For many people their first attempt at creating a business website – whether it is to generate leads, sell products, or provide access to secure information, is a complete failure. I’m sure that you ” ve heard the statistics – some 98% of online businesses are not profitable. The question is, what can you do to insure that you fall into the top 2% of websites online? Understanding the Nature of the Internet The biggest thing that online marketers seem to fail to comprehend (or at least they choose to ignore) is simply the nature of the media that is the internet. There are millions of sites online. Unless you are creating a huge portal site which provides current news or stock quotes or a free repeatable service such as hotmail that people will need to come back to every day, most people will only ever see your website one time. Because of this, your website needs to be a direct response advertisement for your product – the internet by default makes you a direct response marketer.
What does that mean? It means you need to focus on getting an immediate action from your customer – and it can only be one of two things: 1. a sale 2. their email address If you are trying to do anything else with your website (such as branding, god forbid… ) you are simply throwing money out the window. This is the first thing that you have to know about internet marketing if you truly want to succeed. Understanding Your Stats and Conversion Understanding that your website is a direct response advertising business makes business online very simple.
Direct response marketing is one of the easiest techniques available for generating huge profits on a continual basis. Why? Because it all comes down to two things: 1. Your Traffic (how many people see your site) 2. Your Conversion Ratio (how many of those people buy your product) We will talk about generating traffic to your website later in this course, for now we are just going to talk about a basic understanding of your conversion ratio.
Business online is simply a calculation. You need to make sure that you spend less money getting people to your site than you make in sales, and there you have a profitable company. The internet makes this a breeze by providing technology to analyze your numbers that would be impossible to create offline. Most sites have a standard conversion ratio. On almost all websites you have access to your visitor statistics (if the company doesn’t offer this, forget them quickly).
All you need to do is look at your # of visitors and divide it into the number of sales that you make in a specific time period. For example, if you had 580 people visit your site last week, and you made 4 sales, your conversion ratio is 4 / 580 = 0. 00689655 (a little more than half of one percent – not terrible, not great) The standard “Successful” conversion is about 1% for direct mail, and a little higher online. If you only sell one product at one price, you can stop there (just use your product price as your average sale price).
If you are selling multiple products, though, you also need to calculate your average sale. So, if those four products cost $25, $47, $54, and $23, your average sale for the week was: (25+47+54+23) / 4 = $37.
25 Of course, the longer period of time that you average your sales over the more accurate your final number will be. So, in this situation, knowing that you convert about. 69% of your customers (note that is NOT 68%) and that the average sale is $37. 25, you can now generate your Visitor Value. To figure out how many visitors you need to get one sale you divide 1 by your conversion ratio: 1 /.
0069 = 144. 92753623 So 145 visitors are worth 1 sale, or about $37. 25 to your business. You then divide the average sale amount by the average number of people it takes to generate one sale and you end up with your Per Visitor Profit, or Visitor Value.
37. 25 / 145 = 0. 25689655 (I know this is a lot of math, but it is one of the most important things you will ever learn if you are going to succeed online! ) To summarize, there are a couple of important numbers. # of Unique Visitors to Your Site (visitors) # of Sales (sales) Your Average Sale (avg sale $) Your Conversion Ratio (CR) # of Visitors per Sale (VPS) Your Visitor Value (VV) and… (visitors) / (sales) = (CR) 1/ (CR) = (VPS) (avg sale $) / (VPS) = (VV) Within these three simple equations lies the success and failure of every website online. In this example, you are making approximately $.
25 per visitor (with no advertising costs) What this means is that you need to spend less than a quarter to get a person to your site, or you are losing money. If you can spend $. 24 and make $. 25 you are making profit (not much, granted) and you can continue promoting and try to improve. If you are spending $. 26 per visitor and making $.
25 – STOP and reevaluate your sales system, you ” re headed for bankruptcy. This example is a bit extreme, and it is not hard to get much better margins than this, but it is VITAL that you know your numbers when doing business online. If you sell high ticket items you may be able to spend as much as $100 to $125 per lead generated by your site, and if you sell candy you may only be able to spend a penny per person – it varies greatly depending on the business you are in. Building a Powerful Site that Sells You may wonder why I am throwing all of this marketing information at you – this is, after all, a course about web builders, isn’t it? Well, we are going to go in depth about web builders, their specific advantages and disadvantages, and your options over the next week or so. The thing is, we want every single person who reads this and decides to get a website to succeed in their marketing, and there is really so much more to it than simply “building a site.” By the time you finish with this course, you will not only know exactly what you need to know to choose a great website solution, you will also know how to use that solution to pull in great profits with your business. So – that’s it for the first course.
Take the time to absorb what you just learned, this is the foundation of all success online. Set this aside for future reference and NEVER forget to do your math! In the next course we ” ll give you a hot checklist of everything you need to know and have BEFORE you even start on your website to ensure that down the road things go as easily as they possibly can for you. Until then, have a great evening, and I’ll see you on Wednesday, October 1 Best Wishes, Justin B Handley P. S.
, if you have a friend who would benefit from this course, please pass this on. Or, they can get their own copy of our full five day free mini course by clicking on the following link: web n / a.