The secret to making money online is to fail fast. The secret to failing fast is to test quickly. The secret to testing quickly is to have a great tracking system. A critical part of tracking is to track conversions. In other words, is your website traffic taking the action on your site that you want them to take? You need to accurately and quickly determine your call to action conversion rate.

For example, if you are selling a DVD on your website, you would have a sales page, an order page, and a thank-you page. You send traffic to your sales page, a certain percentage of your visitors will click the order button and get sent to your order page, then a number will follow-through with the order and be sent to a thank-you page. Now the question is how many website visitors did you convert into an actual sale?

A common method to track conversions is to install a tracking pixel on your thank-you page. Without getting overly technical, here is what the “tracking pixel” looks like:

This example code comes from a free online tracking solution called Tracking202.

Everytime someone makes it from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom of your sales funnel, the tracking pixel will “fire.” At the end of the day or week or month, you now have an idea about your website to sales conversion rate.

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I had planned to start this post by explaining why online business owners should track visitors. But then I concluded that that would be too obvious. It’s clear that we should track visitors to our websites so that we can do more of what works. If we don’t track, we won’t know. So let’s talk about how to track visitors to your website.

If you want to know how to track visitors, follow these 7 steps.

1) Sign up for Google Analytics. This excellent software tool is free from Google.

2) Install the small piece of Google Analytics code on each web page that you want to track visitors.

3) Check to see if you have AWSTATS as part of your web hosting service. If you use companies like www.premierewebhost.com, this tracking utility comes standard.

4) Create a simple spreadsheet with three columns. One is for the keyword, the second for the number of times the keyword was used, and the third has the date.

5) Each month print out the keyword report. You’ll be surprised at the types of keywords that people use to find you.

6) Optimize your website based on the keywords that turns a profit or produces the desired action when visitors get to your site.

7) Install a tracking link for all your off website content like on articles, blogs, forum signatures, PPC ads, contextual ads, video ads, and so forth.

And that is all I have to say about how to track visitors.

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Looking for a web host? Unlimited free web space is what you want for a robust site!

Today’s web sites have evolved from small, one or two pagers to sites containing hundreds of pages of content, artwork, banner ads and sometimes millions of links! Long gone are the days when the one-page website, selling a single product and carrying no advertising, successfully attracted visitors. You are whistling upwind now if you’re still relying on that strategy to produce any sort of income.

The current algorithms used by the search engines will place your site far down the list of result pages. Today, content articles and freely available information, relevant to your products and services, is one important component necessary to raise your search engine rankings.

In order to flesh out your site, you need quite a bit of web space with your hosting service to make the grade with the search engines. If you envision enhancing your web site offerings, with sound, video, animations and plenty of ads, the ideal solution is to find a hosting service which provides unlimited free web space. Is this just pie-in-the-sky thinking? No. Unlimited free web space is being offered by large hosting services, which have the disc space and memory that smaller services just can’t afford to reasonably offer and stay in business.

Who knows how long such offers will be available? Some are currently offering such a plum of a deal, with lifetime rights, so long as you continue your relationship with that hosting service. If you are planning to expand your current website, now may be a good time to take advantage. Some of these unlimited free web space hosting promotions may disappear not too far down the road.

Updating your site with video capabilities, sound, flashy slide shows and animations makes your website more interesting, thus attracting a greater amount of traffic. Of course, you need to promote these features, through press releases, social networking sites and feature articles in newsletters and article directories, for the best and quickest bumps in your site traffic. However, these site resources can consume astonishing amounts of disc space and memory. We’re talking gigs here. Using a host which provides unlimited free web space eliminates these problems.

Expanding your web site in all of these ways naturally results in larger databases, requiring additional disc space and memory. However, adding all these bells and whistles definitely leads to more traffic and more income.

When you find a hosting service offering unlimited free web space, be sure you also get unlimited bandwidth. If the unlimited bandwidth isn’t part of the deal, you haven’t gained much, because you’ll not be able to take advantage of all that space!

The large, robust web site is the wave of the future. You’re well advised to check out this option now, while this new hosting marketing strategy is still available.

Here is my recommendation:

http://premierewebhost.com/

If you are setting up a website, carefully consider your web design layout. It is more important than you might think. Here is why.

You’ve located a perfect marketing niche for your product or service. You’ve got your business plan and marketing strategies ready to go. You have your domain name and hosting service in place. What you don’t have is your web design layout. While you may plan on hiring a web design firm to make this happen, you’re well advised to put in a little effort of your own before hiring a professional.

