Users, Conversions, and Free Previews

Today, I’m going to take you through a my viewpoint on conversions on Lopico. That’s what it’s all about. Getting people to Lopico has never been a real problem for me. The problems lie in the conversions. The first person to comment with any suggestions related to this post gets a preview of the next version of Lopico, that has never been seen before, and a preview of the new site that I soft launched today.

There are essentially five types of Lopico users:

1. Info grabbers
2. Adders / Businesses
3. Reviewers
4. Voters
5. Rock stars (people that do it all).

The info grabbers are fine - they make up the majority of Lopico’s visitors and they are the people most likely to click on ads - but I want more from them. The info grabber is not someone that is leaving the site in any better condition than when they arrived. These are the hardest people to convert. Their mainly just trying to get the info and go. I’m working on a couple of features geared toward this set of users. More features that don’t require sign-up, like the recently launched Reliability Score, will help in this area.

Then there are the Adders. These visitors add businesses to the site, but too often do little more. Some never come back. I have a pretty good idea of how to fix this problem and it will likely go away before long. This is often where businesses tend to fall - they want their information listed, but have little desire to participate in any social aspects.

The next toughest group to convert are the reviewers. These users tend to only write reviews and rarely if ever vote. This is great, but I’d like the next step to be taken. Reviews make for interesting content and comprise a large portion of all page views on the site… but these people have accounts and I feel I could get more out of them. I have a couple of ideas here too.

Voters are usually pretty easy converts. Well, the heavy voters anyway. There are people that will go on Lopico everyday to vote, some stick around forever, some come for a month or a couple of weeks and then move on, but these people definitely add value to the site (in more ways than you might think). Best of all, the amount of time that these users spend on the site usually leads them to engaging in other activities such as writing reviews and commenting. I have ideas to boost this as well - and hopefully you’ll see all of these ideas come to light in the next version of Lopico.

Finally the Rock Stars. These users take advantage of all the features that Lopico offers, BUT… they need to be converted backwards. These are typically not the ones that generate any revenue for Lopico. So, they are my favorite users - but they do the least for me in terms of direct monetization.

That was a little long, and certainly could have been three times as long, but that’s a general run-down of my users. Comments = rewards; put your best foot forward and let me know what you think I could do to convert more users in any of these groups.