Websites are great business tools, and today we have tons of web designers to choose from. Unfortunately, 99% of all websites are constructed without a good grasp of Marketing Psychology, which is basically a solid knowledge of how people interact with websites and how we consume content online. Below is a short analysis of www.AffiliateProgramsAdvisor.com. If you’re interested in getting a site analysis of your website please fill up the form on the Home page.
So, let’s get started. Below is a screenshot of the webpage. Open in a new tab (CTRL+Right Click) so it will be easier for you to follow through the analysis.
Branding Potential
www.affiliateprogramsadvisor.com is a great site URL. At the very start, whoever reads it gets a notion of a site that has the potential of bringing some order and can be a source of real, reliable info in the jungle of affiliate programs.
With the economy in a slump for several years now, people losing jobs, prices going up and so on, it is extremely important to get the info up front before you dive into an affiliate program that ends up as a dead end. So, the name itself carries a lot of potentials.
Owning this URL potentially is as owning a golden hen.
The homepage, however, could use some work. It doesn’t have a navigation menu at the top, there is no sidebar and no search bar. There is a single action a visitor can do, which is to sign up. As such, the homepage is actually a landing page, which is not a good practice.
The homepage should instill enough confidence and introduce the company in a non-obtrusive way so that visitors can get a feeling of being at the right place where they can find out more about various affiliate programs out there.
Attention Grabbing Potential
The URL sets visitors with a certain expectation of a site that is a reliable resource where people can find out more details on how affiliate marketing works and reviews of affiliate programs. Some may expect these reviews to be free and are ready to make a donation. Some may expect that the info is premium content so they too are prepared to pay for the knowledge. In a sense, the expectation is to land on a website that is About affiliate programs, not yet another pitch for an affiliate program.
The site’s design, unfortunately, fails to deliver. It actually looks just like any other site offering an affiliate deal. As such, the design quickly brings down the perceived look and feel of the site, and severely dilutes the site’s potential of keeping people engaged.
The initial response is that they’ve landed on a site that IS an affiliate program, and is not ABOUT affiliate programs. In a sense, the site’s design and content do not match the URL’s message, so visitors feel tricked into visiting the site.
Dialogue Potential
Once the URL’s perceived value gets mismatched with the content on the site, there is little chance of getting a dialogue started.
At the very start, visitors are called to “share the love” on Facebook and Twitter, before visitors even get a chance to interact with the site’s content. Calling visitors to do something before you start a conversation with them is a big No-No. Visitors won’t be willing to do anything before your site and content answer three crutial questions:
- Where am I?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I do anything on this site?
The catch phrase here, “Affiliate programs: Six figure super affiliate’s secrets exposed” is too flashy. These titles maybe did work at the very beginning of the Internet, but after the bubble burst back in the early 2000s, people are quite skeptical and shy away from anything that promises the stars.
Scanability
After being attracted by the URL, visitors usually take a few seconds to scroll through the web page to get an aereal view of the content. Attention goes to elements such as bulleted lists, bolded, italicized or underlined words, different color text, and of course, images. This scanning of the page is the initial evaluation, and if people don’t see elements that grab their attention, they leave the page.
Ultimately, visitors get on any site and the first thing they do is to look for a reason to leave it and move onto the next candidate.
The page has very little scanability. Although paragraphs are well formed and the largest paragraph is only 4 lines long, these blocks of text have no emphasized words, so visitors quickly get discouraged and hardly spend the time to actually read through the text.
There is only one bulleted list and the bullets are too long. Also, they are written in passive English, so that further discourages people to read through the entire list.
There is no use of different color in the text, and there are no images to identify, complement or reinforce the Unique Value Proposition of the site.
Web Copy
When a visitor gets enough reasons to stay on the site, the tone, language, and formatting of the text must take this attention and extend it hopefully long enough so visitors actually read through the text and convert into clients.
Any visitor that engages with the website should be treated as a face-to-face conversation, but this text starts off on the wrong foot. There is no reason to start off a conversation as if it’s a letter, with a To, From and Subject entries. This sends out a message that the visitor is just a passive observer, i.e. reader, and she is not in a position of doing anything on the site. This gets people to say “If I can’t do anything on this site, then there’s no reason for me to be here.”
I’ve already pointed out the way formatting should be used to guide the visitor through the text, but this text has only one bolded instance, and a poorly written bullet list that only lists what people want from a business… but we already know that. That’s our list of demands and we’re looking for a way to meet these demands. So the bulleted list doesn’t offer real conversational value. It just states the obvious.
Without visual aids (bolded, colored words, images etc), the text seems too long and is broken down quite a bit. As such, visitors see very little value in reading through the entire text. This further reduces the probability that visitors will scroll all the way down to the Call to Action button, especially as it is positioned below the References (commonly placed on the very bottom of documents).
There are several instances where the text mentions 13 videos, yet there is nowhere a list of titles of these videos. So the text raises a question but does not answer it, which is not a good way of converting visitors into subscribers.
Images
Images should convey value, personality, and even branding. This site has only one image, which falls into the branding category, but it does not do justice to the branding potential of the site. The image is too casual and in some cultures even disrespectful.
Visitor on this site will be people who are interested in getting valuable and reliable information, so they do expect a more serious look and feel of the site’s image.
Videos
The initial video is 12 minutes long. While it may offer good data, it is far too long for a page that fails to motivate visitors to stay on it. And no matter how motivated visitors are, 12 minutes of a monologue is far too much for the first contact.
Call to Action
The call to sign up for the 13 videos set is actually the best block of elements on the page. It has a clear headline, it has a graphically styled call to action with a strong emphasis on Free, and has a prominent button with a me-focused text.
Conclusion
The www.affiliateprogramsadvisor.com is a site that has great potential. But it needs serious work. The design needs to be tweaked so that it communicates value, seriousness, and reliability.
The web copy needs to be tweaked with a more actionable language, with more bulleted lists and bolded text.
The use of images should be leveraged to communicate and reinforce the Unique Value Proposition of the site, and the video should either get shortened out or taken out completely.
