If you feel like your website could and should be generating more leads for your business, you’re not alone. But where the hell do you start? Traditional advertising costs a fortune and it doesn’t work how it used to. What’s the secret to making real profits online?
To get a better handle on exactly what your website can do for your bottom line, you’ll need to get down to the nitty gritty. Only then can you analyse what you’ll need to do to reach your goals.
Let’s get started.
1. Firstly, study your stats!
I can’t stress this enough. Don’t get so obsessed with them that you have withdrawals when you’re not near your computer, but study them at least once a week. If you haven’t got a Google Analytics account yet, set one up. It’s free and you can wire it up to your site to give you very valuable information on your visitors’ behavior. (If you’re a Web123 client, we can easily plug in Google Analytics to your website.)
When studying your stats, look at the following:
- Number of unique visitors
- A number of page views – the average number of pages viewed per person.
- Bounce rate – this is the rate at which people hit your home page and then straight away leave.
- Number of Conversions – this could be an inquiry, newsletter subscription, sale, etc.
- Most popular pages
- Traffic sources – where did they come from? Google? Bing? Email newsletter? Facebook? Twitter? Direct?
- What keywords did they type in Google to find you?
There’s plenty more but just start by getting your head around the above.
2. Now let’s work out your conversion rate.
You now know what a conversion is. Next, you need to know your conversion rate. This is important so make sure you set aside some time to study yours.
To work out your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors you get to your site over a certain period of time. Eg. If 500 visits nets you 5 sales, your conversion rate is 1%.
Now let’s imagine you sell widgets for $50 each. And you want to generate an extra $20,000 in widget sales per year through your website. That means you need to sell 400 widgets per year, right? To make the maths simple, let’s say that equates to 7 widgets per week, or one a day.
We know that your conversion rate is 1%, so if you want to make 1 sale per day to meet your goal of $20,000, you’ll need to attract at least 100 people per day to your website.
You can now see that if you’re only attracting 10 people per day to your website and your conversion rate is 0.5% – 1%, which is quite normal, you might need to look at ways at increasing your exposure. This leads us to your traffic…
3. How do you get more traffic?
As I mentioned in this week’s newsletter, your website will never generate leads for your business. Someone doesn’t just type your address and land on your site unless they’ve seen or heard about you through some other form of marketing or word of mouth.
The secret then is using the right tactics to drive quality traffic to your site. Be aware that you need the right kind of traffic too. It’s not just about numbers. You need to provide your website with a steady flow of leads and quality traffic for it to do it’s job for you.
Here are some great ways to increase traffic to your site:
Search Engine Optimisation SEO or is the process of moving your page up the ranks of Google so people can find you. It’s probably the most popular with small businesses on a budget and you can do a lot of it yourself for free. There’s tons of information out there on SEO and how you can optimize your website to make it effective with search engines. It is time-consuming so if you’d rather stick to what you know, you can pay an SEO expert to do it for you. Also, see our blog posts What is SEO? and Growing your business with Google.
Online Advertising can vary hugely online. You can advertise with Google Adwords where you Pay Per Click for traffic. Facebook now also has Facebook Ads which can be highly targeted and sometimes more cost-effective than Adwords – especially if your industry is competitive online.
You can also advertise on other websites or blogs with advertisements or get an ad in a newsletter with a large subscriber base. The trick here would be to offer something for free as a hook so you can capture people’s details and put them on your own list instead of always paying to use someone else.
Social Media has come a long way and it’s now easier than ever to make a success of your business using Facebook or Twitter to name a few. In the old days, you were told to sell, and next you were told to market… nowadays it’s all about “engaging” – which is just advertising talk for making people feel emotional about your product or service. Use social media to link to your website, eBooks, products, or blog. If other people also share the link, love, it’ll help your search engine rankings.
Email Marketing has got to be one of the best forms of advertising around today and is the preferred method for most of the top marketers around the world. It’s said that a customer needs to visit your site 9 times before they buy from your website. That’s a lot. Good email marketing hurries things along by enabling you to market directly to potential buyers in a more timely and targeted way. Use regular email marketing to remind people who you are and prompt them to visit your website. It’s powerful stuff.
Content Marketing is so important if you’re to rake in real profits from your site. Create videos relevant to your audience and publish them on YouTube, share presentations you’ve done on Slideshare, create eBooks, and publish on Scribd. You could also write relevant articles and get them published on high-volume websites. Good articles will position you as the expert and in most cases you can get a link back to your website and potentially generate a truckload of traffic. (Google will look kindly upon you also if you have links on high-ranking sites.)
Don’t forget about blogging either. Blogging gives you the opportunity to penetrate new markets, gain valuable backlinks (Google loves them!), sell your products, build your mailing list and so much more, FREE!
But don’t stop here; I’ve really only scratched the surface! These are just a few ideas of what you could do online. Don’t forget about all that you can do offline to drive leads to your site.
It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to make it big online but with such a wealth of information at your fingertips, anyone can do it.
Start with your stats, know your conversion rate, then work out what tactics you’re going to use to feed your website the nutrients it needs to keep the traffic levels up and be a huge success for your business.
What works for you? Tell us all about your wins and losses. Share your thoughts.
Prefer to leave it to the experts? Web123 has a whole suite of small business online marketing services available to suit all budgets. Talk to us to learn more.