How To Evaluate Your Web Sites Performance

By Nancy P Redford

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your
web site goals.

If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.
Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your web site is functioning at peak efficiency.

One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.
However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful.

Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your web site.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for.

For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take the number of visitors who made a purchase and divide that figure by the total number of web site visitors. Then multiply that result by 100 (25 % 2000 X 100).

If your web site is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer.

However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your web site whenever you make changes to the site. You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low.

There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your web site, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier.

You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your web site to accomplish the action the site is set-up to do.

For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site.

Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible. Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your web site. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form.

Web site copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Nancy P Redford shows you how to Take Online Payments for any web site without a costly merchant account. Stay safe on the Internet by getting wise to Online Scams and Shams. Plus get some of the best business tools and resources for your home-based business here at: http://www.miriadz.com

Making the Most of Your Website: Start with the Basics

By Carla Alvarez

One of my most salient memories from when I sold real estate in Oregon for my Dad’s company was listing a property where the owners had initially tried to sell it For-Sale-By-Owner with no success. After the listing contract was signed my Dad told them, “Next time put your phone number on your sign.”

It is easy to laugh when someone forgets something as obvious as providing a contact method for a buyer, but far too frequently website usage falls into the same category.

Below are a few tips to make the most of your website.

First things first . . .

Email signatures – Is your website listed on every email you send out? If not, you may be missing out on exposure for your business. You may think that if someone already knows you, that they already know what you do. However often when someone knows you on a personal basis, they do not always remember your business connection.

Business cards, flyers, and printed material – Every single piece of printed material you put out should have your web address on it as well, whether it is a coupon, gift certificate, flyer, letterhead, or business card.

Advertising – If you are advertising in the yellow pages, a magazine, newspaper, TV, cable or radio, make sure that your web address is included. I have seen business spend thousands of dollars on a huge ad in the yellow pages and leave out their website, which is the equivalent of money flying out the window.

Any time you put something out there that says, “This is my business, this is what I do,” make sure your website is on there.

Learn from the big boys:

Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on market research to test consumer response patterns and behavior. As a small business, there is sometimes the view that we can’t compete with a large conglomerate. However, the Internet is a great leveler. A professionally presented web site can give a small business the same credibility on par with an international company.

Small companies can take advantage of the lessons that large corporations have paid much to learn. Corporations do not see a website as an entity unto itself, they view it as part of the total marketing strategy.

What do those million dollar Super Bowl commercials have in common? They all prominently feature the company web address for viewers to visit to get more information. The ads are designed to create awareness and corporations use their website to sell the benefits of their product or services.

The purpose of marketing is to create awareness about your product or service, highlight the benefits that you offer, and to entice the buyer to contact you. A website is an increasingly important component of a comprehensive marketing plan.

Copyright 2005 - Carla Alvarez, Legacy Marketing Services

Carla Alvarez is owner of Legacy Marketing Services which provides integrated marketing services for businesses including business identity, web and CSS development, and business development seminars.

5 Ways to Build a Website

By Steve Knorr

If you are like me you have wanted to build a website but didn’t know how!

Why?

Because you haven’t learned html

Because it costs too much to have someone do it for you.

The software you have found is too complicated

You just didn’t have the time or patience to read the 500-page manual

There was no one to teach you how to do it.

Well let’s review those one by one.

You didn’t build a website because you haven’t learned
html.

With today’s easy to use html text editors you can build a website as easy as typing a word document. You need to learn very little of the html coding and what you do need is very easy to learn if taught properly.

You didn’t build a website because it costs too much to have someone do it for you.

Well that’s a fact! If you have someone do it for you, you will have to pay a web designer Big Bucks to create it. To get just what you want, optimized by keywords, with the look and feel you desire you will spend as much time with
the designer as if you did it yourself. And then pay them more when you need changes!

You didn’t build a website because the software is too complicated.

