelming. However, it will be worth learning.

I focus on two of Google Analytics’ features in particular.

The first one is “Traffic Sources.”  In this section you will find some very good information for taking action. You can determine which search terms are leading people to your site and which pages on your site they visit.  Click on Traffic Sources->SEO->Queries and Traffic Sources->SEO->Landing Page.

Both give you views of the pages that get the most traffic on your site and what click through rates you are getting.  The action you can take there is to find pages that are getting traffic and work on ways to make them better.

The second important Google Analytics feature is the “Content” section.  It’s good to know what gets you traffic, but it’s even better to understand what people are doing once they arrive on your site.  Are people getting the information from your site they expected to receive relative to their search?  Is there a close match between their search and your content?

The Content->Site Content->Landing Page is the view I like most.  This view shows you how many people visited a page, how long they stayed on that page, and your bounce rate.  A bounce is a measure of what percentage of people arrived at your site and immediately bounce away.  A high bounce rate means someone searched for a term, then arrived at your site and bounced away because it wasn’t what they were looking to find.

I use this information particularly, when I have a high bounce rate on a page that is highly visited.  I’m getting traffic, but not serving the needs of that audience properly.  If the traffic is being driven by search terms that are highly desirable to me, here’s a chance for me to serve up exactly what the client wanted instead.

Infusionsoft Analytics is a huge step forward in this space.  If you aren’t using this, you are missing out.  I use this to understand what someone has done on my site before I contact them via email or on a phone call.

I’ve included a screen shot of my website’s Contact Us form.

Once people complete this form, I get notified of their answers.  I also get information telling me what page on my site they have visited and how long they stayed on a given page. It replaced my original form which used a very simple name, email and message format.  One thing I wanted to make sure I included was a phone number.  People aren’t going to part with their phone number unless they are serious.  I asked some free form questions to better qualify people filling out the form.  I have gotten people to fill out the form with extensive details giving me a lot to go by when we first talk.

This can give you some real insight.  If you have someone that has spent 30 minutes reviewing your site, reading a specific blog post, looking over the team member pages, reviewing my services page, that gives you some idea of their level of interest.  If they are doing some homework to identify a vendor they would like to hire, that’s information you want to know before you email them back or call them.

So building a better fly trap is an exercise in understanding your site’s traffic using the right tools and taking steps over time to gradually improve your site’s performance using real metrics.  You fall away from “I think this will work better” and instead work on “This works better based on the numbers.”

Hope this helps.