Just One Number

As someone who is interested in promoting your website, you no doubt are convinced of the importance of two things:

a. getting traffic to your site.

b. enticing people who visit your site to take some specific action once they have arrived there.

In these two types of actions is embodied the ENTIRE process of all-things-Web. That’s it. That’s the whole enchilada. That’s the game. That’s the thing you need to do.

Well, as anyone who has been doing “stuff on the Web” for any length of time knows, getting those two all-important things to actually happen isn’t always easy. And, after having tried a few tricks you had up your sleeve that might or might not have borne fruit, you may have already realized that you’ll need to actually get serious about using metrics to measure your site’s performance.

And by metrics, of course, I mean numbers. Many of us – businesspeople alike – are a bit numbers shy. Others are just plain math-phobic. However, I strongly encourage you to get over any math aversion you have and start working with the numbers a bit at a time. Getting metrics-savvy is your first step toward really managing your Internet activities toward better performance.

Here’s a first step in your journey to a metrics-centric view of your online activities: figure out the One Number that is arguably the most important number you need to know about your site. And that One Number is this: the conversion breakeven point.

Put simply, the conversion breakeven point is defined as the maximum amount of money you are willing to spend to get someone to take that all-important action (i.e., buy something, sign up, call you, etc.) on your site.

Once you know this number, a whole slew of additional things flow from that. For example: how much you are willing to pay per conversion (and even per click) for your PPC campaign. How much you are willing to pay for SEO. And even how much you should charge for your time, services and products. All of this information is in part a function of this One Number.

To simplify your life even further: you can figure out the One Number for your business using my free conversion breakeven calculator at: http://www.jcjinteractive.com/ppc_seo_conversion_calculators/.

(Be sure to read Part A below before reading this).

Okay, so what’s the best way to think about these different types of traffic that could potentially visit your site?

Here is how to prioritize your traffic in terms of capturing them (with SEO) and converting them (with good site design).

Top Priority: Type III: people who want a service like yours but who don’t know you exist

These folks should be your primary targets. Think about it this way: you want to conduct your SEO campaign (and design your site to capture, inform, impress and incite to respond to your call to action) for those people who aren’t yet aware you even exist on the planet but who are already motivated to seek a service or product like yours. Make your site all about these folks. The biggest mistake webmasters and site designers make is to assume that site visitors already know: a. who they are; b. what the value that they offer is; c. to whom they offer that value. Don’t make that mistake. If you do, you’ll miss these vitally-important Type III folks.

Second Priority: Type IV: people who want a service other than yours but who, if they learned about your service, may consider using your service as a substitute for the service they are looking for

Your site should also make provisions for these folks. This is a bit harder of a sell only in that it can be tricky to change a prospect’s thinking from believing they need some other type of product or service to believing that yours might do just as well (or better). Still, very much worth the effort. Hint: you can explicitly state on your site something like, “Looking for an X Widget? Try my Y Widget instead.”

Third Priority: Type II: people who want your services and have heard of you – but who can’t quite remember your name

These folks should pretty much take care of themselves once they reach your site.  But, in order to increase your chances of getting them to your site with SEO, make sure that your site’s meta tags (keywords, in particular) contain common misspellings of your company or site name.

Fourth Priority: Type I: people who want your services and already know your name

With any effort at all, you should be already ranking within the top 5 positions on major search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, Yahoo! and Bing for your own company or site name. If so, Type I traffic should take care of itself. If not, do some SEO for your own name using blogs, backlink creation, etc.

Bottom Priority: Type V: people who don’t want your service and likely never will, even as a substitute for something else they do currently want

Basically, you can ignore these folks. Still, occasionally they will stumble across your site by accident. Or, maybe they are doing research on your company and find you that way. At any rate, for these folks, just supply an informative “About Us” page to explain who you are, what you do. That should do the trick.

Make the conscious decision to intelligently target your potential site traffic in this order of priority and you will in the process be making the best use of the time and resources you put into capturing and then converting your site traffic.

It is a big day in an Internet marketer’s life when she realizes that she really doesn’t want everyone in the world coming to her site, despite what she had been telling herself all these years. It represents a quantum leap in her thinking when she admits to herself that it is actually to her advantage to keep certain people away from her site (especially if she is doing pay-per-click marketing, but that is another story).

This realization is both liberating and a little bit scary. For, by recognizing that you don’t want everyone out there “on the Internet” coming to your site, you are forced to look more closely at exactly whom you do want and how you should treat them once they get there. And, then of course you may find yourself going back to your old college marketing textbook and flipping to that long chapter on market segmentation. Market segmentation, as I define it, is the art of dividing your prospects into meaningful categories so that you can go after them in different ways.

