Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Looking for inspiration for your personal trainer website? Here are 10 great personal training websites along with explanation for what makes them so effective.

As a marketer, a big part of your job is to convert qualified website visitors into leads. Simple enough.
More specifically, inbound marketing requires you to create remarkable content they’ll want to trade their contact information for. From there, those leads turn into opportunities, who turn into customers and even promoters.
Clearly, conversions are a big deal. So how can you optimize yours? By creating conversion paths optimized to most effectively convert your ideal visitors into leads.

While not all conversion paths are identical and depend on the type of business they’re for, they have a few common attributes: a landing page, a call-to-action, a content offer or end point, and a thank you page.

Landing page: A landing page is a specific page on your website designed to collect a visitor’s contact information in exchange for a resource, like a course, ebook, or other product.

Call-to-action: A call-to-action is a section on a webpage or advertisement that persuades the visitor to act or do something. These can take the form of buttons prompting website visitors to sign up, subscribe, or buy a product.

Thank you page: The thank you page shows your visitors that you appreciate them for taking a desired action. For example, a thank you page might appear after a visitor has signed up for a newsletter or filled out a form.

End point: This may be in the form of a content offer, which is any material or resource given to a visitor in exchange for their contact information, completing the conversion path. These materials could be guides, ebooks, courses or other products. For e-commerce, instead of a content offer, a conversion path may end in a purchase.

In order to convert into a lead, a visitor sees a content offer of interest to them (or product in the case of e-commerce), clicks on the call-to-action button to access that content, and is then taken to a landing page. On that landing page, the visitor can provide their information on a form in exchange for access to the offer itself. Upon submitting that form, the now-lead is taken to a thank you page where they receive the offer.
Voila! Conversion path complete.
By designing and implementing the right conversion paths, you can most effectively move website visitors through the buyer’s journey and help them become customers and promoters.
Conversion Path Example

Let’s say you’ve been lured to the landing page above after searching online for tips for preventing frizzy hair.
You’re then prompted by a CTA (pictured below) that invites sign up for their email list in exchange for 10% of their products.
You decide you’d like to try one of their satin-lined caps to fight frizz and take them up on the offer.
A thank you page pops up once you’ve filled out the form giving instructions on how to access your discount code. Once you get the code from your email, you use it to purchase one of their caps. Ta-da! The conversion path is complete.
What makes a good conversion path?
Well as you might have guessed, you need content, a call-to-action, a landing page, and a thank you page. But with so many conversion paths out there on the internet for your potential customers to explore, it’s more important than ever to create the RIGHT paths — paths that your ideal customers are drawn to and most effectively convert the right visitors into leads.
What are the steps to creating a conversion path?
Let’s explore the key items you need in your inbound toolkit to create effective conversion paths that turn casual visitors into customers.
1. Attract your target audience with context-appropriate content.
Content is the fuel that powers effective inbound strategies—and it’s what you’ll use to convert those website visitors into leads. The good news is that content is everywhere! Content is what your website pages are filled with, what goes into your emails, and what’s hosted on your blog — your website pages, emails, and blog are just vehicles to deliver that content.
Although content is in no short supply, in order for it to act as your inbound rocket fuel, you need to create the right content. As you can probably guess, the right content is optimized to appeal specifically to your buyer personas. It should focus on the challenges they’re trying to overcome and the goals they’re looking to hit. Most of all, it should be relevant and interesting to them.
But here’s the kicker — it’s not enough to just create persona-specific content. That content needs to be relevant to your persona based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is the active research process your personas go through leading up to making a purchase — and specific content is more relevant to your personas at different stages of that journey. This is where the “context” piece comes in: It’s not enough to just create content for your personas. You have to make sure that content is relevant to what they’re interested in and hoping to learn more about.
Most visitors to your site are still at the very beginning stages of that journey — they might not even know what your product does or how it can help them. All they may know is that they have a problem or there’s an opportunity at hand. So, the content that will most appeal to your personas when they’re first visiting your website and converting a lead will generally be high-level and educational in nature.
In order to be an effective tool in your conversion path toolkit, make sure you have remarkable content tailored to your buyer personas and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
2. Create landing pages that speak to your personas.
After you’ve developed a remarkable content offer that speaks to both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey, the next step is to leverage that piece of content to convert website visitors into leads. That’s where landing pages come in.
Landing pages are specialized website pages whose sole purpose is to collect visitors’ contact information in exchange for something of value to them. Landing pages contain forms that potential leads must fill out and submit before getting access to your remarkable content offer. And like that offer, great landing pages must also be tailored to both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
In order to most effectively convert website visitors into leads, your landing pages must present the benefits of your offer that are most relevant to the particular problem your persona is experiencing — and discuss the aspects of that problem that are most important to where your persona is in the buyer’s journey.
Imagine, for example, you work at a pet store and have created an ebook on raising a puppy. Someone who’s at the beginning of the buyer’s journey probably won’t be too interested in downloading your ebook if your landing page talks all about how your ebook contains the best techniques for housebreaking. Instead, an effective landing page for this persona might highlight how your ebook discusses how to choose the right dog breed for you.
Great landing pages focus on both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
3. Use attention-grabbing calls-to-action.
While having a remarkable content offer and great landing page are key to creating a successful conversion path, your website visitors need a way to actually access that landing page in the first place. That’s where calls-to-action come in.
Calls-to-action or CTAs, are buttons you can embed throughout your website that advertise your content offers. When a visitor clicks on one of these calls-to-action, they’ll be taken to your landing page. In effect, every call-to-action you have on your website is the beginning of a conversion path.
To create calls-to-action that get those clicks and act as key steps within your conversion paths, you must ensure that the message displayed on your call-to-action aligns with the message on your landing page — and the content itself.
Great calls-to-action should be just that: action-oriented. Since their main objective is to garner clicks and direct people to landing pages, ensure that they’re click-worthy by using actionable language and colors that help them stand out from the rest of your website.
4. Close the deal with optimized thank you pages.
If a call-to-action is the beginning of a conversion path, a thank you page marks its end. Thank you pages are the final item you need in your inbound toolkit to lead your website visitors down a conversion path to become, well, a lead.
Thank you pages are specialized website pages from which your now-leads can download the offer promised by your call-to-action and landing page. They’re also an opportunity to move people further along in the buyer’s journey, by including things like additional calls-to-action that complement the offer you’ve just provided your lead.
Improving the Mobile Conversion Path Experience
Designing for mobile is no longer optional, it’s a must. According to a 2020 report from Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA, formerly Groupe Spécial Mobile), nearly half the world’s population uses a mobile device to access the internet. By the end of 2019, 3.8 billion people were mobile internet users, an increase of 250 million users from the previous year.
With those numbers in mind, there’s a good chance visitors will access your website from their phone or tablet versus a desktop. If you want to create an effective conversion path, It’s imperative to consider the mobile user experience. Follow these steps to create a mobile conversion path that sets visitors up for success.

