I read an interesting article the other day about this strange economy we’re in. According to one Indiana business newspaper, this is the first time ever that the economy actually grew in a time of recession.

That sounds a little odd to me (I guess that’s why I’m not an economist), but apparently shoppers aren’t holding back as much as was originally feared.

So if you’ve been hesitant to get your web site ready for the holiday rush, now’s as good a time as any.

But you’re running out of time, so you better act quickly. Here are 7 quick fixes you can easily implement on your site in one single afternoon:

Ask for the sale!
Don’t be shy about asking your customers to make a purchase. There’s no need to wait until the very bottom of the page before you include an “Add To Cart” button.

Your site visit might be ready to make a purchase after reading only one paragraph of your sales letter. Add multiple buy buttons to each page.

Help your site visitors make a decision.
At this time of year, there are so many gifts to buy for so many people; it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Help your site visitors choose a gift by breaking your merchandise into categories. Can you create a “Gifts For Men” directory, a “Gifts For Pets” directory, etc?

Include options for visitors not yet ready to buy.
Maybe your site visitor is in a “just browsing” mode, or is comparing several different merchants. What kind of compelling offer can you make to grab this visitor’s contact information?

Beef up your guarantee.
Guarantees are most effective when they are completely spelled out. Don’t leave your visitor guessing. What exactly does “Satisfaction Guaranteed” mean? Who will pay for return shipping?

How does a shopper request a refund? Include a link to additional information about your return policy and your complete guarantee agreement.

Make everything clickable.
Studies show that website visitors click a lot more often than webmasters expect. If you have a graphic or an image, make sure it’s clickable.

Make sure headlines are clickable and include text links in addition to buttons.

Put your Thank You pages to work.
Believe it or not, after a buyer has made a purchase, he is most likely to buy again. Maximize this opportunity by including complimentary items on your order confirmation pages.

Take advantage of your transactional emails.
Studies have also shown that transactional emails are opened nearly 75% of the time.

This is another awesome opportunity to present complimentary items and increase your sales volume.

My friend Steve recently asked me to critique a web site and suggest changes that could improve conversion rates.

There were several backbone upgrades that I recommended, but what I want to focus on now are the front-end problems that might also be plaguing your own site.

The first issue this site-in-question had was the webmaster (who is also the business owner) was too familiar with the business.

His copy was full of industry terms and technical jargon that his site visitors didn’t understand.

Unless your prospect is a total industry insider, it will probably be necessary to “dumb down” your web site copy. Use common terms and phrases that your prospects would use on a normal basis.

Read through your copy and as you hit questionable words, ask yourself “Have I ever heard my customers say that?” If not, replace that word with a more commonly used term.

Make sure your visitors can find what they’re looking for. Steven’s site was driving a large portion of its traffic through a display ad in a trade magazine.

He reasoned “The visitors already know we offer XYZ service because that’s what the ad talked about. I want the web site to show them what else we can do.”

So the landing page highlighted his ABC service and never even mentioned the XYZ service.

It seems like a logical approach, unfortunately, that’s not how web surfers think. They are looking for immediate gratification. If they come to your site based on an ad for XYZ, chances are 90% or better that they are specifically looking for XYZ.

If they can’t find it quickly and easily, they simply leave. Web site competition is too fierce to expect your prospect to spend his time hunting and digging through your site. Give him what he’s looking for right away.

He redesigned the landing page to showcase his XYZ service and he saw an immediate reduction in the bounce rate.

And speaking of finding things quickly and easily, it’s imperative that your site visitor can complete his task quickly and easily. Don’t ever interrupt the flow of conversion!

Steve broke into the checkout process by presenting the visitor with a survey on the second screen of the shopping cart.

His logic was, “These are the people making a purchase, these are actual customers. These are the opinions I want, and I want to grab them while I have their undivided attention.”

I’ll admit, that logic makes sense. But again, that’s not the way web surfers think. Any thing that stops them in their tracks is only an invitation to leave the site.

So he decided to move the survey to the end of the checkout process and made a few tweaks to the survey process itself (that’s a topic for another day.)

Other things Steve did to improve his web site included cleaning up the navigation, improving the call to action, removing the over-used back button and updating most of the graphics.

