Getting Started
The first step towards creating an online business is building
a website. Now, that isn’t as complicated as it sounds. When I built
my first website, I thought Java was a type of coffee and HTML the
name of a robot in Star Wars. That’s why I didn’t do it. I paid
someone else to do it for me. It cost me just a few hundred bucks,
but I earned it back in the first few days. This chapter discusses
how to begin the process of creating your first site, and where you
can find someone to build your site if you don’t want to do it
yourself.
To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling
your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an
affiliate), you need a Web site created just for that - a simple,
focused site. One that is easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost,
credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter.
Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn’t
insure the success of your website. There are many factors to be
considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are
easily ignored by Internet business owners.
Build It for Speed
- It's a fact of modern life - people are in a
hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture
your potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time,
keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy
technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation)
sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation.
Target your Market - Know who your market is and make
certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that
your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is your
market mostly business professionals? If so, the site must be clean
and professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and young
adults? Then your site could be more informal and relaxed. The key
here is to know your market and build the site to their preferences.
Focus the Site - Make certain your web site is focused
on the goal, selling your product or service. A site offering many
unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often
the case. If your business does offer many products, dedicate a
unique page for each instead of trying to sell them all from one
page.
Credibility Is Crucial - The most professionally
designed site won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A
clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility.
Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from every page
on the site as well as from any location that you are asking your
visitors for personal information. Provide legitimate contact
information on line.
Navigation should be simple - Make site navigation easy
and intuitive. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience
of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Many
times a lot of visitors do not have the patience to navigate through
the whole website to find what they are looking for.
Consistency is the key - Make sure the site is
consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and
disturbing to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to
another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site.
Make your site interactive and personalized – Make your
website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that
allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might
have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is
another key element that can lead to customer delight and can
increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the
analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the
customer is buying online. It would give you an idea of what
products to cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys
a CD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.
Content is King - Good content sells a product. Ask
yourself the following questions. Does your copy convey the message
you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it
lead your visitor through the sales process? Have others review,
critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended
message. Always double check your spelling and grammar.
The aim of a web site's navigation is simply to allow users to
get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number
of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of
these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and
designed. You have to consider different types of visitors and
simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they
want on your site and the navigation plan has to optimize this
movement. For example the steps required from searching a catalog of
items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart,
proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a
specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation
system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration
or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted
sale.
To find their way about, users need to know two things:
-
Where they are now
-
How to go elsewhere
Navigation does not exist in isolation; good site organization
is a prerequisite for a coherent navigation system.
Objectives of a Navigation System
Navigation can be broken into two primary types, Location
Indicators and Navigation Controls
Location Indicators
Location indicators let users know where they are in the site
at the moment. It needs to be borne in mind that users coming from
outside your site can enter at any page, not necessarily on a 'main'
page. They need to be able to orientate themselves.
Equally it is important that users navigating around your site
have a clear idea of where they are both in absolute terms and in
relation to other content.
Location information should appear on every page of the site,
in the same place and in the same style. Location indicators should
tell the user precisely where they are and this should be clear even
to a user who has entered the site at an internal page. The location
indicator should be identifiable for what it is and make sense in
the context of other navigation.
In simple sites a page banner - text or graphic - naming the
page will be sufficient. For this to work the page name should also
appear in the main navigation so that it is relevant within the
overall structure of the site.
Color can be used. For example a different color background,
contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be really
effective the color change should be reflected in the navigation.
Using ‘breadcrumbs’ on every page is a good idea. Breadcrumbs
show you a series of hierarchical links that you have used to go
from page to page within a section. Using breadcrumbs is like
leaving a trail of the path you have followed. The breadcrumbs
appear at the top of the content section, just below the main
navigation template. Each element in the breadcrumb is a link to
that section or subsection. This helps in avoiding a series of back
buttons allowing the user to directly go back to the main section
page or another sub section. More importantly, it always shows the
context of the page that is being viewed and how it belongs to a
section or sub-section.
