Jun 27 2009

Visitors Leave After Seeing My Home Page – Aye, Carumba!

One of the keys to a profitable web site is analyzing your hits to visitor ratio. What does it mean if you have a low hit to visitor ratio? This article provides the answer

No Depth

An effective means for analyzing web site traffic is to look at the number of hits per visitor for a time period. To do this, you simply divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for the time period in question. Time periods can be a day, week, month or quarter of a year. Don’t look at any time smaller than a day as the data may not create an accurate picture of the traffic.

Assume you have the best damn dang hair net site on the net. You have over 1,000 hair nets of every variation, color, material and weave. For those of you not “in the know”, a hair net is one of those things people working in fast food places have to wear. I have no idea why, but I am sure there was a lawsuit once that makes complete and total sense.

Anyway, a site with over 1,000 hair nets should have a massive number of pages. Logically, every visitor to the site should click through more than a few pages while looking for the perfect specimen. Unfortunately, you find the server stats tell a different story.

In reviewing server stats, you learn that on average the site receives 5,000 visitors a day and 10,000 hits. Dividing hits by visitors, you discover to your dismay each visitor is looking at only two pages on average. This information is supported by the fact you’re only averaging a few sales a day. Aye, Carumba!

There are a few possible reasons for this poor performance:

1. Slow Site: A site with 1,000 products is going to require a very careful database design. I would guess 70 percent of database sites are fatally slow. By fatally, I mean they load so slowly that most dial-up users can’t navigate in the site. We are talking 30 to 40 second page load times. If you have this problem, you are immediately losing the 45 percent of people using dial-up.

2. Click Fraud: If you are running a PPC campaign, you must track the clicks in the campaign. A low hit to visitor ratio can often mean your PPC ads are being artificially clicked as such clickers rarely venture into the internal pages of a site.

3. Poor Advertising: This one is purely your fault. Your advertising must focus on keywords that are relevant to your site. If you are selling hair nets, don’t place ads under “hair styling.” If you do, people will click your ad, see hair nets and immediately leave. Know your limitations!

There can be a variety of reasons for low hit to visitor ratios. More often than not, slow load times are the answer. If the site is fast, then you need to dig deeper so you can figure out a way to make your visitors do the same.

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Jun 27 2009

Top 5 Surefire Ways To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

You’ve spent a good deal of time creating an awesome website with very enticing advertising copy that is very successful in getting your customers to click the “Buy Me” button. However, after examining your websites logs you’ve come to notice a very ugly pattern – your customers are abandoning your website after they decide to buy your product (after they click the “Buy Me” button). This is called shopping cart abandonment, because it is usually the purchasing process within your shopping cart that scares the customer away.

Let’s go over 5 ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment:

1. Be crystal clear as to what needs to be done: Complex shopping carts are a sure way to scare away potential customers. Make sure the instructions on what needs to be filled out are simple, easy to read, and easy to edit. Also, if the checkout process is multi-paged, make sure the button or link to get to the next page is clearly displayed.

2. Add a progress meter: The typical purchasing process for a given product on a website is multi-step (multi-page). While it is good to keep these steps to as few as possible, it’s even better to let your customer know what step they are on. A progress meter simply tells the customer what step they are in within your purchasing process. You’ve probably seen them in action on some of your favorite websites. It could be a graphical meter or a simple text-based indicator. A progress meter is absolutely necessary to help reduce shopping cart abandonment.

3. Show the product (or products) in the shopping cart: This can be a small picture, or a very brief (but specific) description of the product. Make sure the picture or description of the product contains a popup link that shows all the details and benefits the product has to offer. Remember, as customers fill out the purchase form they need to see what they are actually buying – so they know exactly what their purchase consists of – and you’ll also find that many just need to reread the benefits before they continue with their purchase.

4. Provide the shipping & handling costs upfront: It’s a good idea to include the S&H costs in the first step of the check out process – or even better, include the costs in the product description page. Even though they were well aware of the S&H costs, potential customers get quite annoyed when they spend 10 minutes of their time typing all their checkout information to find that the total cost just shot up $15 for S&H on the last step.

5. Add some comfort logos: Do you belong to the BBB? If so, display the BBB logo on the website. Another good logo is the Hacker Safe logo (www.scanalert.com) indicating that your website is Hacker Safe certified. Simple Verisign and credit card logos are also beneficial in adding more comfort to the process.

There you have it… five good ways to help put the brakes on your shopping cart abandonment rate.