Most of the software is designed with the professional in
mind. All the bells and whistles add to the complexity of the product. Which makes you wonder where you are even going to start. Throw in the fact that you need to master a few other programs to support the design software and you have a confusing tangle of programs to learn all at once.

You didn’t build a website because you just didn’t have the time or patience to read the 500 page manual.

Not to mention that you have to read the manual more than once to understand things, so you can learn by trail and error. And are you ever sure you did it the right way? Was there a shortcut you didn’t know about? Are there other programs you can use to make it easier and faster to get a website up.

You didn’t build a website because there was no one to teach you how to do it.

A tutor or html training course is a great way to learn how to build websites. Preferably if you can get one-on-one tutoring.The problem is one-on-one tutoring is very expensive.

Many group courses are taught when it’s convenient for the teacher not the student. After the class is done there is no on going tutoring or ability to ask questions when you run into problems.

So what’s the answer?

Learn on line with an html video tutorial series. An html video tutorial that teaches you step by step at your own pace how to build a website. You can rewind a section and play it over again if you don’t understand it.

And what if this tutorial product includes all the software you will need FREE. Along with the live video
tutoring on how to use all of it.

You can build a website as you go through it. When you have completed the video tutorial you will have a built
a working website. I mean a WORKING web site.
Done! Finished! Completed!

There was no one to teach you how to do it

You are now ready to work on that all important marketing of your website. As you learn how to market your site, making the necessary changes are a snap for you! Because you were able to build a website. And now you can edit it yourself.

Give yourself some credit. It’s a lot more rewarding when you do it yourself. And, if you are like me you don’t have the money to waste trying a lot of different things.

This works! For more information check out this link = = > http://www.web-marketing-products.com

Steve Knorr is a veteran of the offline marketing world who has brought his talent to the Internet. He makes it easy to learn from today’s best Internet Marketing Experts. For more information and a free subscription to his Web Marketing Newsletter visit his site at= = > http://www.web-marketing-products.com

Why You Need a Website

By Jennifer Stewart

You hear a great deal about the Internet these days -- that it's revolutionised communication ... commerce ... education ... Life-As-We-Know-It ...

Is this just hype?

You be the judge:

AN INTERNET TALE

After spending over twenty years at the Chalk-face, as a high school teacher, the novelty had worn off somewhat, so I did what so many others are doing now, I started looking for ways I could achieve that most desirable of lifestyles and be my own boss.

Home Based Businesses (HBB) are the fastest growing segment of the economy with thousands of people launching out on their own every week.

But there are pitfalls in setting up your own business: capital equipment can consume huge quantities of your precious resources; advertising costs can be horrendous, but since they're the only way you can tell people about your product or service, you have no choice; printing costs eat into more of your money; then you have to pay for postage, long distance phone calls and faxes to suppliers and customers. And we haven't got to the problems that can arise when suppliers let you down, when there are problems with transport ... aargh!

If I sound as if I've 'been there and done that,' it's because I have. My first business was marketing a series of courses I'd written.

I had the courses printed; I set up a free-call number and a reply-paid postal system; I advertised in all the major newspapers in three states; I paid to have the courses mailed to those who ordered them, and I soon discovered that I was just covering costs ... but only just.

This certainly wasn't the door to economic freedom I'd visualised (OK, let's be honest, it wasn't the freedom I'd fantasised about. Where were the big cheques every week? Where was the huge customer base that was supposed to be clamouring for me to write more and more courses for them? Mere figments of my imagination!)

ENTER: THE INTERNET!

But then I discovered the Internet, and suddenly there was no need to print hard copies of my course; I could email the whole course to students anywhere in the world!

And it didn't cost me any more to send courses to a hundred people than it did to send one course to one person. Suddenly my running costs were reduced, and I was able to halve the price of my courses.

I could change the course as I saw the need, adding newer examples to keep it up to date, deleting sections I wasn't happy with, rewriting whole sections. Plus, I now had the most amazing advertising vehicle for my course -- a website!

