{!date dayname+0}, {!date long+0}

Dear {!firstname_fix}

I hope you are doing fine and you are looking forward to another relaxing weekend. We are in the midst of a big "tidy up" in our house - checking cupboards, drawers and other storage areas for things we no longer use or need. Watch out for activity on eBay soon...! It's amazing how much "stuff" we collect without realising. The same is true for many business people. How much of your email inbox do you really need to keep? How many of those hundreds of PDFs you have saved will actually come in useful? Often it is a good idea to have a clear out. Not only that, it makes you feel good. So if you needed a "pick me up" this weekend - have a clear out...!  

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

Why do people leave a website?

One of the biggest frustrations for any website owner is getting traffic to your pages, only to find that people disappear quickly, having spent only a few seconds taking a look around. All that effort in getting people to web pages is being wasted because once they are there, they disappear more rapidly than you can even think about it. You would think that having bothered to spend the time searching, sifting through search engine results and then clicking on your site that they would linger a little longer.

The problem is always the same; they cannot see what they were looking for - IMMEDIATELY. People want you to make it completely obvious to them that the very thing they wanted to find is right there, staring them in the face. If it isn't, they buzz off, out of your site and onto another in the hope they will eventually find what they are looking for.

Whatever they have searched for they want to see, right then, right there in front of them when they click. If they haven't used search, but are following a word of mouth recommendation, or an advertisement, or a link from another site, guess what? They expect to see the very thing that is being recommended staring them in the face.

Some big name advertisers get it wrong all the time. They advertise a product and take you to their home page, where you can't see the product and you then have to work out where it is on their site. Bye bye, you're out of there. The notion of "landing pages" is supposed to deal with that issue, by taking people to the relevant page of the website instead of the home page. But people rarely get that right.

The problem is, the landing page is still something within the overall site, so people have to go through all the navigation, the page "furniture" and so on, just to get what they were really looking for. The result is that even landing pages cannot always deliver the "right between the eyes" factor you need in order to keep people on your page.

Remember, people are NOT looking for an entire website, but a specific answer to the problem they want solving. Hence a website does not matter to the visitor as much as the answer to their issue. Most people leave a website because they cannot see what they want. If we concentrated less on website building, but more on web page building, we could focus our pages much more in providing specific solutions which people would see quickly and stay around long enough to read the details.

Remember, you can always ask your question and get it answered in this newsletter by going to: http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/questions

WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK:

Systems are essential to your business success 

Yesterday I was at the monthly business lunch I attend of NRG Networks which starts with a problem solving session. This week it was my turn to have one of my problems aired in public and debated by the other business owners at the event. My issue was that I keep producing ideas for new products and services, but seem to have more ideas than I can cope with...!

Whenever I have an idea which I cannot immediately deal with it goes into my "in tray". Then each week I review my list of ideas and some will get put in the diary for working on, while others go in the "someday" file to think about again in the future. But my "someday" file of ideas just keeps growing and growing.

My friends at NRG made me realise that while I have a system for managing my time and my workload (I use the Getting Things Done methodology) I didn't have a system for effective and proper evaluation of each idea. I was making my decisions on which ideas to take up based on gut instinct and whether or not I had the time. What I need to establish is a proper evaluation system which assesses the value of each idea to my business. In that way, ideas with little value can be eliminated from my "someday" file quite quickly and easily. It also means the ideas I work on will produce more income.

It was a reminder that for every part of your business, a proper system is essential if you are to do your best.

If you want to check out what else I've been doing for the past week, you can always look at: http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/week

Read more by reading less

The amount of material you need to read is going up week after week. New books are being published at a rapid rate and the amount of content being added to the web each second would fill a pile of paper three miles high...! Is it any wonder we all feel that we are drowning in content?

Luckily, though, if you use "GetAbstract" you will be able to read several more books than people who don't use this system. Each month you get two complete book summaries - and you can download the archive for an additional payment. It is a tremendous time-saver and allows you to keep up to date with all the latest business thinking - without having to buy the books.

GetAbstract costs $89 for a year giving you 30 book summaries. Considering the average business book is around £15 this is a huge cost saving as well as being able to get the information more quickly because it is more concise.

You can buy GetAbstract from http://GJurl.com/abstracts.

So, that's it for this week - see you in seven days...!

Kind Regards

Graham Jones
Internet Psychologist

Web: grahamjones.co.uk
Twitter: twitter.com/grahamjones
Facebook: facebook.com/internetpsychologist
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grahamjones

Tel: +44 118 336 9710
Email: graham@grahamjones.co.uk

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