Sincerely,

Michael Ellis

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Jun 27 2009

The Advantage Of Going After A Nook On The Web

Focusing on a nook to the exclusion of everything else is a tremendous way to make money.

The Advantage of Going After A Nook On The Web

When we talk about a nook, we are merely focusing on a specific area of a service or product sector. Think of nooks and crannies in a room. A simple, but clear, example of a nook would be Lasik eye surgery. It is a nook within the larger field of eye care and much larger field of medical services. The key to making money in your particular area is to focus on a specific nook that provides either a large volume of business or small volume with lucrative profit margins.

One of the biggest nook advantages is the ability to quickly become a dominant player in the area in question. By definition, there is almost always a limited pool of competitors in the market area, either for the area itself or the geographic limitation. Assume you are offering Lasik eye services. There are a limited number of medical professionals in your area offering the same thing. This means you have an outstanding opportunity to become the dominant personality. You can go get appearances on the local television and radio shows, publish articles in the paper and so on. News outlets are desperate for such quality content.

On the web, the same concept applies with a slightly different orientation. You want to focus on your nook to the exclusion of everything else. This sounds simple, but can be difficult to implement. There is an incredible temptation to expand a site beyond the nook in question. The motivation, of course, is greed. We all tend to think that if we offer tour services to London, our clientele would obviously be interested in buying soccer shirts for the professional teams in London. Wrong. Define your nook and stick to it. Even if you sell a few shirts, you risk distracting your prospects from purchasing a tour.

The web also provides unique advantages found in no other business medium. One of the dominant ways to market any business is to write content for periodicals. I am talking about informative articles, not advertisements. If you wrote an article for the local paper and they included it in their Sunday edition, how would you be viewed? It would be a lot more effective than an advertisement and, over time, you would become a trusted source for most readers. Whenever they thought of your area of expertise, they would come to you or your business. Talk about a goldmine!

On the web, you can take this example to the extreme. There are numerous sites known as article directories. These sites collect articles for an interesting audience. Websites, blogs and online newsletters need content all of the time. They use article directories to find the content. You should submit articles to the directories under the category applicable to your business. If you make the articles informative, you will quickly become a credible source and they will use your articles again and again. It is like being published in your local paper and a few hundred papers in other cities.

In summary, find your nook or cranny and stick to it.

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Jun 25 2009

Important Hosting Plan Features

Most Web hosts offer a range of features to attract potential customers to their hosting plans. These features may include disk space, free bandwidth, e-mail boxes, auto responders, FTP access, templates, and more. The customer must then decide which of the available packages best suits their needs.

The first requirement to consider is space. The Web site will require a certain amount of disk space based on the volume of content it will contain, with concern given for potential future growth. If the site is not already designed, a designer should be able to give a specific target range to look for.

The second big requirement is bandwidth. It is absolutely critical to buy sufficient bandwidth to cover the traffic generated by the Web site. In the early years of the Internet there simply wasn’t very much bandwidth available at any price. Today the technology has caught up and some Web hosts offer as much as 1,000 GB of data transfer free each month. Again, the required amount is something a Web designer should be able to predict.

Some Web hosts also offer Web analytics. This very useful service provides an insight into the way a Web site is being used, showing the where the traffic is originating and the pages that are being read. It can even display the amount of time a visitor is spending on the site and the search engines that are sending the traffic. While not usually provided for free, this information is usually considered invaluable to Web site owners.

The disadvantage of this is that the log files used to do traffic analysis take up valuable space. With daily logs, it is possible download and delete them every day, but if monthly logs are preferred it will not be possible to delete them until the end of each month. It’s important to clarify where the Web host will store these files or several megabytes of log files may begin crowding the Web site’s designated storage space as information builds up.

Also check to see where the storage for the e-mail boxes will go. If it will go to the same limited area provided for the Web site a maximum limit for each mailbox should be set. This will prevent incoming mail from causing the site to exceed the storage limit, resulting in an overage fee.

If the Web site is going to be a business site, auto responders should be required. This software allows for visitors who show interest in the site to have and automated reply sent to them. Additionally, the inclusion of forwarding aliases can be useful by allowing email to be sent to a filtering program for sorting prior to final delivery.

Finally, FTP access is another of the things a host absolutely must provide. Very few Web hosts charge for FTP access, since without it hosting of most content becomes very difficult if not impossible.

Written by Ricco Richardson
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