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By Richard Grady
If you take a close look at this 'working online' business,
you will see that it is quite simply a numbers game (this
is actually the case with most, if not all, businesses).
At the most basic level, building a successful website is
just a matter of getting sufficient visitors to the site
and ensuring that some of them purchase something. I am a
firm believer that you can sell pretty much anything if the
price is right and whilst your products may not appeal to
everyone, they will appeal to someone.
So, back to the numbers game. Once you know the percentage
of visitors to your site that will actually buy something
(the conversion ratio), you can give yourself something to
aim for.....
If one out of every 100 visitors buys something then you
have a conversion ratio of 1% (which online is actually not
that bad). This means that 500 visitors to your site
should result in five sales.
To increase the number of sales there are a couple of
things you could do. Firstly, you could increase your
conversion ratio by improving your sales page or reducing
your prices etc. Alternatively, you could work the numbers
game and increase your traffic - you already know that 500
visitors will give you five sales so if you can get 1000
visitors to your site, you should generate ten sales
(assuming that the quality of the traffic is equal to or
better than that which you are already receiving).
This may seem obvious but it is often the most obvious
things that people miss. I was talking to one of my
customers recently and they had managed to build their site
up to the point whereby it was receiving around 250
visitors a day and was generating approximately $50,000 a
year in sales (this was a site selling physical goods so
this figure is the sales cost, not profit).
Despite this, my customer was finding it hard to visualize
the steps that he needed to take to improve his business
further. His target was for the business to generate sales
of $200,000 a year and the difference between the current
earnings and the target earnings seemed too great to be
achievable.
To get over this perceived problem, I asked my customer to
look at things in a slightly different way. I asked him to
forget about the sales figure and concentrate on visitor
numbers to the site. If 250 visitors a day generate
$50,000 a year in sales, then it is fair to assume that
1000 visitors a day will generate $200,000 in sales (as
long as the quality of the visitors remains constant).
This made the task seem fair more achievable since my
customer 'only' had to find another 750 visitors a day
instead of $150,000.
Of course, finding that many new visitors a day is a big
task but if you are mentally prepared and believe you can
achieve your target, you are far more likely to succeed.
This numbers game principle can be applied to pretty much
any aspect of an online business, for example....
If you write a newsletter and you have 1000 subscribers
that generate income when you promote a product of, say,
$100, then to increase this figure to $500 you simply need
to increase your subscriber numbers to 5,000.
If you know that each time you add a new page of content to
your site that this will generate, on average, ten extra
visitors a day from the search engines (once the page has
been crawled and indexed) then adding 100 pages of content
to your site should earn you an extra 1000 visitors a day!
If you are a regular contributor to online forums and know
that each post you make (that contains a link in your
signature to your website) will gain you 5 new visitors to
your site a week, then making 10 posts a day should boost
your visitor numbers by 350 a week.
If you create your own products such as eBooks or software
and currently earn $250 a month from each one, then it is
perfectly possible that every new product you develop will
earn you an extra $250 a month (once marketed and
established).
And finally, if you have one website that earns you $50,000
profit a year, what would happen if you had two websites?
Or three? Or five?......
Online business is just a numbers game - the principals
behind the numbers are far more complicated and I am not
suggesting for one moment that doing any of the above tasks
is easy BUT if you keep the numbers at the front of your
mind it should make the targets seem far more achievable.
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