Web Site Review of Automatedwebpro.com

This web site review is done completely from the aspect of providing quality feedback and suggestions if appropriate. They are done for free in exchange for permission to post them on the Small Business Web Site for all members to benefit from. Any feedback is intended to be constructive in nature.

This is a web site review a website from one of the Small Business Web Site's subscribers.

Dwayne Garrett operates automatedwebpro.com which is an all in one solution for online businesses. Before we begin, take a look at the web site yourself so you can see what this review is based on.

First Impressions

Right from the beginning I will tell you I was impressed with Dwayne's site. It is professional in appearance and has an attractive sales letter style. The graphics are very well done and the first impression is very favorable.

The ad copy is in a pretty lighted hearted style and flows well. Before I get into any constructive feedback, Dwayne should be congratulated for a visually pleasing site.

Let's see what suggestions maybe offered to tighten things up a bit.

Constructive Critique and Observations

At first glance of the site, my attention was immediately drawn to the graphic offering a 30 day trial for the site. It seemed somewhat out of place because I had no idea what the site was about yet. It was taking up very valuable "real estate" on the page. The top portion of the web site is critical to get and hold your visitor's attention. If they don't "get it" within 8 seconds or so, they are probably clicking on to other things.

The 30 day trial graphic might be more appropriate further on down the page, after people get a chance to realize just what it is that are signing up for.

Headlines

You may want to bring your biggest selling points up top as a headline. Your current headline is "ATTENTION: ALL Internet Business Owners And Those Soon To Be. Are you Struggling With Trying To Automate and Make More Money With Your Online Business?" Truthfully that comes off a little awkward and does not really scream out the top benefits to your potential customers.

Maybe something similar to "Make More Money By Automating All Aspects Of Your Online Business". This headline is so critical that you should test, test, test it to see what results work the best. I would implement a A/B split test and run through a couple hundred visitors at a time. Keep tracking the results until you have narrowed down the headline to perfection!

Subheadlines

Speaking of headlines, this one caught my eye but for the wrong reasons: "Give Me Just 57 Minutes And I'll Show You The Secret To Make More Money, Work Fewer Hours and Automate Virtually Every Aspect Of Your Online Internet Business - Guranteed!"

I am still not sure if it is tongue in cheek humor, but do you really expect people to give you 57 minutes of their time? I saw that and immediately thought "I don't have 57 minutes" which would lead me to believe it must be a really complicated process. That one really jumped out at me in a negative aspect.

Grammatical Errors

One thing else I noticed about the subheadline was a pretty glaring spelling typo. In the headline, the word Guaranteed was mispelled as "Guranteed". I can relate because I have had my share of grammatical errors myself in the past. I posted a good tip in this article which explains how to use a common program to help point out many grammatically errors on a site.

Additionally some of the capitalization choices in the headlines are somewhat awkward. Some words have all the letters capitalized and others pick and choose various words. This leads to possibility of distracting the reader instead of flowing them through the order process.

Ad Copy

Dwayne had mentioned to me that he thought his sales copy could be a little better. I think he is on the right track with it, but yes it could use some tweaking.

One thing I noticed was that the ad copy was selling features, features, features. He may have better results selling benefits, benefits, benefits.

There is an old saying in marketing that you want to "sell the sizzle not the steak". In other words you don't want to tell someone about the 12 oz cut of beef tenderloin you are offering. You are better off describing the smell of it on the barbeque, the mouth watering taste of it and how they are going to enjoy the benefits of eating it. (My apologies to any vegetarians out there for that example!).

Actually some of the benefits are mentioned in the sales bullets but they are hidden a bit. It might be beneficial to emphasize them first.

For example instead of:

"Set up an unlimited number of follow-up responders with unlimited messages. Stop paying ridiculous fees! You can have a thousand autoresponders if you wish, each working for you 24 hours a day, and pay not a penny more!"

it might read

"Save money by not paying for multiple autoresponders! You get unlimited accounts with an unlimited number of messages at no extra fee. This feature alone can pay for your Automatedwebpro account!"

Subtle difference, but it puts the direct benefit first. You might want to think of it this way "The benefit you get is [fill in the blank] with this feature we offer of [fill in the blank]"

As always, this is a result you should be tracking to see how your sales conversion rate is effected.

Pricing?

One thing that kept occuring to me as I looked through the sales page is what does this service actually cost? It is only through digging around on the order page that I discover the actualy monthly cost after the 30 day trial.

