I've been very busy lately with various aspects of my online business, doing a lot of the "behind the scenes" stuff. In other words, those tasks that aren't so fun, the ones that are technical, tedious and boring, but highly necessary. And something occurred to me this morning that I thought I'd share with you.
Your online business requires continuous monitoring, evaluation, tweaking, and fixing. If you're not doing these things constantly, or having them done for you, I guarantee you're not making any money online and you're most likely not going to be profitable anytime soon.
For small business entrepreneurs this can be especially frustrating because you can only split yourself - your time, efforts, concentration and energy so many different ways. That's why it is so important to plan and prioritize as much as you possibly can, so that you know where your efforts can result in the most benefit for you.
Anyway, before I get too long gone down another path, I want to remind you of this today... Sometimes things require a little KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don't neglect to use your common sense.
If you're just beginning your attempts to make money online, you may not be able to afford all of the latest techniques and tools, and a lot of them you don't need anyway. But if you stop or at least slow down long enough to look at things from a common-sense standpoint, you can often see problematic situations, evaluate them and make a determination for a solution based on common sense alone.
What in the world are you talking about, Kimberly?
Let's say you have a website, a really great website or so you think. You regularly monitor your competition and know your website could use some improvements and tweaking, but overall it's a pretty OK website. However, you are not making many sales and/or you're not getting very many subscriptions to your newsletter (you do know that you're supposed to be building your own list, right?).
Okay, so there's not much going on here, and because you're not getting much traffic and everyone tells you that you need traffic (of course you do, otherwise where will the sales come from), you assume that you need to concentrate most of your efforts and resources on getting more traffic. Right?
Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes, you need traffic to be successful with any online business, just as if you had a "brick and mortar store", you would need a constant stream of customers coming through your door to sell things to. As with any type of sales and commerce, online business, much of it, is a numbers game. You have to have a certain volume of traffic, a threshold that you can eventually determine, that is required for you to get whatever results you require or desire.
But, listen to this...if your website is not performing well, then I'm willing to bet that traffic is not your primary problem. Why?
Because even if you have a little traffic (and this is where a little bit of common sense comes in handy), if the traffic you're getting is not converting (you are not making sales or accumulating new subscribers) then there's most likely another problem. And until you determine what the other problem is, it doesn't matter how much traffic you get, your sales will still lag.
Recently, we talked about using Google analytics and evaluating things such as your bounce rate. If you're only getting 500 visitors per month to your site, but nearly 100% of them are bouncing (i.e. not staying on your site longer than a few seconds), then something is wrong. And, what is wrong is not simply that you're only getting 500 visitors.
There could be a number of other possibilities that are causing a problem. For instance, it could be that you are targeting the wrong keywords.
Let's look at an example. If your website is about chocolate candy bars and you use the keywords candy", "chocolate", "bars", "sweets", you may attract people looking for your product. But, chances are a number of the people being attracted to your website are looking for something completely different. People using the search term "candy" to arrive at your site, could just as easily be searching for hard rock candy, lemon drops candy, saltwater taffy candy, peppermint candy or any number of thousands of other candy types. Individuals searching with the term "chocolate" could be looking for baking chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, chocolate chips, chocolate cookies, chocolate cake or any number of things other than chocolate candy bars. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
So in this example, a few better keyword choices may have been "chocolate candy bars", "chocolate candy bars varieties", "gourmet chocolate candy bars", "best chocolate candy bars", "low-fat chocolate candy bars", "crunchy chocolate candy bars", etc. Using these keywords would ensure that only people primarily looking for some type of chocolate candy bars would be finding your website. Thus, you would have a much greater percentage of people interested in your products, interested in subscribing to your site for more information, and a much better chance to sell chocolate candy bars. Cha Ching! And it had nothing to do with increasing the amount of your website traffic, which at the outset you may have thought was your primary problem!
This post is getting way too long already, so I'll stop. But I do want to reiterate that it's quite possible that the "success key" you're searching for is something that's right under your nose. In terms of identifying the sources of problems in your website and in your business, sometimes "over-analysis" can be a detriment. Try to look at issues and challenges from the simplest perspective first. You may find that you can identify your problems much more quickly and easily with just a touch of common sense.