Start with a responsive design: A responsive design adapts to both desktop and mobile devices by rendering the display differently based on screen size. Visitors won’t have to pinch or zoom in while browsing your website via mobile, which leads to a better user experience. Additionally, having a responsive design signals to Google that your site is mobile-friendly, which will help improve your rankings in search results for mobile users.

Nix cluttered landing pages: When it comes to smaller screens, minimalism is a virtue. Having long-form, relevant content, images and video may translate well on desktop, but can be too busy for mobile devices. Avoid unnecessary text, images, and features that may make it difficult for visitors to find the information they’re looking for. Visitors can’t become leads if they can’t navigate your website. Consider the information most relevant to your audience, and leave out the rest.

Keep CTAs to a minimum: As noted above, with smaller screens you’ll want to take extra care with how that real estate is allocated. Opt for one (or a few), clear call-to-action button as the main focus that your potential customers can easily find. Keep sign-up forms short, only asking for the information you absolutely need. Avoid burying the call-to-action at the bottom of the page after several paragraphs of text. In most cases, mobile users will not scroll down to the end of the page to see it.

As people become increasingly attached to their phones, taking the mobile user experience into account will improve your chances of converting more leads.
Conversion paths are invaluable in inbound marketing as they convert website visitors into leads. When done right, an effective conversion path can move leads beyond an initial conversion, ultimately turning them into customers.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May, 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

There are many businesses out there that operate with a mindset of “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it.” Unfortunately, this type of close-minded thinking can lead to a great deal of waste.
Tasks may be unnecessary to achieve the final goal, processes may be repeated multiple times when one would be sufficient, employees may be wasting time on superfluous responsibilities, and materials may be wasted during manufacturing.
When this occurs within an organization, employee satisfaction decreases so turnover increases, quality suffers so customer satisfaction and retention is decreased, and one look at the books will likely indicate the company is hemorrhaging money.

