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If you own a website, one important question that you should ask yourself is: Does your Website attract a steady flow of targeted website traffic, build an opt-in list, supply you leads and income from sales of products and services?
If it doesn’t, then you need to examine your Website content, design and structure.
In most cases, Websites are designed and built first. Then the business owners try to figure out how to attract visitors. This approach is backwards.
Before you have a single web page built or content written you should have clearly identified your strategy for attracting visitors and converting them to leads or clients. Using the web to market your product or services requires a web marketing plan.
The web has the potential to be a powerful communication tool, but your Website needs to be designed in order for you to achieve your marketing goals. These goals also have to be measurable.
A Website built and managed without a clear marketing plan is usually a waste of time and money. Many Website are nothing more than web billboards. These sites generally do not attract clients and provide little marketing benefit.
What should you measure?
The most obvious category that can be measured is the amount of website traffic that your Website is generating. The key value is the number of unique visitors that come to the Website. There are other values that are important, such as page views and average length of stay.
As you measure these values over time the goal would be to have a steady increase in all of these values.
Of course, if these visitors are not doing anything when they are on your Website they are of little value.
Do you have a call to action?
Your Website should be designed in such a way that your visitors are presented with a call to action. This call to action should be obvious to the visitor. Your call to action is another element that can be measured. How many visitors perform the call to action?
The call to action can take many forms. It may be opting in to a email newsletter list, or filling out a lead form. The ideal action is the purchase of a product or service.
When a site visitor performs the call to action, you have a conversion. The number of conversions divided by the number of Website visitors is the conversion rate.
One of the goals of the Website should be to increase the conversion rate.
Testing
Once you have your measurable elements, traffic and conversions, you can test various ways to make your Website work. You can test various techniques for increasing traffic. Options here include search engine optimization of your Website, pay per click advertising, press releases and article writing.
Then you will also want to increase your conversion rates. Split testing is used to determine how various elements within the web page affect the visitor. You can change the elements on the page such as the headline or color of text and graphics, to measure the affect on the visitor.
Website Goals
You now have the understanding that your business Website should be working for you with a marketing plan. You need a call to action. You need to measure website traffic and conversions, and then test to improve the results.
With these measurements in hand, you can now set goals for your Website. This will give you a sense of direction and it will allow you the weigh the methods that could be initiated to gain success in your online business.
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All website owners know that you must have website traffic to generate sales. However, not just any traffic will do. The best is targeted traffic. Having the right techniques will help you succeed on your online business.
Targeted traffic involves enticing visitors to your site who are actually interested in the content of your website. If people are interested in buying tropical fish they will find websites about buying tropical fish interesting.
There are a number of methods for obtaining targeted traffic.
Forums – If you are an active participant in a forum you can obtain targeted traffic through the link to your website that you are usually allowed to add to the signature. If you spam you are likely to get banned. However, if you add value by joining in debates and answering questions you may even come to be known as an expert. If others like your style, the quality of your posts or even the promotional text in your signature you can generate targeted traffic that doesn’t cost you anything.
Reciprocal Linking – For most product websites there are usually many other related websites which aren’t direct competitors. You can contact the owners of these websites to ask for a reciprocal link. While a number of them will simply ignore your request, you will start to build up some useful links over time. Again, this can provide a source of targeted website traffic.
E-zines – E-zines are ideal because the readership is targeted. Nevertheless, not all e-zine advertisements result in a good conversion rate so it is best to start slowly with a new e-zine to see it is worth the investment. If you do get good conversions then you can ramp up the amount of advertising with that particular e-zine.
Newsletters – As well as using other web owners e-zines, you should consider starting your own newsletter. In this way, you can build up your own list of targeted people and when the size of the list grows you can start selling your own advertising as well.
E-books – People like to receive things for free. You can give away e-books which contain useful information and are valued (and read). The trick is to include links back to your site. If the information is really useful, the books tend to be passed on from one person to another creating a viral effect.
Joint ventures – Successful internet marketers are always on the look-out for new opportunities. If you have a good product which converts well, don’t be shy in contacting them to offer a joint venture. You only need a few well-connected partners to see a large expansion in your traffic.
PPC – Pay per click will cost you money, but it is the quickest way to get targeted website traffic. If you write your ads well and select your keywords carefully making sure to include negative keywords, such as ‘free’, you can end up with a positive return on investment. Of course, if you choose poorly you can burn through a lot of cash quickly.
By applying a number of these techniques you can increase your level of targeted traffic which, in turn, can increase the profitability of your website. Having the right targeted traffic will bring about success on online business.
