You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed if you're new here. Thanks for visiting!

It should be obvious to any person with some marketing experience online that there is no magic pill to success.

To be honest with you I’ve grown tired of reading email after email filled with claims on how easy it is to sell online.

Whilst this can be true, what many fail to tell you is there’s more to it than just putting up a website and driving traffic to it.

Are you ready for the “real” truth behind successful online marketing?

Here it is…

“Fanatically test and track everything!”

Let me say it again, it’s that important…

“Fanatically test and track everything!”

Before you get started with your testing and tracking you need to know what your website conversion rate is right now. This gives you a yardstick to measure future improvements to. In scientific terms this is called your “control”.

Knowing your conversion rate before making, say a change in your headline, is the only way to know for certain if the change made has a positive or negative impact.

And by split testing one headline against another you’ll soon find a winner that beats your control.

Here’s a word of warning… never make a steadfast change to your copy based on some other marketers advice.

This is critical and it’s where so many people fall over…

What works for them may not work for you too.

Plus, how do you know they’re not merely repeating some “mantra” they read or heard elsewhere?

A classic example of this is to make your headline a bright red color. Whilst in some markets this might be the “winning” headline color, in other markets it could fall flat on it’s face and reduce sales conversions massively. Can you see the importance of testing?

Whilst it’s true you can increase sales by increasing the traffic to your site, it’s not the easiest way to do it.

Let’s face it, increasing your traffic is either going to cost you more money or a lot of time and effort (certainly more than split testing and tracking everything to improve your existing sales conversions).

However, just throwing more traffic at your website without knowing your baseline conversion metrics means you’re leaving money on the table because you do not yet know the full potential of your sales process.

Let’s play with the numbers for a moment to give you a good example of what I mean…

Say you have a 1.5% conversion rate and 1000 visitors each week.

That’s equal to 15 sales a week. Not bad.

And each sale is worth $20 in profit.

1.5% x 1000 = 15 X $20 = $300 profit each week Now, increase traffic 50%… 1.5% X 1500 = 22.5 x $20 = $450 profit

Let’s step things up a bit…

Now you increase your conversions to 2.5% and send more traffic, let’s see what happens next…

2.5% x 1000 = 25 x $500 profit. That’s $200 more than in the example above and $50 more than sending more traffic.

Let’s send more traffic to our 2.5% converting site and see what happens with a 50% increase.

2.5% x 1500 = 37.5 sales x $20 = $750 profit each week. Replicate this over 4 weeks and your financial picture changes dramatically.

Always keep this in mind…

Only when you’ve got your sales conversion percentages as high as possible should you begin to consider increasing traffic. This ensures you get the very most return on your investment (ROI) in any marketing campaigns you run that send you more traffic.

Becoming fanatical at testing and tracking is the true path to online wealth.

To help you get started here are the testing and tracking tools I use and recommend you use too…

Google Analytics: www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics tells you exactly where your organic traffic is coming from, what pages people visit, how long they stay for and even how well it converts.

Google Website Optimizer: services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

This other service by Google is integrated with Google AdWords, but don’t let this hold you back because you can use it by itself on any website you own and costs nothing to use. Google Website Optimizer enables you to run “split tests” where you test one website component against another automatically.

To access both these superb tools for free all you need is a Google Account.

Increase your website sales by 275% or more...

Popularity: 45% [?]

So how do you use the web? or more accurately how do you read the websites you visit?

It’s amazing isn’t it when we create our website we think it’s a masterpiece of creation.

We believe that when people arrive at our new website people are going to pore over each word you’ve written and every website graphic you’ve created.

You probably even designed it to be read something like this…

I would even hazard a guess that you think your ideas are obvious and people will “get it” right away and know exactly what link to click on next.

I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong and what people do most of the time is (if you’re lucky) is glance or quickly scan your page. Then click on the first link that catches their eye.

In fact you’d probably be surprised to know that there are huge parts of your page that your website visitor won’t even look at (yes it’s true!).

Here’s the cold hard reality of someone using (or scanning) your website…

The closest analogy I could find to express what happens is this… try reading a billboard at 45 miles per hour, because that’s how your website is seen by your visitor. Don’t believe me?

Go check your Google Analytics stats and look for the “Bounce Rate” and the “Avg. Time on Site” because those numbers will tell you the true story about your website.

Here are my own stats for BigSellingConversions.com during a recent promotional campaign:

What you’re aiming for is a low “Bounce Rate” percentage and a high number for “Avg. Time on Site” …simply because this means that your visitors are probably reading more of your web page.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics to measure what your traffic is doing then you’re missing out on some really valuable statistical data about your website. Analytics costs nothing to use, all you need is a Google account.

Let’s assume you have Analytics… so how can you improve the “stickiness” of your website design so people stay longer?

Here are 7 easy to use ideas you can apply to your websites landing page, squeeze page or any other page you care to squeeze or land on:

1. Keep any links you have to an absolute minimum, you don’t want people leaving your web page to go to another website.

2. Use short paragraphs of text making them easy to scan. Ideally you want your paragraphs of text to be no more than 4 lines deep. This helps make your page easy to scan (very important because we’re all scanners online).

3. Keep your website design simple and easy on the eye, as I’ve said before “simplicity sells!”

4. Make what you want people to on your web page really clear. If you want them to take a certain action on your web page tell them what to do, don’t ever assume they’ll just “get it”.

5. Don’t go overboard with lots of graphics (unless they help people use your web page).

6. Make your navigation simple and obvious so your visitors can make clear decisions about what’s on each page of your website.

7. Use contrast in the design of your website to make it attention grabbing.

How many of these ideas can you put to use on your website today? 

Increase your website sales by 275% or more...

Popularity: 68% [?]