11 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Website

/> Website visitors are like the speedy T.J. Ford; they are so intent on getting what they want as quickly and efficiently as possible, that they often surf the Internet out-of-control.

How many times have you sat in front of the computer with your hand resting on your mouse searching for some desired product, service, or information, when all of sudden you find what looks like what you want, but before you even have a chance to discover exactly what it is, your hair-trigger finger decides it’s time to move-on. It’s like your finger has a mind of it’s own.

Speed Kills Marketing Efforts

All the talk and discussion about short attention spans caused by people raised on video games and quick-cut-edited music videos is very misleading.

What website visitors won’t tolerate are websites that waste their time,

and many websites are guilty of exactly that. Contrary to popular belief, the job of a website designer, who understand marketing, is not to speed up website visitors, but to slow them down so they can absorb the marketing message.

If you want your audience to remember you, if you want to make an impression, if you want website visitors to understand why they should give you their business, then you have to slow them down long enough to absorb your message. And that message better be worth their while or they will never come back.

It isn’t about how fast a page loads; it’s about delivering an appropriate payoff for the wait.

Now I will admit there people who absolutely, positively will not wait more than eight seconds for anything to load. You know who you are. And I say, the hell with them. These are the same people who won’t

wait their turn in a brick and mortar store either, they demand to be served before everyone else – it’s just not possible to satisfy these people, so why design your entire website marketing around them. They are never going to hang around long enough to grasp your message and learn why they should be giving you their business, so forget about them.

The people you should be worrying about are the ones that really want to find out more about what it is you do, and are prepared to invest a little time and effort to give you a chance to explain yourself. These are the important people; this is your real audience, and you disappoint them at your financial peril.

The Reasons Why Web-users Are Impatient

The real reason website users are so damn impatient is not that they have such short attention spans, it’s because most websites

are designed to meet perceived company objectives, rather than audience needs.

How To Drive Traffic Away From Your Website

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why your website visitors may be leaving your website before they’ve had a chance to hear what you have to say; or to put it another way, if you want to drive traffic AWAY faster than you attract it, here are some of the things you should do.

1.Give Web-visitors Too Many Options and Choices
Social scientist and Swarthmore College professor, Barry Schwartz, has coined the phrase, “the paradox of choice.” His studies have concluded the more choice you give people, the less likely they are to make a decision. Some choice is good, but too much choice creates confusion: it’s a case of diminishing marginal utility.

A well designed website

explains, directs, guides, and focuses visitor attention on the things that are of real benefit to your visitors and to your company.

Every business provides a variety of products, services, and information to their customers, but these things are not all of equal importance. Your website is a place to focus attention on your core marketing message, not a place to provide a shopping list of everything you are able to do and every product or service you may be able to offer.

2. Give Web-visitors Too Much Information To Process
Architect, author, and information designer, Richard Saul Wurman, in his book, ‘Information Anxiety’ talks about, “the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.”

Good website design is about more than technology and aesthetics; it’s about deciding what

information needs to be presented and what information needs to be left out. If you are truly an expert in your field, you should know what information is important to your customers in order for them to make a decision. Too much information is like too much choice, it confuses rather clarifies. Focus on delivering meaningful content or risk having your visitors hit the exit button.

3. Give Web-visitors Too Much Non-relevant Content
The only thing worse than overloading your website with more information than visitors can absorb is confusing them with useless and non-relevant content.

Non-relevant content is content that doesn’t advance your major purpose: to deliver your marketing message in an informative, engaging, entertaining, and memorable manner. If it isn’t relevant, dump it.

4. Give Web-visitors Too Many

Irritating Distractions
Websites should be designed to direct visitors to the information they want and that information should be the content you want to delivery.

You cannot sell someone a product or service they do not want. A real prospect is one that needs the same information you want to provide; the art of sales is directing potential clients to relevant information, and presenting it in a way that visitors see your product or service as fulfilling their needs.

On the surface, third-party advertisements and banners may seem like a good way to make some extra cash from your traffic, but these ads become so distracting, visitors either get feed-up or click on one of the links that takes them away from your site. Whatever few bucks you earn from these ads, you are loosing by chasing real customers away; this of course assumes you

are a real business with something legitimate to sell and not a website that’s an excuse to deliver advertisements.

Other nonsense like favorite links and silly fluff-content merely distracts visitors from investigating your site to find what they are looking for.

5. Give Web-visitors Too Many Red Flags
Website visitors are constantly looking for red flags that tell them that the site they are visiting should be skipped as soon as possible.

If you want to make sure visitors won’t deal with you make sure you don’t provide any contact information: no contact names, no phone numbers, and no mailing address is a sure sign that you won’t look after any problems that arise from a website transaction.

Your website must be designed to build trust and foster a relationship, not scare people away.

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