Navigation Controls
Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they allow
users to move around the site. Whether they comprise images or text
they should be predictably located in the same place, and with the
same appearance, on each page.
These have several purposes
-
To allow users to move about within the site
-
To tell users what information is available at the link
-
To work with location indicators to orientate users
A good navigation control:
-
Is clear: it looks like navigation
-
Leads to obvious content - users have a good idea what they will
find if they click
-
Is consistent with other navigation controls
-
Is predictable in its style and location on the page
There is no mystery to usability. It simply involves creating
a site, which is accessible to the majority of people, is easy to
use and get around and delivers on its promises. You can have a site
that meets the most important standards of usability by planning it
well and always keeping the end user in mind. Remember that web
sites should not be designed for their owners - they should be
designed for their users.
Problems with usability could be said to stem from just two
sources: the site itself and the user. In fact the site is always at
fault; if a user, however experienced or inexperienced, has problems
navigating, getting information or understanding the site.
While websites have become far more complex, web users have
become less rather than more experienced as more and more people go
online. It is a mistake to think that the majority of users will be
web or even computer savvy and will understand subtle clues about
content. Most will not.
A usable site will:
-
Help users achieve a goal, usually to find something, such as
information, or obtain something, such as a book.
-
Make it easy for them to achieve that goal
-
Make it possible to achieve the goal quickly
-
Make achieving that goal a pleasant experience
A site will be generally usable if:
-
The content is good and relevant
-
The content is easy to find
-
The content can be found quickly
-
The page is pleasant to look at and cleanly designed
A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one
that provides products or information that is useful or beneficial
to users. A good usable site will make it clear what information or
content is available and at what price AND what is not available. A
good usable site should define clearly all subscription packages
offered.
Good navigation, precise location indicators, secondary
navigation, clear linked text and a well organized structure all
contribute to making information easy to find for a wide range of
different users. This is discussed earlier.
Bearing in mind that many users are inexperienced, it may be
necessary to include explanations of things you consider
self-explanatory. For example, an inexperienced user may need an
explanation of how to use a drop down menu.
This is the aim of the majority of web users. It can be broken
into two important aspects:
Speed of page loading
This requires, in particular, attention to images to ensure
they are properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time.
It may also mean breaking up long articles and ensuring that
important content is at the top of the page where it will load
first.
Speed of Access to content
This is where the much-vaunted 3-click rule comes in -
no important content should be more than 3 clicks from the home
page. Some standards even say that it should be no more than two
clicks.
One helpful way to speed access to content is to consider each
type of user, select the content that they are most likely to be
interested in and create links from the home page to one piece of
content for each group. This will get them quickly to the
appropriate part of the site.
Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to
read. It is almost impossible to make a site with an image shown as
a tiled background usable - the whole thing is too distracting and
confusing. It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it
just requires thought and adherence to the principle that when it
comes to design, less usually is more.
Most paid membership websites are limited to online access and
information download rather than selling products. There should be
clear download instructions. In case of information download, it is
crucial that you show a download bar and the download status. Many
websites offer huge files for download but while the user is
downloading he/she has no idea of the status of the download or the
speed of the download. This is very frustrating especially in the
case of larger files and often you’d see users canceling the
download midway and leaving the website. Your website should also
state the size of the file in kilobytes and the estimated time of
download for a user having a 56K modem, DSL, Cable and so on.
While for large commercial sites investment in full-scale
usability studies may be not just useful but essential, few small
sites can afford such luxuries.
However, identifying problems with usability for your site
need be no more complicated than asking a few (honest) friends to
act as guinea pigs on your site and, if possible, watching them
silently as they do this. Watching users try to find information at
your site can be both instructive and quite surprising.
Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene
and explain, then you have identified a usability problem.
List of the most common usability problems
-
The site does not state its purpose clearly
-
Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements slow down
loading; 10 seconds is about as long as the average user will wait
for a page.
