In my previous article, I talked about how to setup an online business. So you setup a business and waited for a few weeks, and have a lot of visitors coming to your site. And yet, nobody bought anything. You check your site, and you find that your visitors spent less than a minute on your front page, and none visited the other contents of your site. So what went wrong?

Well, like I wrote before, the biggest problem is pitching your sales to potential customers. Web surfers are a fickle lot, and any sales pitch that takes more than 15 seconds will make them lose interest. Think about it: Same thing happens when you watch television and the commercials came on; how long do viewers spend before they lose interest? 15 seconds at the most. Any more the viewers are liable to switch to another channel.

Try this for an experiment. Get into an elevator, and anyone you meet try to introduce yourself, what you do, and where you are based, before you reach your floor. Initially it will be hard; you’ll find yourself mumbling about weather, news, or something else (Hint: This problem is exactly what your online business marketing suffering right now). Keep practising and refining your 15 seconds elevator pitch. Pretty soon you will find that after some fine tuning, you will be able to tell people about yourself and your business in 15 seconds, and get people interested enough to actually want to know more!

So how do we apply this 15 seconds pitch secret to successfully leverage our online business? How to make your visitors spend more than a minute on your front page and content pages, and to finally convert these visits into a sale? Do the same thing as the elevator experiment; keep refining your front page by removing all the clutter and unnecessary things! Remove any and all text that has nothing to do with what you are selling.

Keep it simple and minimal like this. In less than 15 seconds you can tell that this is Google and they are selling the ability to search for things online.

Avoid clutter like this. This is basically information overload. Not only is there too much text for a search engine, the way it is presented basically turns people off.

Although both helps you search for information, you will find that people will be more interested in using Google. Clearly Google has applied the 15 seconds pitch well! And now you have learned the secret of 15 seconds marketing, so can you. Have fun tweaking your website.