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Fair Measures Corporation is a nationally recognized management training
company made up of attorneys and professional speakers. They consult with
companies such as Oracle, Sun and Cisco around preventing employee lawsuits
by treating employees with respect.
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Their Web site, at http://www.FairMeasures.com/ contains over 500 pages
of free in-depth legal information and analysis, provided for both employers
and employees. It includes a monthly e-newsletter, and an “Ask the Lawyers”
page where visitors can post additional questions. The site attracts
frequent media attention, and has been featured in “HR Magazine”.
Last year (2000), we completely restructured the site to add content for
the many employees who come there looking for information. Previously, we’d
been concentrating on the traditional markets for Fair Measures human
resource professionals and managers who hire them for workplace training
programs. But we realized that in doing so, we were missing out on a very
different audience for their expertise and one that really only exists in
the online context.
How did we know this? In two main ways:
1. by looking in our traffic analysis at the key search phrases that
brought visitors to the site; and
2. from the content of questions submitted
to “Ask the Lawyers”.
We could see that many visitors were looking for information around
sexual harassment, overtime exemptions, Internet e-mail monitoring and
privacy issues, and wrongful termination. Employers wanted to know how to
create policies and practices that would protect them against costly
lawsuits, and employees wanted to enforce their rights.
So, we created a whole series of new products - instantly downloadable
online guides and sample policies around these topics. They are available in
Word, pdf, and html formats at the buyer’s choice, and come with a full
money back guarantee. The price point currently $10 for the guides, is
intended to encourage impulse purchases.
The latest of these products a “Wrongful Termination Guide” was
added in April, and is now achieving a nearly 5% conversion rate in sales.
This is far higher than the average 1-2% that is typical of most e-commerce
sites (and perhaps indicative of the current economic climate!) And, with
real-time traffic analysis from Hitbox, we are tweaking the language and
length of our selling pages to see what’s most effective with each
audience.
Our downloadable products are now generating a steady additional revenue
stream, from a source that is very different from the traditional markets
for this company.
So, lessons learned (and still being learned) from this exercise:
1. Be open to new and different potential audiences for your online
business; 2. Study your traffic analysis there are many valuable clues as
to visitor needs that can be translated into new products and services; and
3. Keep monitoring your visitor response and try new spins on your content.
About the Author:
Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is an internationally recognized e-business
strategist. Check out her free tipsheet "Beyond the Search
Engines" for 17 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html
Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317
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