-
The site requires specific software to be used. Have you ever
actually changed browsers or downloaded a piece of software just
to see a site?
-
Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation and,
not uncommonly, no navigation at all
-
Bad design leading to poor readability
-
Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost
always because a designer overestimated their skills.
-
Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that
includes biographies and photos of each of the board members.
Happy egos on the board; bored users!
-
Complexity or excessive originality of design, which requires
users to learn how it works in order to use it.
-
Inaccessibility because the site cannot be used by browsers used
by people with disabilities
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as
email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any
questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization
of your website is another key element that can lead to customer
delight and can increase your sales. Personalization technology
provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross selling and up
selling when the customer is buying online.
It tries to restore to the online business the magic of
personalized attention that is one of the chief reasons why most
people still prefer in-store purchase. You can use personalization
to match your customer with the right products through either
rules-based or customer analytics based processing. Thus as your
software stores customer information and preferences, it can help
categorize them into groups. At the same time, observations over
time can suggest products to cross-sell and up-sell. Thus when a
person buys a subscription to a fitness site, exercise equipment is
also offered. Amazon pioneered personalization on the net – when you
a buy a book, it shows you other books in the similar genre saying
“people who bought this book also bought these”, inducing you to buy
more.
A consumer survey from the Personalization Consortium found that 56
percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase from a
site that allows personalization, and 63 percent are more likely to
register at a site that allows it.
Personalization can lead to customer delight and can increase
your sales.
Your site has to be aesthetically attractive with visually
appealing organization and enticing images. Fashions change fast on
the Internet, so when you come to choose a designer, make sure you
take a good look at their portfolio. You want the user to just
glance at your homepage and understand immediately who you are and
what you can do for them.
Your website content should convince visitors that your service is
either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of
quality or is competitively priced. It should show your potential
clients that you can provide the solution that they are seeking.
Your product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream,
enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the
dependable expert that they want and need!
Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and
growing your customer base. Web site copy creates the “voice” of a
company, just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the
company and on otherwise intangible products and services. On an
e-commerce site, the copy plays a key role in closing sales as well
as in up-selling and cross-selling products and services. Good copy
delights first-time visitors, encourages return visits and propels
both customer acquisition and retention.
People read a Web page differently than they do a brochure or
a newspaper. They scan, scroll, click, hit the back button, and hit
the forward button. “Reading” is about moving around and being in
control. You have one chance to make a first impression – to quickly
convey the benefit of staying on your Web site. I can’t overstate
the importance of first impressions, which in Web-time are measured
in milliseconds. The layout, functionality, message and overall look
and feel of your web page determine who stays – and who clicks away.
Your story should be clear and to the point. The goal of any
web page should be to get the visitor to DO something: to move on to
the next step in a purchase sequence or to click for more
information about a product or service. Without readable, compelling
copy and clearly organized hypertext links, visitors are much less
likely to complete a transaction – and return to your site again.
Writing for your Web page should always start from your
visitor’s perspective. What is your Web site visitor looking for?
Why is he/she here? How can you make his/her visit as quick and
efficient and positive as possible? You should take the time to
clarify the goal of each page before starting to write. If the page
is part of a transaction sequence, identify what may be hindering
the buying process. Be sure instructions are clear and easy to read.
If you are selling a service on your website, your Unique
Selling Proposition (USP) is
your service’s most powerful benefit, in combination with a strong,
unique feature of your business. It answers that most difficult
question:
Why should potential customers hire your service company?
Tell your customers what service you are selling and
explain what your service provides. What is the key benefit(s) to
your customers? What pain does it cure, what solution does it
provide? Compare your service with that of your competitors and
highlight what makes you stand out from the competition? Keep
working on this until you can clearly separate yourself from the
field. As stated earlier there must be a convincing reason
for doing business with you, instead of your competitor.
Summarize the above into one tight, powerful, motivating
phrase that will persuade your customer to do business with you and
to trade their money for the benefits delivered by your
service.
