My conversion rate

[wavedancing]

My site takes about 2000 visitors to produce a sale. A sale will make me about $20. I tried to bring visitors from overture and google for a while. I spend $150 on each of them and they brought 4500 clicks and I sold nothing!

My site still sell because I am now get a lot of traffic everyday. But somebody told me that the industry average is about 2% conversion rate. Is it true???? On ebay, it takes only about 30 click to sell my product.

My site is http://www.wavedancing.net . Please check it and give me some advice. Thank you.

[Robert Warren]

Lixin,

Let me guess: you sell Chinese calligraphy, right? :)

I'm going to try and be honestly helpful here; please accept it in the spirit that I want you to succeed.

First thing you need to understand is that, contrary to what the "Internet marketing" gurus will tell you, this isn't a numbers game. It's not about pushing the right buttons in the right order to get the right result; though you are working directly with a computer, there's an actual human being on the other side. Search engines, hit counts, sales ratios, conversion rates.. none of them really matter. What matters is effectively communicating to those people who are most inclined to buy your services.

The rest is hype, hope, fantasy, delusion, denial and desperation.

Even if you somehow managed to score the #1 slot at Google with your keyword spamming, few people would be led to a buying decision by your copy. It's very obviously written to gimmick the engines. It's not human-readable; you're not doing *anything* to provide a point of emotional identification, establish your credibility, or build a sense of romanticism around your service (which naturally lends itself to a strongly romantic pitch). Your current copy is contrived, confusing, and obviously written by someone who does not speak English natively.

Your design is awkward and amateurish. It looks cheap and hacked-together. There's no clear progression on the landing page from emotion to action.

Lixin, you are providing a unique service here. You're also talented and obviously believe in what you do. I can immediately think of several markets and angles which would do you very well, but you first need to stop writing for search engines and start writing for *people*. The best Google placement in the world accomplishes exactly nothing if your site doesn't resonate with the heart of your reader.

[wavedancing]

Robert,

I want to sincerely thank you for checking my site and told me what you thought.

If I understand you correctly, here is your main points (critics) :

1. My English writing is so bad that it will drive my visitors crazy so they will not buy. Yes, I know my English writing is not good but I don't know it's so bad. Should I hire some good English writing people to fix the writing?

2. My design is not good and not professional. This one I am actually a little confused. Honestly I didn't put much time on the design. But lots of people told me that to keep a site simple. I did provide an action link to encourage people to click it and I did put the links to the sales page. I hope you can tell me more detail about what I need to do.

Thank you for your time.

[Robert Warren]

Originally Posted by wavedancing

1. My English writing is so bad that it will drive my visitors crazy so they will not buy. Yes, I know my English writing is not good but I don't know it's so bad. Should I hire some good English writing people to fix the writing?

My primary point was that you're keyword spamming: you seem determined to cram the words "chinese calligraphy" into your page as many times as humanly possible. Aside from probably being penalized by the search engines for doing it, you're making your website thoroughly unreadable.

My secondary point is that you are writing to a primarily native-English speaking audience; broken English isn't going to cut it and *sure* isn't going to convince anyone to actually buy anything. And yes, your English writing is that bad: it's two steps away from being a Babelfish translation.

Hiring a writer isn't a bad idea, but good writers aren't cheap. I'd start by asking a friend, neighbor, associate, anyone who speaks English *natively* and is willing to give you an objective, unbiased opinion to read your site over completely and tell you where you're off track.

I'll give you this one for free: "Lixin Wang are now a famous calligrapher". The word "are" is only used when the referrent subject is plural. Unless you are a sufferer of Multiple Personality Syndrome, there's only one of you. That word should be "is".

Originally Posted by wavedancing

2. My design is not good and not professional. This one I am actually a little confused. Honestly I didn't put much time on the design. But lots of people told me that to keep a site simple. I did provide an action link to encourage people to click it and I did put the links to the sales page. I hope you can tell me more detail about what I need to do.

Thank you for your time.

At least on my browser (Mozilla), your design is cluttered and everything is squeezed pretty close together. That's hard on the eyes. Your left control bar is too thin and should probably be backdropped with some color that nicely contrasts the rest of the yellow page.

I'm sure a few of the other web designers around here would be willing to take a more thorough baseball bat to your design. :)

[wavedancing]

Thank you Robert. I will ask one of my native English speaker friends to help me fix the writing. As for the design, my pages don't have the problem at the computers I use (I actually view it on a lot of computers with windows and linux). I may need to check my code to see if there is anything wrong.