You’ve created something useful and someone has found it.
Now what?
That’s a question I think is easy to overlook when you’re building an online business.
We can spend so much time thinking about getting people to our website, writing content and building an audience that we forget to think about what happens when someone actually turns up.
They read your article.
They find it helpful.
And then?
That’s really what conversion is about.
Thinking about what happens next.
When There Isn’t a Clear Next Step
I’ve visited plenty of websites where I’ve found something useful, finished reading it and then wondered where to go next.
Sometimes I’ll look around.
Other times I’ll simply leave.
I don’t think that’s necessarily because the website wasn’t useful. Quite often it’s because nobody seems to have thought about what I might want to do after reading the article.
It’s easy to see how that happens.
When we’re creating content, most of our attention tends to go into the content itself. Then we publish it and move on to the next job.
The person reading it simply reaches the end and decides what to do from there.
That’s why it’s worth thinking about the next step before we consider the job finished.
The Next Step Should Be Helpful
Of course, simply having somewhere to send people isn’t enough.
The next step needs to make sense.
If I’ve just read an article about getting more traffic to a website, for example, sending me straight to an unrelated product simply because there’s an affiliate commission attached to it doesn’t help me much.
A better next step follows naturally from what brought me there.
Perhaps another article answers the question I’m likely to have next.
Perhaps a free resource helps me look at my own situation.
Or perhaps there’s a product that genuinely helps with the problem I’ve been reading about.
That’s where the word helpful becomes important.
The question isn’t just:
Where do I want this person to go?
It’s also:
What would make sense for them to do next?
Those can be two very different questions.
Conversion Doesn’t Always Mean a Sale
Sometimes the most useful next step might have nothing to do with buying anything.
When we hear the word conversion in online business, it’s easy to think immediately about sales.
Someone visits a page.
They click a button.
They buy something.
That’s certainly one type of conversion, but it isn’t the only one that matters.
Someone who reads one article and decides to read another has taken another step.
Someone who completes a free resource has taken another step.
Someone who joins your email list because they’d like to hear more from you has taken another step.
Eventually, one of those steps might be buying something you recommend.
But it doesn’t have to happen straight away.
For me, that’s a much more useful way of looking at conversion.
It’s not just about turning visitors into customers.
It’s about giving interested people a natural way to continue.
Too Many Choices Can Make Things Harder
There’s another side to this as well.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that there isn’t a next step.
It’s that there are too many of them.
I’ve certainly created pages like that in the past.
Read this article.
Download this.
Join my email list.
Look at this product.
Follow me on Facebook.
I thought giving people plenty of choices was being helpful.
But when several different things are competing for attention, it can become difficult to know which one actually matters.
That doesn’t mean every page on a website needs to lead to one particular place.
It simply means asking which action makes the most sense at that point and making it easy to find.
Sometimes making something clearer might mean giving people fewer things to choose from.
Make It Easy to Keep Going
I used to think about conversion mainly as the point where someone became a customer.
I’m starting to see it differently.
If we’re genuinely trying to help people, conversion isn’t something we suddenly think about when it’s time to make a sale. It’s part of thinking through the whole experience we’re creating for someone.
How did they find us?
Did they find what they were looking for?
And if they want to continue, have we made that easy?
We don’t get to decide whether someone takes that next step.
But we can make sure there is a clear reason for taking it.
Maybe that’s the simplest way to think about conversion.
Help someone first. Then give them a good reason to keep going.