You might think that this type of operational inefficiency only occurs in large corporations and organizations, however, it’s just as prevalent in small-to-medium-sized businesses and can be seen throughout every department.
Efficiency is the name of the game for successful businesses, and you’re about to learn one of the best ways to turn your business into a lean, mean, money-making machine.
Lean Process Improvement
What is lean process improvement?
Lean process improvement is a concept originally developed by Toyota to decrease the amount of time it took from receiving an order to delivering it. While lean process improvement is often discussed in a production environment, the concept can be applied to service, healthcare, technology, and even government.
Consider a marketing department that has multiple people working on the same project but not communicating. Rather than each handling a specific aspect of the campaign, several people tackle the same task while other activities go unhandled.
It’s not a traditional production environment, however, the team could benefit from creating an easy-to-follow process that looks at the desired end product and finds the simplest route to get there.
The whole idea behind this way of thinking is that when you look at the big picture, you can find ways to eliminate waste, whether that’s financial, physical, time, or employee energy that could be spent elsewhere. This concept may take a while to implement, and that’s okay. It’s not meant to be a short-term solution, but rather a change to the entire mindset and culture of a business.
What are the benefits of lean process improvement?
Businesses that incorporate lean process improvement see a variety of benefits from this shift. These include:

Less waste
Less inventory
Increased productivity
Better quality
Happier customers
Fewer costs
More profits

It makes perfect sense that when you remove the redundancy, streamline processes, and create less waste, your bottom line will increase. When your customers receive their product faster and with less hassle, you’ll have happier customers who return and recommend you to others. With more customers, your bottom line increases once again.
If you’d like to see this type of improvement in your organization, read on to learn lean process improvement steps.
How do I incorporate lean process improvement into my business?
You guessed it … there’s a process to lean process improvement. There’s actually a series of nine steps you’ll need to implement to create this level of efficiency in your organization. Let’s take a closer look at lean process improvement steps.

1. Review the process you want to improve.
This step is essential because if you don’t know what you need to work on, you won’t know where to focus your efforts. In order to do that, you need to talk to employees on the front line.
The biggest mistake companies make during this process is implementing changes without ever speaking to the people who do the job day in and day out. Interview your frontline workers, and ask them what’s not working well in their daily routine.
2. Identify what improvements need to be made.
Once you’ve identified what needs to be fixed, it’s time to involve your team once again. There’s a very good chance that they already know how to fix the problem and just haven’t been able to implement it because of a “That’s-how-we’ve-always-done-it” mindset.
3. Implement the suggested changes.
How will you put the changes into action? Create a plan so everyone involved understands and buys into the process. This is the best way to ensure organization-wide success.
4. Monitor how the changes are impacting your efficiency.
While it would be great if your first attempt at execution was a success, the reality is that once the process is tested in the field, it will need to be further refined. The only way to do this is through constant monitoring and reevaluating. As new issues appear, you can address them and make the necessary changes.
5. Identify what activities add value.
Throughout these steps, you’ll be assessing every single action and every aspect of your process. During this time, you must evaluate every single activity to determine whether it adds value to your process, or detracts. If an activity is deemed unnecessary, it should be removed and the process tested without it.
6. Limit risk.
Production and often business, in general, is inherently risky. This time should be used to identify any risky activities or aspects that are part of the current process and eliminate or simplify these tasks. This may involve automating an activity or simply changing the way in which it’s executed.
7. Standardize the process.
As you create and refine the process, document your progress thoroughly. This allows the process to be repeated, properly, by other employees or depending on the specific process, by other teams or departments in your organization.
8. Ensure compliance.
While lean process improvement should be a company-wide shift in culture, your industry or governing body may have specific metrics, procedures, and standardized measurements that you must adhere to. Compliance may not be sacrificed in the name of efficiency.
9. Improve the customer experience.
In determining the success of a lean process improvement plan, Marketers consider the customer experience to be “the moment of truth.” Ultimately, whatever improvements you make during production or service must trickle down to positively impact the customer.
Lean Process Improvement Tools
As you embark on this journey, there are a number of tools available to you. These tools can help you organize your thoughts, identify issues, and implement your plan. The following are just some of the tools you can look to for support.
Just like any other tool, the one you choose must be the right one for the current job. If you start out with one and don’t find that it meets your needs, consider trying another.

Why Analysis: By asking “Why?” repeatedly, you can identify the root cause of the challenges you’re experiencing.

Ishikawa Diagram: Also known as a “Fishbone diagram” or “cause-and-effect diagram”, it allows you to examine a problem from multiple angles, including measurements, materials, people, methods, machines, and environment.

