I have been reading books, articles and blogs about web business and web marketing and I find all of the information a bit overwhelming. If you could give one piece of advise to a newbie like myself what is the one thing most site owners neglect that could make their site more profitable.
Jimmy’s Answer:
How to make your website more profitable!
Thank you for your question. So many things are neglected by the majority of site owners so it is very difficult to pick just one. However, since you have put me on the spot I will have to say Testing, Testing, Testing! Testing will make your site more profitable. Most site owners fail to test different ideas on their pages and analyze statistics.
It is a common mistake to create a website and not analyze statistics and test different ideas. By not testing different text, images, headlines, offers etc. you will never learn what is most profitable and your site will not even come close to reaching its potential.
I will illustrate this with a very simplified example. Imagine I have a website that sells car insurance using an online application form. On my homepage I have a little green button that says Apply. Lets also imagine that 7% of people that visit this page click my apply button. Now lets change that button to a shiny red button that says SAVE ON INSURANCE! Click here! By testing different apply now buttons like this and analyzing my site statistics I could find that a new button leads 14% of people to click through to my application page. That would double my applicants and therefore double my revenue without even increasing traffic.
One should always test various different elements of their pages and analyze visitor behavior to make their website more profitable. You can test page headlines, copy, images, buttons, design, video and anything else you can think of. With a good website statistics program you can see how these changes effect the behavior of the average visitor on your site. Bounce rate, length of visit on a page and # of pages visited are a few of many stats that should be of interest to you. A good stats package should also have conversion tracking that will help you analyze what visitors take the course of action you want them to.
You should never assume your site is perfect and always strive for improvement. Identify areas you would like to improve and make changes to try to better them. Use website statistics to analyze the results and stick with what works and eliminate or improve areas of weakness.
I hope this information was useful for you and wish you the best of luck on improving the profitability of your business.