No one knows your business better than you do. You know the flavor of the appearance you want to convey to your customers. While a good web page designer may have the visual elements of good graphic design down pat, only you know what will be of special appeal to your niche market base. You also may have the inside scoop on marketing techniques that will edge you up in your search engine rankings. These factors may be totally out of your web design layout expert’s purview. They are looking to create a pretty page that will please a visitor, once they’ve landed on your page. Web page designers are not usually conversant in SEO issues or spider turn-offs. So it’s worth your while to make a mock-up that takes these important issues in to account.

Your page composition is a good starting point. Your home page must be inviting, while fulfilling sales objectives. As soon as your visitor hits your home page, you want them to see your main sales offerings, without having to scroll down. A good web design layout makes these sales points immediately visible, not hidden in the last half of the page. You want them to find your most valuable propositions right off the bat. Make a mock-up of your site’s web design with this in mind. Ad placement is another important component of a good web design layout. Make sure you make it clear what ads you want your visitors to see up front. Your web designer is skilled in visuals and graphic design, but may not understand the importance of ad placement.

Good web design layout must also take into account what type of software will be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Flash(R) slide shows used to be a huge problem. The search engine spiders would essentially flip out when they encountered Flash(R) displays, resulting in no future visits, or indexing, of that page. While the spider bots can now deal with them, after a fashion, there are still a number of details to be taken into consideration before integrating these sophisticated software programs without damaging your rankings.

A good web design layout must also consider different browsers. When you engage a web page designer, make sure they know the problems associated with dealing with different browsers. The majority of web surfers use Internet Explorer. However, Firefox and Opera are competitors. Each of these browsers display your web design layout differently. If your design layout accommodates IE exclusively, you’re going to lose out on that segment of potential customers using a different browser. Your page may appear distorted and unprofessional in appearance, with strange effects that will have that visitor surfing away forever, never to return.

If you make the effort to create a mock-up that incorporates these marketing concerns into your web design layout, you’ll end up with a site that draws the maximum number of visitors. Let your web master take care of the graphic elements.

How to refine your online business opportunity choices and maximize your enjoyment and profits!

With the many success story websites we see and hear about, many people have thought about online business opportunities. Yes, there are more opportunities to make extra money or even a full-time income online now-a-days, but it’s not easy. It’s smart to be cautious and do some careful planning, but then again, it’s equally important that your venture be something you truly enjoy. You may actually put in more hours than you do at your current job, so loving your work is a high priority.

Another factor that comes into play is the careful planning, particularly when it comes to your lineup of products and services. You want to make available just the right mix of offerings, either of your own, those of affiliates, and those for which you are a distributor.

No matter what your niche market, you’ve got to make it a goal to maximize your online business opportunity and to maximize your profits – you are running a business. Many people set up beautiful websites with just a few, albeit high quality products. Such sites rarely stand the test of time, running out of resources and perhaps ultimately failing. Here’s how it works.

If your website offers little content, you have fewer pages, so it takes far longer to raise your ranking with the search engines. This means fewer visitors. Studies generally agree that a potential customer visits your site seven times before making a purchase. So it can take a long while to realize sufficient income to make a living. You don’t want to tie the hands of your own online business opportunities!

This picture can be improved by adding plenty of relevant content. However, you can further optimize your exposure with more links to other websites. Here’s where you can get double the benefit out of adding links. You’ll be increasing your exposure when you get other sites that link to you. The search engine spiders poll these links regularly. The more relevant, quality links you have pointing to your site, the higher your rankings become. More visitors, with more reasons to be interested in staying longer at your site. The end result is that your sales come quicker and your sales numbers increase.

When you structure your online business opportunity in such a way that each page on your site offers information with affiliate’s products specifically relevant to the interests of the reader of that information, your chances at a sale are automatically increased. You’ll definitely want to get into the Google Adwords program. You should also hand select some sites, with quality items targeted at that reader.

As appropriate to your site’s content, consider the drop-ship distributor opportunities. You select specific products which may especially interest your visitors. You carry no inventory and maximize your profits.

So as you develop the online business opportunity of your dreams, use these guidelines to help make that dream come true. To your happiness and prosperity this coming new year!

A well-planned and implemented web advertising strategy is essential to your success on the net!

You can have the most beautiful website on the planet and yet have virtually no traffic. When you’re competing with millions of other sites in your niche, you need to carefully and thoroughly analyze your demographics, then target your potential customers by putting together a web advertising strategy that is customized to the needs of those visitors. There are always many avenues to putting the word out where it counts. The trouble is discovering which venues are most cost effective. You also need to understand how the search engines work when their spiders go out crawling, what they’re looking for and what they don’t like.

Here’s an overview of what needs to be considered as you plan your web advertising strategy.