Affinity Diagram: This works great in the early stages of lean implementation as it can help sort and organize large amounts of data. Identify the value you bring to the customer and then uncover problems with your existing processes.

FMEA Analysis (failure mode and effects): Catching issues before they get out of hand can help you eliminate waste and save money. This tool allows you to examine your flow and identify problems early on.

5S Dashboard: This approach can help you organize your workspace for maximum efficiency. While the original tool has five S’ based on Japanese terms, many businesses have added a 6th practice. These stand for:

Sort
Set in order
Shine
Standardize
Sustain
Safety

Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) Cycle: Create continuous improvement by repeatedly analyzing a problem, testing a hypothesis, reviewing, and then analyzing the results, and finally, putting the plan into action once it’s successful.

Lean Process Improvement Techniques
There are a number of approaches that have been created to assist in lean process improvement. Just like the tools, it’s important to find the right technique for your project and your organization. For example:
Six Sigma (DMAIC Model)
With a goal of reducing the variation in processes, Six Sigma works to increase both external and internal customer satisfaction by standardizing workflow. The DMAIC Roadmap stands for:

Define
Measure
Analyze
Improve
Control

Kanban
These boards allow you to visualize your workflow and use value stream mapping to break down your workflows into stages. Having a visual representation of your workflow, and all the activities that make it up, can assist you in identifying inefficiencies.
Sharing this board with your entire team allows anyone to stop the process when a problem occurs. Now, it becomes everyone’s job to find a solution.
WIP Limits
Within Kanban boards exist a concept known as WIP Limits or “Work in Progress Limits”. Every stage in a Kanban board workflow is represented by a column. WIP limits force you to stay under a maximum number of work items for each stage. This can be per person, per work stage, or for the entire project.
Having these limits in place ensures that current tasks are finished before new ones are started, and helps to complete activities faster.
Final Thoughts on Lean Process Improvement
Now that you understand how important lean process improvement is to a successful, efficient organization, it’s a good time to reiterate that this is an ongoing process. If you attempt to overhaul your entire organization overnight, you will undoubtedly fail and most likely make things worse than when you started.
Identify the biggest sources of inefficiency in your organization and target these first, one at a time, until you’ve created a well-functioning business.
Finally, remember that your most valuable assets are the employees getting their hands dirty every day. Attempting to identify problems and create solutions without getting their input is akin to driving blind when you could simply open your eyes.

We’ve all had it happen to us: we try to choose an option on a website, and right before we click, the page jumps away and we end up clicking something we didn’t mean to. Doh!
Like a game of “down low, too slow”, this website behavior makes us feel slow and frustrated. Fortunately, website developers are now incentivized to improve their site experience with the release of Google’s Core Web Vitals; a set of metrics that help site owners measure and improve the user experience of their web pages.

Cumulative Layout Shift is one of these key metrics that measures the “jumpiness” of a website and how it unexpectedly moves as elements load. Let’s take a closer look at how this metric works, and how you can make sure your own website is following best practices so you rank higher on search engines and provide your users with a better experience.
What is Cumulative Layout Shift?
Cumulative Layout Shift (or CLS) is a measure of how much a webpage unexpectedly shifts during its life. For example, if a website visitor loaded a page and, while they were reading it, a banner loads and the page jumps down, that would constitute a large CLS score.
Along with Largest Contentful Paint (the amount of time it takes to load the largest piece of content) and First Input Delay (how long it takes for a page to be interactive or “clickable”), CLS is part of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Google’s web crawlers measure CLS on each page they index.
What causes Cumulative Layout Shift?
Page shifts happen when content loads at different speeds and causes the layout to change and alters what the viewer is looking at. Advertisements loading slowly, videos of unknown size suddenly appearing, or DOM elements being dynamically added are all potential causes of CLS.
The example below shows what happens when an ad banner is loaded after the rest of the webpage loads. The content is pushed down, and the user experience is negatively impacted.