This lead to some frustration and suspicion as I hunted it down. If the service is a good value (which it appears to be in this case), why would it almost seem that the price is being hid?

It may be a better approach to explain how customers are getting a fantastic deal for such a low price.

The sales page starts to address this by listing the total costs you would expect to pay if everything was purchased separately. This is great and well implemented. Unfortunately after reading it you are left wondering "Ok, that's how much it would cost without this service, so how much IS this?!?" It isn't answered anywhere on the main page anywhere.

Dwayne offers a lot for the reasonable fee he is asking. There is nothing wrong with being upfront and open about it.

If sticker shock is a concern, then emphasize the 30 day trial: "We know you are going to find this complete service so valuable that we are strongly encouraging you to try it out for 30 days for only $2.95! This is a fantastic way to see exactly how powerful this combination of tools are to your web site."

Email Capturing

I was happy to see that Dwayne has in place a system to capture the email addresses of people who visit his site. This is really critical for any business web site so that you can keep approaching them (with their permission) with information about your services.

Dwayne's email capture is done through exit popup windows. The potential problem with this is that more and more Internet Service Providers are blocking these windows. He may want to look at the popover or "flyin" type ads which use dynamic HTML and can't be blocked.

Also, he may want to look into being selective as to when the popups appear. I had them come up several times while navigating around the site. I would suggest making the popups more selective as I explain here.
It might make sense to have them only appear when someone is leaving the site. Have them disabled when navigation inside the site is happening, that way there are no distractions.

Bonuses

Automatedwebpro offers some bonuses that are given when you sign up. Unfortunately they are hidden away to the order form itself.

You want to advertise these bonuses so that they get to the order page in the first place! Yes, you can have them on the order page to reinforce the decision to signup but they should be more prominent on the sales page.

Where To Go From Here

Marketing of the site so far has only been attempted with some solo ads in newsletters. You may want to consider using pay per click search enginges and pay for some traffic to your site. If money is an issue, start with search terms which are in less demand. For example, instead of paying for "autoresponders" maybe "unlimited autoresponders" or "autoresponder service" is less expensive per click.

I use google adwords, overture, findwhat and a few others with good results. The key is to track your results and find out how much each visitor is worth to your site. Then you know how much you can bid on each keyword. More on that in this article.


Search Engines

The automatedwebpro site may want to create separate pages for each of its features. Each page can be keyword rich for the term(s) that apply to each feature. A great resource is Wordtracker for helping to offer suggestions of search for terms.

By having focused pages on each of the features, each page is likely to do much better in the search engines then one page diluted with numerous terms.

You would want to link each of these pages to each other which will help the search engines go from page to page on your site.

Affiliate Program

Dwayne's site offers an affiliate program which is two tiered. He pays out 20% for referrals and then another 5% for people that they refer. He should take a look to see if he is able to offer a bigger percent to entice as many as people as possible to take part. His costs may prohibit this, so I am not sure.

My recommendation is offer as hefty a commission as possible because a strong affiliate program can really explode sales. The thought being, would you rather have 80% of no referred customers or 50% of thousands?

In the case of approaching a big site for a joint venture he may even offer a "loss leader" type deal where they get 50% of the first months sales and a performance bonus of some sort. The idea is to get as many people as possible into the recurring payment system.

He would do well for himself to investigate possible jv partners who he can partner up with. The services he offers appear to be a solid deal. With enough financial incentive, some of the big names online may very well be up for promoting his site.

Summary

Overall, Automatedwebpro.com has a very solid looking web site with many of the right features in place. Converting more visitors to buyers can probably be increased with some tweaking of the points mentioned here.

Every effort should be made to be tracking the performance of the site. Figure out what the conversion to sales ratio is and then work towards continously improving it. If the sale ration is 1%+ then you may want to start a full scale marketing campaign. If its significantly under that mark, your time would be better spent on fine tuning the sales copy. Once you know it performs well, then marketing money is well spent.

Great job on your site Dwayne!

I recommend that the subscribers to this site check out automatedwebpro.com. They may very well be in need of the services offered there. You are offering some of the foundation services that most online businesses shouldn't be with out. (If time permits, I may do a review of the services offered and would love to hear from any members that sign up).

If you are interested in having your site critiqued, please contact me through the web site review form located here. They are only done on a limited basis as time permits!