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: 50% [?]

Back in January I ran a 7 day test using this interesting new online website visitor tracking service called Crazy Egg. (Here’s the article I originally wrote Don’t boil this crazy egg).

Essentially what this online tracking service does is it tells you which links are the most popular ones on your website. You can then use this information to optimize your websites ability to convert visitors into subscribers or customers.

Here’s the page I tested: BigSellingConversions.com

As soon as you login to your CrazyEgg account you’re shown a really well laid out and easy to navigate dashboard that shows all the tracking campaigns you’re running.

Here’s a screen shot of the page I tested out…

So you can see that during this time I had 25 visits and 17 clicks in total for that page.

To be totally honest with you that figure of 25 visits is something I’ve not been able to verify with my Google Analytics stats that I was getting so I have to question the accuracy of the tracking. I’m going to run another test on another site to see how accurate the tracking really is, right now I’m just not convinced by it.

For the purpose of just showing you what you get when you use this still very interesting online tracking tool here are my other results…

CrazyEgg provides you with a couple of ways to look at the data you get back on the clicks the links on your site has gotten. The first way is a heat map…

Then you can switch to overlay mode and you get something like this…

What’s interesting is how many people clicked on the check box, even though the form would still work without the checkbox being checked. The reason for doing this is to use the idea of commitment and consistency, when you commit to doing something by taking a positive action you’re more likely to follow-it through to the end by being consistent in your actions.

Is CrazyEgg worth using?

Definitely, but with one caveat… make sure you also track your visitors using a service like Google Analytics to compare the visitor numbers.

Based on the what I learned the numbers of clicks were not high enough to get any kind of significant information from them. Ideally you need around 200-300 visits to the page you’re testing to get meaningful results.

Go check out CrazyEgg.com now and see what you can learn about how people are using your website. It costs nothing and takes about 5-10 minutes to set up.

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

Popularity: 39% [?]