Source
It can be difficult to know if your users are experiencing CLS, because not every device or environment operates in the same way. If you’re loading your website in a development environment you may have elements cached or they may be loading locally. Personalized web content based on cookies will behave differently for every visitor, especially depending on their location. Plus, mobile users can have a very different experience – a small shift on a web browser may be monumental to someone viewing the site on a small screen. Really the only way to understand your users’ experience is to measure CLS, which we’ll go over below.
Why is CLS important?
Understanding CLS is critical for two reasons: your visitors’ experience and your search engine ranking.
Your visitors have high expectations when it comes to your site’s performance. In 2020, 93% of people reported leaving a website because it didn’t load properly.
Jumpy websites that load in pieces or with unexpected behavior will cause your visitors to find another website to browse. And if they do stick around, a high CLS score is likely to cause usability problems like choosing the wrong option, checking out too early, or missing parts of your website altogether.
This problem is only exacerbated by the large number of internet users who are browsing on their smartphones. When viewing your site on a small screen, any jumps and layout shifts on the website are certain to have a big impact on mobile user experience.
Optimizing your site and reducing your cumulative layout shift is essential to providing customers with a good experience.
Secondly, Google ranks sites based on their page performance. A better user experience results in a higher search ranking. If your page doesn’t meet the standards that Google lays out in their Core Web Vitals guidelines, your site will be penalized.
Google doesn’t want to direct people to sites that don’t perform well. Aligning with CLS best practices can help your website move up the rankings. And since 68% of online experiences start with a search, making sure your site shows up on the search results page is important to generating inbound traffic.
How do you measure Cumulative Layout Shift?
The good news is that you don’t have to measure CLS yourself because Google makes it really easy to analyze your page performance with their PageSpeed Insights tool, or in the Chrome browser using Lighthouse Tools.
To analyze performance in PageSpeed Insights:

Enter a website URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Click ‘Analyze.’
Check your performance. You can review both mobile and desktop performance, which you can switch between using the top left corner navigation.

The page analyzed below shows a good cumulative layout shift score of 0.001.
To analyze performance using Lighthouse tools:

Open up the website you want to analyze in Chrome.
Navigate to Developer Tools by clicking the three dots in the top right corner of the browser window, choosing “More Tools” and then “Developer Tools.”
When the console opens, choose “Lighthouse” from the options along the top.
Click “Generate Report.”

The page below shows a CLS of 0.109, or “needs improvement.”
Lighthouse provides a detailed audit of what contributed to that score. To review the audit, scroll down and choose “Show audits relevant to CLS.”

More About Impact Fraction and Distance Fraction
Two terms you might see when researching CLS are “impact fraction” and “distance fraction.” These are the two variables that Google uses to calculate CLS.
layout shift score = impact fraction x distance fraction
Impact fraction relates to the size of the unstable element in comparison to the viewport. Distance fraction is the amount the unstable element moves as a ratio of the viewport.
So a high CLS would consist of a large element moving a long distance. A small CLS would be the result of a small element moving only a small distance.
CLS is the largest “burst” or group of layout shift scores that occur during a session window. Essentially, if a bunch of shifts happen within a five-second window, this would be considered disruptive and result in a large CLS score.
What is a good CLS score?
A good cumulative layout score is anything less than 0.1. The reports from PageInsights or Lighthouse tools will automatically flag any poor scores, as well as provide advice on how to optimize the page for better performance.
Source
How To Improve Cumulative Layout Shift
There are a few best practices that website owners can follow to improve their CLS score:
1. Use a CMS (content management system).
Especially one that integrates with Google Lighthouse or other diagnostic tools. This will make sure that you’re designing with best practices in mind, and flag any issues before you launch your site.
2. Specify size attributes for images and videos.
Rather than letting them set their own height and width, dictate size attributes for your media. By setting these attributes, you’re telling the browser how much space to set aside, even if the image isn’t loaded yet.
3. Understand how ads can influence your layout.
Google Publisher Tag offers extensive guidance about how to reserve space for ads.
Load new content below the viewport. Loading content above what the user is viewing will often cause a page to shift.
4. Use transitions and animation to provide context around page changes.
For example, a “Read more” link that scrolls the user down the page would not impact CLS because it’s an expected layout shift.
A Note On Expected Vs Unexpected Layout Shift
CLS only takes into account unexpected changes. If the layout changes because of a user-initiated action, there is no impact on CLS. This is a helpful tool to use when you don’t need to load everything all at once. Instead, offer users the opportunity to choose which elements they want to view through “read more” links or “expand topic” accordions within your page.
Offer A Better User Experience With CLS Optimization
Paying attention to CLS not only provides a better user experience, but it also boosts your search result rankings. It’s a win-win.
To meet Google’s standards for CLS, start by using a diagnostic tool to measure your website’s current performance. Take into account the basic guidelines outlined above, and keep layout shifts top of mind when designing your website, especially around transitions and content additions. With these few simple considerations, you’ll see better results across the board.

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