The increased conversion rate was almost magical and Steve says I am his best friend. Not bad for a few easy fixes that you can easily apply to your own web site in a short amount of time.

The holidays will soon be upon us, and with them comes the rush, rush, rush of harried holiday shoppers. The holidays can be a stressful time.

When you add in the fact that the US economy has been a bit bleak, your visitors will be in no mood to wait endlessly while your dinosaur of a web page finally loads in their browser.

Avoid losing your hard-earned shoppers to the all-too-easy exit button with these 7 simple web site fixes that can be applied in one weekend:

For speed and accuracy, use CSS.

Replace your tables and table-based layouts with CSS versions. Tables, especially nested tables, slow down the load time of your pages and render differently across platforms.

Use simple navigation. Instead of using Javascript and DHTML to create roll over image effects, duplicate a similar effect with CSS and background colors.

Replace as much Javascript as possible with PHP or server side coding.

And while we’re on the subject of PHP, eliminate multiple calls to your database. Use indexed fields and HTML data displays whenever possible.

Make sure all your images, divs, tables, rows and columns have a specified height and width.

When you leave out the height and width information, the browser has to load all the content in the background before it figures out what to do with it.

Clean up your code. Avoid excessive comment tags and white space which both add to overall page size.

If you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, verify your source code before sending the file to the server. WYSIWYG editors are notorious for adding bloat to your HTML code.

And don’t forget to clean up the code in any external files, including cascading style sheets and Javascript. Reduce your comment tags, eliminate excessive white space, and use shorter names for your classes, ids and functions.

Ensure that all of your HTML, XHTML and CSS code is valid. You may not realize that your code is invalid just by looking at your page, since most browsers can actually load and display invalid code.

Unfortunately, it takes a longer time to render invalid code, so the best practice is to verify before putting your pages on line.

Time to implement:

If you have an archaic table-based design (not all table-based designs are bad, only bad ones are bad), it could take several hours to create a new CSS page template.

Likewise, replacing Javascript with PHP and CSS might be a time consuming task, depending on your programming skills. However, tips 4 through 7 can be implemented in usually less than an hour.

My friend Sam is designing a new web site, and in reviewing available content I noticed there were no testimonials.

Sam told me he never bothered collecting testimonials since he always thought they were “stupid”. He claimed that reading testimonials never inspired him to make a purchase since they always sounded like they were made up anyway.

I’m a firm believer in using testimonials on your web site. Done correctly, testimonials should:

provide social proof - the credibility that your prospect needs to feel comfortable purchasing from you

position you as the expert, leaving you as the only choice for the product or service your prospect is looking for

answer any questions that your prospect has floating around in his head - even though he won’t come out and ask you, he does have questions

The problem many web site owners have with testimonials - the reason Sam didn’t want to use them on his site - is that most people go about the process in the wrong way.

Once Sam decided to include testimonials on his new web site, I knew he would have to create a “testimonial collection plan.”

Testimonial collection plans help to compile inspiring, effective testimonials that motivate site visitors to make a purchase.

This plan is easily adapted to your own web site endeavors:

Step 1
Compile a list of current and past clients that you would like to have testimonials from. Most small business owners simply choose their “high ticket” customers or the customers they are currently working with.

Review your clients and judiciously choose the ones you want to duplicate. Sam based his decision on the industries he most wanted to work with, the size of the company he preferred, the corporate culture he felt comfortable with, etc.

Many prospects are stirred by testimonials from people who are “just like them”. Be sure to stir the prospects who you most want to target.

Step 2
Go through your initial list and ask “What specific, quantitative benefit did I bring to this particular client?”

What is the purpose of this step? Testimonials are more effective when they’re specific. It’s OK to guide your customers in providing specific testimonials, so generate some ideas for steering your customers toward specifics.

Step 3
The third step is to generate a list of questions that the clients can respond to. When formulating your questions, keep your quantitative benefits from step 2 in mind.

You can craft different questions for each of your customers, and the logical answer for each of the questions points to the benefit that you originally identified.

For instance, if you know your product saved the ABC Company considerable downtime on the production floor, your question could be “How many man hours were you able to recoup with the Super Duper Luper Widget?”