As you start to work through the above four steps, you may
find this to be a lot harder than it looks. Don’t blow it off and
give up! You must have a USP.
If it was easy, everyone would have a great USP! Come up with a
tight, sharp USP that sells your service to your customer.
Write tight, get right to the point, be keenly aware of the
audience for the page, and don’t use a three-syllable word when a
one or two-syllable word will do. Use call-to-action language and be
interesting. The page should be so clearly organized that, in
seconds, visitors can understand and get convinced to buy your
product and be able to anticipate where a hypertext link – or a
“Continue” button – will take them. Studies show that “ease of use”
is the winning factor on an e-commerce site.
If you’re going to promote your service and expand your customer
base using your website, potential clients have to be able to trust
you. Their confidence in you and your products has to be boosted.
Endorsements on your website from a valued friend or colleague, or a
referral from a strategic partner are the types of “leads” that
boost your credibility. You and your service must be perceived as
being trust-worthy before your visitor will be confident enough to
contact you or even buy your product.
Show prospects that you have their best interests at
heart and that you can adapt or customize your service to meet their
individual needs. Foster an ongoing relationship that steadily
increases their trust levels and cements a view that you are an
“authority” in your field.
Another important aspect of convincing prospective customers
is to keep abreast of recent developments in your field. Check on
what your competitors are writing about, and watch for new trends.
This will keep your website current, razor-sharp and unique.
By keeping your eyes open, you will be able to grab an angle or
niche that hasn’t been well covered yet by your competitors. Portray
this angle or niche on your website.
Finally, be wary of broadening the theme of your site too
much. Try not to dilute your product or service’s targeted niche
simply to expand your base of merchant partners. Remember; focus on
your selling your service. That’s where the “meat and potatoes” of
your business will come from.
In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because
of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a
bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store.
In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story
altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online
business. You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no
store design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of
words to reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of
knowing what your site is all about until he/she finds it and reads
its contents. Who can ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that
Excite is a search engine?
Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A
good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can make
your business stand out in the crowd, or just float aimlessly in
space.
The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led
to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names instantly
provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what
to expect and look for in a site. For instance, Etoys.com is a toy
store.
The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful; that
some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to get the name
they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com were both bought for
$3 million each. Telephone.com was acquired for $1.75 million, while
Bingo.com sold for $1.1 million.
However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz”
that you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has always been
about proper names: McDonald's did not name their store Hamburger.
Hertz is not called Car Rental. FedEx is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is
not Photographs. Microsoft is not Computer Software.
For better branding results, your domain name should be
memorable and easy to remember. Remember the following tips when
creating a domain name.
-
The domain name should be short
-
The domain name should be simple
-
It should be suggestive of your business category
-
It should be unique
-
It should be easy to interpret and pronounce
-
It should be personalized
-
It should not be difficult to spell
-
It should not be difficult to remember
Domain names can be registered through many different
companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these companies is
available at ICANN: http://www.icann.org. You can register for 1 to
10 years - prices can vary anywhere from $10 to $20 per year. Most
web hosting companies, as explained later, will handle the
registration process for you, but make sure that you are properly
listed as the owner of the domain when it is registered. If you have
registered a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew
it in time. You can be surprised at the number of cases, where site
owners have let a domain name slip by if they have not renewed in
time.
At some point while you’re building your website, you’re going
to have to buy a domain name. This is the address that users type
into their browsers to reach your site. That takes about five
seconds, and depending on the name you want and whether anyone else
owns it, it won’t cost you more than a few bucks.
But domain names are also a golden opportunity to make some
easy money.
I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up
good names and sell them on for a profit—if you haven’t got into
that now, forget it. The bottom’s fallen out of the market and the
best domains are long gone.
I’m talking about expiring domains.
Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to
promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then lose
interest and move on, leaving their site active. That means that
although they still own the domain, they’re not actively promoting
it. But they don’t need to. All the automatic marketing systems
they’ve put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site runs
itself.
Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to
expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the
market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers. You can either
rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain. You could
set up an affiliate program get paid for users someone else paid
for.
It’s that easy.
There are tons of options, and lots of easy ways to make lots
of money with very little effort. Opportunities like these are
everywhere.
Websites such as
www.expiredtraffic.com or
www.deleteddomains.com actually do all the legwork and let you
reap all the rewards. Expired Traffic even has an affiliate program
and
www.snapnames.com allows you to back-order a specific domain
name.
Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some
swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions, provide you
with outdated lists, take your money and keep the good domains for
themselves. It happens, and there’s little point in taking a risk
when
www.deleteddomains.com does such a great job.
Let’s start where the Internet starts: with a host. A host is
a server which provides a home for your website on the World Wide
Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host
contains all the files needed to run your website. Why can’t you
just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would
mean users would have to connect directly to your computer to see
your website. Not a good idea—it wouldn’t be secure and it would
make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can
simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can
then connect there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and
allows it to have all the security and extras it needs.
Selecting a host is the first important step towards building
your Internet business.
Hosting services and companies vary from totally free, shared
servers to large-scale dedicated machines. You’ll have to decide
which is right for you and your business.
Your choice of server will depend on how much money you have
available at the beginning and how much you plan to grow in the
future. In my opinion, for commercial sites, free hosting is a waste
of time. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups
every time they surf to your page, it’s going to be impossible to
get a decent position in a search engine, and you don’t even get a
real business URL. No one’s going to remember your Web address if
they have to type www.freehosting.com/my_site. But it is possible
to choose a cheap host at the beginning and move up as your business
begins to bring in money.
You have designed a very usable web site, you have hosted it
using a very reliable web hosting company, and you have integrated a
safe and trusted payment processing system with your website.
However, all these can prove to be useless until you know your site
is actually working and accessible. If you want to create an
accessible website, you will need to test, test and test again.
A recent Forrester Research report reported that failure to
ensure website quality will cost the average small or mid-size
company thousands of dollars in wasted expenditures on website
redesigns, forfeited revenue, and lost customers.
Testing a website is a long and tedious task, but it's perhaps the
most important task of all. There are numerous stages to testing,
all of which are very important. Ranging from browser testing, to
content testing, none should be excluded.
Visual Acceptance Testing
Visual Acceptance Testing is the first
port-of-call for all webmasters. This type of testing generally
ensures that the site looks as it is intended to. This includes
checking the graphic integration, and simply confirming that the
site looks good. In this stage you should assess every page
carefully to ensure that each looks the same. The site should be
tested under different screen resolutions and colour depths.
Functionality Testing
Functionality testing is perhaps the most
vital area of testing, and one which should never be missed.
Functionality testing involves an assessment of every aspect of the
site where scripting or code is involved, from searching for dead
links, to testing forms and scripts.
You should also test your payment processing
system completely and thoroughly. After all, you wouldn’t want a
potential customer to get stuck at the last stage and eventually
leave the site just because there is something wrong with payment
processing.
Content Proofing
This stage of testing removes any errors in
your content, and ensures that your site has a professional
appearance. In this phase, you should reread each page on your site,
and check for spelling and grammatical errors.
System and Browser Compatibility Testing
This test phase is completed in order to
ensure that your website renders correctly on a user's screen. To
begin with, you should test several pages from your site on
different browsers such as Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, Netscape 4 and
6, and Opera. This can be extremely important - if your site does
not work properly with the Netscape browser, Netscape users will end
up annoyed, and they'll go elsewhere.
Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial
information, not to mention interesting. If your visitors proceed to
purchase a product but then a large majority leave the site when
they get to a specific page in the order process then you need to
know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to
use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an
example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of
your site visitors.
Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you
can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting
service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your
marketing progress. If you don't have access to website statistics
get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter
that just shows how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out
on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your
site.
A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that
provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a
web site from various sources such as search engines, directories
and other links.