You naturally want to start getting visitors as soon as possible, but don’t jump the gun and submit your site to the search engines if all you have are a few pages of sales material. Submitting too soon may hurt your search engine rankings immediately. Wait until your site has plenty of content and relevant links. This way, when the spider trolls your site, it records the amount of information available for free versus pure product sale pages. Sites with plenty of free information are deemed more valuable to a reader searching on your subject and your ranking increases accordingly.

Which brings us to content. Content is an important element of any web advertising strategy. Let’s say you are selling kid’s furniture. What type of information will your visitor – and potential customer – find valuable? Remember, the longer a visitor hangs at your site, the greater your conversion rate will be. In this scenario, you’ll want tons of information pertaining to kids. Some categories you might want to fill out include safety tips, kid’s story book reviews (Newberry Award winners always sell well), craft projects for kids and the like.

Putting links within your content articles is a great way to improve your search engine ranking, so long as the link leads to a topic directly related to your article. For example, you have an article pertaining to choosing a nursery monitor. Put in a couple of links which lead to a consumer report on nursery monitors or more detailed information on a specific aspect. This is an excellent web advertising strategy that doesn’t cost a penny, but drives traffic to you. The higher the quality of the linked site, the more favorably it reflects on you!

Google accounts for about 75% of all searches, and running an AdSense campaign pays. Google does all the work for you, ‘reading’ each page and finding the most relevant products and services. So, as you construct each page, get all your ducks in a row first! Every item on that page should be closely related. This allows Google to fine-tune its ads to the most targeted ads and thus increases your ROI. Always a good thing!

If you have a free e-newsletter, make sure you offer it on every page, in roughly the same place on each. You never know when a visitor will click through to a page other than your home page. You can bet that is often the case. This web advertising strategy helps you capture a readership, keeping you fresh in your visitor’s minds while affording you another opportunity to pitch a sale, tactfully.

Another money-making web advertising strategy comes in the form of affiliate ads. For your kid’s furniture website, develop some affiliate relationships with other sites selling products and services of interest to your visitor, but which are not directly competing with you.

Depending on your site topic, a blog can help create buzz in your community. People love the interaction and may start visiting your site more frequently, just to see what’s new. Again, this leads to more sales.

You can see how a thoughtful, search engine savvy web advertising strategy can have you hit the ground running!

During the early days of the internet, it was far easier to compete because there were fewer websites to compete with. Today in the 21st century, if you want to successfully compete with hundreds of thousands of competitors, you’ve got to have a well planned and strategically sound online advertising campaign in place. Do this before you ever publish your website. If you’ve got all your planning done ahead of time, you’ll get traffic to your website sooner rather than later.

Maintaining your website is an expense. If you’re also paying for ads, the income you derive won’t add up to much without sufficient traffic. The time you spend planning your online advertising campaign and developing the best strategies for your product or service will pay you big dividends, decreasing the time between launch and profits. Let’s take a look at how you can customize your advertising campaign to your advantage.

The *big* search engine is Google. They handle about 75% of all searches online. So it makes sense to make your website Google friendly. Google.com provides detailed information on how your website is ranked, how the spiders work, good links versus what Google deems spammy, along with a wealth of resources which show you how to increase your visibility. In fact, there’s so much information, it will take a while to go through it all. On the other hand, what you’ll learn will help you tailor your strategies for a successful online advertising campaign. This makes your effort entirely worthwhile. Think of all your competitors who neglect to make this thorough investigation!

For example, we’ve all seen websites which have advertisements which are completely unrelated to the page content, trying to sell you cell phones, gadgets and books on a page with an article on obtaining a mortgage. Perhaps the website owner figures if you can buy a home, you can thus afford these items. However, search engines will penalize you for irrelevant advertising. Target your ads to each page as the product or service pertains to the interest of the reader. Google’s AdSense program uses a variety of algorithms to scan the content of your page and match your page with ads of likely interest to that reader. While you can certainly add affiliate program ads, using Google AdSense drives traffic and revenue to your site far more quickly. This single element can give your online advertising campaign a hefty jump start.

Everyone knows that linking is important to a well planned online advertising campaign. What’s not so well known is that the quality of the site you’re linked to impacts your rankings. The search engine spiders are pretty “smart” and sophisticated these days, so be choosy when you select your links. If the Google spiders detect that most of your links within text are click-throughs to a potential sale, rather than information of value to your reader, you’ll take another hit in the rankings. The spiders may even exclude that page from future indexing.

It’s most important that you do your homework and find out what helps and what harms your search engine ranking. If you don’t, your online advertising campaign may become a failed campaign, setting your online marketing efforts back.

Publishing some of your content in relevant e-newsletters with high readerships is another excellent technique for any online advertising campaign. When you’re brainstorming for new ideas, always keep “relevance” and “quality’ in mind. Then watch your profits grow.