Imagine...
You have a website and are managing to receive a couple
of hundred visitors per day. That's nice and
congratulations to you! But so far, where are the sales?
You look back at your sales material and everything
seems fine. Your website is easy to use. You tried
following the advice on Internet marketing but still
no sales.
What are the problems? Well, the only person who can
really answer that is you. But in order to know what the
problems are you'll need to develop a method to help
you detect them.
Here's a 4-step plan to help you:
1. Define the goal of your website. It's already done?
Think twice. The only viable goals for your business are
those that will eventually put more money in your pocket.
So what are your goals? To generate sales? To generate
leads? To improve your customer service?
The goals you define will tell you how to read your
results and what to track. As an example: if your goal is
to improve your customer service you'll want to know
whether the visitors to your site are your actual customers.
You'll also want to know your customers’ level of
satisfaction and so on.
2. Once you’ve established this, try to determine the
variables you need to track. Let's take lead generation and
sales. If your goal is to make your site sell, you'll probably
need to track the sales compared to the number of visitors.
But it doesn't stop here. Let me ask you a question: WHAT
IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PAGE ON YOUR
WEBSITE?
If your goal is to sell, your most important page is the order
form. If your goal is to generate leads for your business, the
most important page is the one asking for contact information.
This is important to understand because if you don't get your
visitors to that page you are in big trouble. You may have the
best copy in the world but if no one reads it you fail. When
you have determined which page is the most important one in
terms of achieving your goal you need to focus on how to get
people to that page.
3. In order to maximize the number of people who visit that
page you’ll need to know which trail whoever reached that
page followed before they arrived there. To do this you'll need
to take a look at your server logs and determine what the
sequence is that makes people click on the link to your core
page. Which sequence brings in the best results in terms of
sign-ups, contacts, or inquiries?
As an example, one of the most important page on
http://www.greatpromote.com is the Discussion Page. If
people don't get there and e-mail me, part of my marketing
strategy is a failure. So at least twice a week I look to my
server log and track the pages they visited before reaching that
page and more importantly what pages people they visited
before e-mailing me.
Once you know this you'll be able to direct your visitors’
visits so as to maximize the most rewarding trail and to
minimize the number of unproductive trails.
4. All traffic is valuable, right? WRONG! I consider that
idea to be Public Enemy #1 of Internet marketing. Don't
fall into that trap. Look at it like this:
Someone tells you about a hot traffic-generation tool and
you sign up, test it, thinking you just found the Holy Grail.
It effectively generates traffic. So you continue to invest
more money and time in this marvel. More traffic. Now
you’re receiving 1000 visitors a day. But one day you wake
up and wonder why all this traffic is not generating sales.
Only 50 a day (5%) sign up for your newsletter and that
yields a pathetic 1 or 2 inquiries per day.
Traffic is not a goal, except for sites making money strictly
through advertising. It's merely a means to reach the goal
you’ve set for your website. But instead of spending more
money on that promotional marvel, look at your other
sources of traffic. Do they offer a better response rate? If so,
can you amplify these results? What would happen if you
could find a source of traffic that brings in 100 visitors a day,
10 new subscribers, and two inquiries? You'll cut your time
and money investment by a factor of ten to generate results
that are ten times better. Now you’ve got something that’s
worth expanding. What if you could expand this source up
to a 1000 visitors a day? Then you'd have 100 subscribers
per day and 10 to 20 inquiries.
Clearly when you are looking to grow your business you need
to know what traffic generation tool is best for you! And the
only way to know that is:
1) Test on a small scale
2) Expand when results are good
3) Drop when results are poor
5. Now you’ve gone through four stages:
1) You know your goal;
2) You know what pages contribute to the achievement of that
goal;
3) You have maximized the results from those pages by
directing your visitors there;
4) You know what are the best traffic-generation tools for your
business. Now you need to test your sales material. That is,
you'll need to write several sales copies, test different trails on
your site, devise multiple USP’s (Unique Selling Propositions)
that are outlined throughout your site. You need to test and
track time and time again. This is a never-ending process.
By following this advice you’ll be able to build a constant flow
of income with multiple activities and you will have the tools to
evaluate the results produced by your website through this
goal-oriented approach.
About the Author
Didier Bonneville-Roussy is an online marketing consultant.
Owner of http://www.greatpromote.com/?jayde he has helped
numbers of businesses to succeed online. Didier is also founder
of The Million Dollar Discussion Forum. You've got to find
what's this all about http://www.greatpromote.com/?jayde