Unfortunately traffic tracking provided by web hosting
services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other
difficult to understand cryptic formats. These log files are
basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is
literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what
your visitors are doing. If you
do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs,
opting for a traffic-logging package would be a good idea.
Basically two options are available to you and these are:
using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted
traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service
may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two.
WebTrends Live and HitsLink are two good, remotely hosted,
traffic-monitoring services worth considering. However, WebTrends
Live is a more complicated system and is suitable for larger
ecommerce websites. “SuperStats” is another recommended traffic
logging service.
These services do not use your log files. Typically a small
section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the
page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and
available in real time to view in charts and tables form.
Log analysis packages are typically expensive to buy and
complex to set up. Apart from commercial packages there are also
some free log analysis packages available, such as Analog.
A good traffic logging service would provide statistics
pertaining to the following:
-
How many people visit your site?
-
Where are they from?
-
How are visitors finding your site?
-
What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other
sites, and other sources?
-
What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?
-
What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors
most interested in?
-
How do visitors navigate within your web site?
Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions
is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return
on investment (ROI) of your web site investment.
The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website
is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software.
The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are
hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or
page loads from your server on to a visitor’s browser. Hits,
however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic
for your website.
The statistic that is probably the most important for a
website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of
two things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and
secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250
visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view
one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you're not
getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading
your site's content so your visitors will stay around longer.
If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the
number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good
work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your
site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking
hold.
Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person
visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors’
category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new
visitors to your website.
Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website
is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of
Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your
content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site
for a long time and surfing.
Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly
because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't
be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be
used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone
can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your website
performance. Remember- this data is available for a reason. It's up
to you to use it.
Like any business, it is absolutely vital to track and
maintain your sales records. You should know every month your income
and expenditure. This would give you a good idea of which products
are in demand and which ones are not.
There are many ways to keep track of your sales. Using
orthodox methods such as keeping a paper journal is time consuming.
Simple spreadsheet programs as well as basic accounting software are
available at no or minimum costs. However, it is advisable to
install advanced accounting software such as QuickBooks, Quicken, or
Microsoft Money.
Such advanced programs save you time by sorting your register
transactions by date, transaction amount, document number (e.g.
check number), order entered, or cleared status. The tracking
feature included in such software tracks, by user, changes made to
each transaction. Daily, weekly, monthly as well as yearly sales
reports can be generated with a few clicks. These reports help you
analyze the sales of each and every product. Logs and reports can be
generated to keep track of all your customers.
Finally, make sure that you build trust and credibility for
your business. We discussed earlier the importance of credibility.
Credibility is a key ingredient for any successful business venture.
Building and enhancing the credibility of the products and services
you offer is an ongoing and full-time effort.
Why not make sure the web site you use works as hard as you do
to establish credibility? Let's look at elements that can be built
into a well-designed web site to enhance credibility in the eyes of
your potential customers.
Offer a Guarantee
Nothing beats a solid, believable guarantee for building
credibility online. It may be hard to believe but buying via the
Internet is still unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, territory for the
majority of people. It is up to you, the business owner, to put
their minds at ease. One way to do this would be to offer an
unconditional, 100% money back guarantee. By assuming all of the
risk, you will earn instant credibility points with most potential
customers.
Provide Contact Information
Even the best guarantee won't help establish credibility if
the potential customer cannot contact you. Post accurate contact
information on your web site and make it easy to find. Provide as
many methods of contact as possible; do not simply post a link to an
email address. For maximum credibility, post the complete mailing
address, phone number (preferably a toll free number), and email
addresses for customers to use if they feel the need to contact you.
Provide a Brief Bio
Familiarity is one of the most effective tools for building
credibility on the Internet. How do you establish familiarity in a
faceless, impersonal medium like the Internet? Simple, tell people
about yourself. Post a page that provides a thumbnail sketch that
describes who you are. Be sure to include personal data as well as
professional credentials. Place your photo on the page so people can
put a face with your name. Creating familiarity will impart another
level of credibility for you and, by extension, for the product you
represent.
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