Never use a question that could be answered with a simple yes or no. And keep in mind that some of your “guided answers” might require multiple questions.

Make it as easy as possible on your customer - don’t make him think or do the math. Here are a few ideas you can use to craft your own questions:

Prior to using the Super Duper Luper Widget, how much money were you spending each month on qizmoshmaltzkies? After using the widget, how much were you spending?

What problem were you experiencing that made you contact our company?

What results have you seen on your bottom line after putting the widget into use?

What was your income/sales/profitability prior to contracting with Sam’s Service? What is your income/sales/profitability level now?

What is the most important thing you learned from working with our company?

What single feature of the Super Duper Luper Widget has made the most impact on your business?

What aspect of our company were you most pleasantly surprised about?

Why would you recommend the Super Duper Luper Widget to other xyz manufacturers?

Step 4
Once you receive the responses you will have to edit them. You want each of the testimonials to be specific, brief and persuasive.

So take out any of the information that other prospects wouldn’t care about. Replace industry jargon with universal terms that all prospects could understand. And swap out a few of the generic words with strong, convincing power words.

Step 5
The next step is to run the newly revamped testimonial by the customer to make sure it has approval. You can do this the easy way - simply call each of the customers.

But rather than saying “Your testimonial wasn’t good enough…” start your conversation with “We loved the feedback you gave us about our company! Thank you so much.

Unfortunately, we don’t have room to reprint it word for word. Do you mind if we paraphrase it like this instead…”

Step 6
The final step is to plaster the testimonials all over your web site. Use them as headlines, in the sidebars, and even in your new email marketing campaigns.

I can’t say that testimonials are the only way to make your sales skyrocket. But they are definitely a good starting point, and an easy step for you to add to your marketing strategy.

You probably know by now that your web site needs to be updated on a regular basis. Updating your site is vital because search engines love fresh content.

In layman’s terms, here’s a brief rundown: the itsy bitsy spider comes to crawl your web site and indexes your pages and content. Two weeks later, he comes back to crawl your site again.

He notices that the content hasn’t changed, so instead of coming back in two weeks, he comes back in four weeks. Again he notices that the content hasn’t changed, so now he adjusts his crawl rate to every six weeks.

If your site’s crawl rate has been reduced, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to get your new content indexed in a timely manner, once you do publish new content.

Since the spider isn’t visiting your site very often, it could take weeks and weeks before he comes across your new information. This is bad news if you’re trying to run a seasonal sale, or if you have any timely information you’d like to spread the word on.

Fresh content is great for your real-live site visitors also. If your visitors come to your site and never find anything new or valuable, the chances are they won’t be visiting very often.

So what happens when you run out of ideas for fresh content? Just snag one of these:

1. Interview an expert.

I love this idea because it is relatively easy, it’s fun, and you generally end up with some extremely valuable content.

You can reprint the interview on your site in text format (best for the spiders to crawl) and, if you’re trying to earn a bit of revenue, offer a downloadable version as a product.

2. Question and answer sessions.

Invite your visitors and email readers to submit their most pressing questions, then release the answers to these questions as individual posts.

Stagger the questions out over a few weeks or even a few months to encourage your human visitors, as well as your spider visitors, to return to your site often.

3. Customer reviews.

Customer reviews have become so popular on the internet, and the great thing is, almost every site can take advantage of them. Even if your site does not offer a product for sale, you can publish reviews about complimentary products or services from your industry.

If you’re offering reviews of other people’s products, you can write the reviews yourself, or invite your site visitors to submit their own reviews.

4. Client case studies.

Case studies are a great marketing tool! A detailed before and after story of a client who has benefited from your products or services is sales letter and social proof all in one.

You can “accessorize” the case study with graphics and/or audio and/or videos, but be sure to include plain text also to serve as the “spider food”.

5. Top ten lists and checklist.

No doubt you can develop multiple top ten lists and checklists to publish at your web site. Review some of your past articles, your free reports, even the user manuals for the products you sell. I’m willing to bet you can have at least 5 checklists created within an hour.

There you have it, five incredibly easy ways to add fresh content to your web site. Some of these ideas take a bit longer than others but neither are difficult.

Try to add new content to your site at least twice a week, and you’re sure to see increased natural traffic in no time.