I was able to put up examples of my writing; I could show people what was in the course; I could point out the importance of being able to write well. I could do anything! And this was all because of the Internet.

Mind you, it took me some time to work out how to actually build a website; I made some terrible mistakes and wasted an incredible amount of time -- time that I could have been using to build my business. (My first efforts are outlined in an article I wrote, The Saga of the alt tags: http://www.write101.com/saga.htm )

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

That was in 1998 and my business has expanded to include professional writing services -- something I'd never thought about doing. It grew because people I met through the Internet asked my advice about their own writing and then asked me to write for them; I now have clients from every continent (except Antarctica).

That's what happens with business opportunities -- they just sort of arrive out of nowhere, and you have to be ready to recognise them and grab them before they get away!

MASSIVE GROWTH

The Internet provides the greatest opportunity of all in its capacity to change the way we do business and communicate, and in the rapidity with which all this has happened.

In 1996, there were an estimated 40 million Internet users worldwide, but according to a study released by market researcher the Angus Reid Group, global Internet usage is well on its way to reaching 1 billion users by this year (2005).

Consider the following:

• A world where e-mailboxes outnumber TV sets and telephone lines is probably only two years away.

According to statistics compiled by Messaging Online, the total number of e-mailboxes in the world has soared 83.5% in the past year. For comparison, the CIA says there are almost one billion TVs in the world, and according to the ITU there are less than 800 million phone lines. This means email has in 12 years done what it took 50 years for the TV and 125 years for the telephone to do.

• Online advertising revenues are expected to grow to $28 billion worldwide this year, according to new Jupiter research released in June at the Global Online Advertising Forum in Cannes, France. Jupiter says that nearly 6% of all global advertising revenue will be spent online and that growth will partly be driven by the rise of the online population worldwide, which will more than double within the next five years.

• Because of the swift time-to-market and the strong return on investment of e-mail, a new Jupiter report estimates that commercial e-mail spending will grow from $164 million in 1999 to $7.3 billion in 2005 - an estimated forty-fold increase in e-mail volume.

• The online population growth in Northern Europe, Asia and Latin America will lead to a global melting pot in a few years, eMarketer predicts and most of the Internet's growth will be in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

• eMarketer also predicts that wireless devices will link millions of new users to the web in the next few years.

According to the European Commission, Europe has one of the highest cell phone penetration rates in the world, with Finland leading the pack at 64.4% (Statistics from Masha E. Geller's MediaPost: http://www.mediapost.com)

Convinced?

WHY YOU NEED A WEBSITE

As well as using your website to facilitate your business, as I did, there are countless other uses:

• Keep in touch with family. So many families these days are spread across the country and around the world. We miss out on all those precious moments such as new babies, first steps, graduations, birthdays, weddings ... but having your own website means you can post pictures of your family, you can even put up videos and recordings so everyone in the family can keep up to date.

• Have you retired? Use the Internet to plan that great Retirement Odyssey; put up maps of your travels so friends can follow your trip; post your travel diary and keep the best travel memories fresh for all time.

• Set up a site around your hobby, sport or craft and show off your work or collections.

• Are you a member of a charity organisation? Build a website to keep in touch with members and benefactors. Use it to arrange fund raisers.

• We all know that children these days seem to be born computer literate, so give your children the opportunity to explore their talents and to build their skills by giving them their very own website. If the Internet is going to play such a dominant role in our lives, your kids need to be thoroughly skilled in all its uses.

Developers have seen the writing on the wall and many are now building housing estates with Internet access a standard inclusion in new homes.

Websites are the way of the future and we can learn to use them or get left behind.

NB If the spelling of words such as "visualised" in this article worried you, please read this: http://www.write101.com/aus.htm

Jennifer Stewart has had her own web-based business since 1998 and offers ghost writing and other professional services to clients from every continent except Antarctica. Visit http://www.write101.com and subscribe to free, weekly Writing Tips: mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@yahoogroups.com