Don't Be A Marketing Day Trader

Many businesses pursue marketing strategies in the same short sighted, reactionary manner as yesterday's day traders. They never develop a marketing strategy. They do not consider the long term. They lack patience. And, like day traders, they receive the same dismal results. Steven Van Yoder suggests us that rather than chasing the latest get-rich-quick scheme, we take a long term approach and build our reputation first. He explains us how in his article: Don't Be a Marketing Day Trader.

Contributed by Steven Van Yoder.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Internet Marketing, Small Business

The Two Variables of Website Conversion

When you sell something through the web, to maximize results you must focus on two variables:

a) Traffic
b) Website conversion

The first variable, traffic, is closely associated with Click Trough Rates (CTR). Whether your source of traffic is a search engine, a link in another website, or a pay per click ad, you must focus on achieving high click through rates of targeted traffic (the kind of visitors most likely to buy your product).

The second variable, website conversion, is measured by the conversion rate (CR), namely, what percentage of your visitors convert into customers.

If you have tons of traffic, but no sales, it may indicate that something is wrong with the quality of the traffic you are attracting, or with the ability of your webpage to convert (maybe due to bad sales copy, unfriendly page design, etc).

I have found a very interesting and well written white paper titled Understanding Website Conversion Rates, that offers a thorough introduction to the subject of Website Conversion. It's author is Kevin Gold, co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, a traffic generation and conversion enhancement strategy company.

He has also written a series of two articles that talk about the issue of conversion in pay per click campaings, which are also worth reading: The Art of Pay Per Click - Part I, and Part II.

Improve Conversion by Cross-Linking Your Pages

One of the greatest challenges for online marketers is how to reduce the "bounce rate", meaning the percentage of vistors who leave your site without doing anything. The folks at the Conversion Chronicles noticed that by linking to four of their articles from the body of another article, bounce rates were reduced from 90% to 38%.

This is how this works: Let's assume that an article on your site talks about search engine optimization, and that it touches on the subjects of keyword selection, website architecture and blogs. You could then link to articles on your site that deal with those three topics from the body of the search engine optimization article.

This will give your visitors the option to learn more by following those links (as oppossed to just leaving your site). By doing so, they will delve deeper into your site and will stay longer, giving you more opportunities to educate them, develop trust, and lead them further into the persuasive process.

This technique also offers important search engine optimization benefits, as the search engines will follow the embedded links, add the linked pages to their index, and pass along Pagerank from the linking page to the destination pages.

Web Conversion Averages

Web design and search engine optimization efforts will mean very little if we are not able to convert visitors into customers. Website conversion rates vary widely, depending on several factors, like: kind of product, company's reputation, quality of web copy, web's usability, etc. The folks at the Conversion Chronicles have put together some facts and figures on website conversion that shed some light on the subject. They have also written a free Ebook with lots of useful information to help you increase your conversion rate (highly recommended).