Tuesday, April 28, 2009

My Formula for Online Business Success

Are you looking for business success in the online world?

Do you feel frustrated by a lack of success in the online world?

I have a simple formula that I use to consistently produce success online, for both myself and my clients.

RESULTS = TRAFFIC * CONVERSIONS

OK, so there it is.

When I work with a client or with one of my own websites and I sit down to assess how the website is performing currently I ask myself 2 questions to start with.

How much traffic is the website getting?

How well is the website converting this traffic?

So, how are you doing so far.

Let me give you a couple of common scenarios. Maybe you can relate to these.

Scenario 1 - No Traffic

This website has very little traffic.

It doesn't matter how good your website is, if you are not getting very much traffic to your website, your results are going to be limited at best.

The other challenge for a website that doesn't get much traffic is that it is difficult to get any meaningful results on testing to improve the website.

For a website that is not getting very much traffic there are a couple of things that I look to do to help to fix this.

Make sure that the website content is optimised so that it will feature in the search engines. Check out my post on seo for your website for more information.

Create content or use the existing content and submit it to article directories to create links and bring traffic. Once you get known in the article directories larger websites will often pick up and republish your content which will bring you more traffic and links.

Share your content in the social media world with twitter, facebook, digg, delicious, and reddit just to name a few. I use a little gadget called tell-a-freind by social twist.

Check out my posts on using social media to drive website traffic.

Buy traffic from google adwords.

It can take some time to bring traffic to your website. Buying traffic is usually the quickest way to bring traffic to your website. How much it costs will depend on your industry and how competitive your keywords are on Google adwords or Yahoo search marketing.

Scenario 2 - Poor conversion rate but plenty of traffic

This is perhaps the easier of the 2 scenarios to deal with.

How would I deal with this scenario. In a word split-testing

The first question you have to answer in terms of conversion is what is your website for? What is the end goal of your website.

The next question you need to answer is what is your current conversion rate.

If your goal is to sell something (e-commerce) and you get 100 visitors to your website and 1 buys your product then your conversion is 1%. If you can double your conversion to 2% then you have doubled your sales with no increase in traffic.

There are many elements on a website that affect conversion. Testing is really the only way to figure out what works best. I use Google Website Optimiser for my split testing. You need a Google Account to use it but it is free and it will tell you what you need to know.

In a nutshell what you do is you have 2 webpages that are slightly different. You might use a different header, different layout, different colors or different wording.

Just remember, only test 1 thing at a time.

Run a test over a few weeks or a month. You find that webpage 1 converts at 3% and webpage 2 converts at 5%. So, you use webpage 2. This then becomes your reference page. Test another page element against your reference.

Over time you can make a significant improvement to your conversion rate which will have a huge effect on your online business success.

So, what do you need to focus on. Traffic or Conversions?

If the answer is both, I would focus on traffic first because the more traffic you have to your website, the more quickly you can run tests in Google optimiser.

Where do you need to focus your efforts?

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