The way I see it, there are five types of traffic out on the Internet insofar as they relate to your products and services. Here they are:

Type I: people who want your services and already know your name

Type II: people who want your services and have heard of you – but who can’t quite remember your name

Type III: people who want a service like yours but who don’t know you exist

Type IV: people who want a service other than yours but who, if they learned about your service, may consider using your service as a substitute for the service they are looking for (oh yeah, and they, too, don’t know or don’t yet care that you exist)

Type V: people who don’t want your service and likely never will, even as a substitute for something else they do currently want

There you have it. As you start to think about the implications of all of this, you’ll realize that the way you should go about targeting these five types of people is (or should be) very different.

In a future post (Part B), I will discuss more about why and how you need to target these potential visitors differently – both from the perspective of SEO/SEM and from the perspective of once they arrive at your online doorstep (your site).

So, you have a website. Now you are finding yourself in the position of wanting more visitors to your website. Okay, you share a common problem with tens of millions of other people.

Now, if you have done some research on the topic, you are probably aware that there are two primary ways to get more traffic to your site: organically (a.k.a. naturally) or via paid search.

In Internet marketing lingo, the study and practice of getting more traffic via organic search is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. Meanwhile, the practice of paying for your traffic is called search engine marketing, or SEM.

So, which should you choose? Here are a few benefits of each:

Benefits of going all-natural:
1. You do not need to pay for each action (ad impression or click) that gets someone to your site
2. The effects of a strong SEO campaign can last for a long time
3. Often, the off-site content (e.g., in blogs, etc.) created to drive traffic to your site creates a higher value for would-be visitors, potentially leading to a higher conversion rate once they reach your site
4. The content you create online (out on the Internet) with backlinks to your site might last for months or years, unlike with paid ads which go away the minute you stop the campaign

Benefits of paying for it:
1. Takes no time to build up its effect: you get instant traffic with paid ads
2. Due to the large amounts of traffic you can “turn on” all at once, you can use that reliable, steady stream of traffic to do testing (e.g., conversion or A|B split testing, whereby you see which types of messaging, images, pricing, etc. help drive more desirable user actions, such as purchases, on your site). This can help you draw conclusions about how to build a better, stickier, and more user-friendly website.
3. The cost of getting the traffic to your site can be measured very precisely in dollars and cents, such that it is very easy to calculate return on investment (ROI) of your campaign
4. You can experiment easily with different types of paid traffic and then quickly and accurately measure the effectiveness of each campaign

Which do I recommend? Well, of course, it depends upon your situation. If you need traffic – like – today(!), then I recommend at least starting with a paid traffic (SEM) campaign. But, on the other hand, building up a solid SEO campaign does take time, so the sooner you start, the better.

One final note: SEO and SEM are by no means mutually exclusive. Rather, you can (and probably should) implement both in tandem – and if you do good job, they will complement each other very well. For example, doing good SEO work on your website can actually result in your paying less for clicks with your SEM campaign due to your site having a higher “quality score.”

Yesterday at the local grocery store I noticed two Coin Star machines placed side-by-side. The machines were almost identical, save for the style and size of the font used in the title panel that displays the name “Coin Star.”

It is likely that the company’s product manager did this on purpose in order to see which machine attracts more users by experimenting with the two different types of signs. (Or, maybe one machine is just an older model!). Either way, this photo serves as a great real-world reference when explaining the Internet marketing technique called “split testing.”

Split Testing: A Proven Way to Increase Conversions

If you are like most website owners or webmasters, you want more traffic surging to your website on a daily basis so that you can make more money (or get more exposure to investors, etc.). But, have you given much thought as to what happens once the traffic gets there?

Identifying such desirable actions that your visitors take – often called “conversions” in Internet marketing lingo – is a key step to building a solid online strategy.

In fact, finding ways to increase your site’s “conversion rate” (i.e., # of people who take the desirable action / # of visitors) is a very worthwhile endeavor that should pay for itself many times over in terms of your time investment.

This is where split testing – sometimes called A|B split testing – comes in. This practice involves creating two similar landing pages (either on your existing site or hosted at two independent Web domains). The key is to make both pages identical in almost every way – save just one element (e.g., a certain image, a choice of wording, a price point, etc.).

Once you have set up your two pages this way, start driving traffic. Then, using your analytics package (I prefer Google Analytics), track which page brings you a better conversion rate. Once you have determined this, you simply start over again: make both pages identical (using the highest-converting page as the model), and then change yet another element – and so on. You can repeat this process forever. Provided that you have given each configuration enough time (or visits) such that you have gathered statistically significant data, split testing is a sure-fire way to improve your conversion rates.

Hint: be sure to only change one element at a time. That way, you can know for sure what it is that has contributed to the better conversion rate on one landing page versus the other.

In this world of Web 2.0 and social media, Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot to know – maybe too much. Frankly, it can all be a bit overwhelming. In fact, you may be tempted at times to avoid trying to keep up with all of the latest technological developments out in “Internet land” and just stick to what you know well. You know what? This can actually be sound advice.

If you are feeling like you are on information overload and find yourself doing anything BUT making the necessary efforts to promote yourself online, try shifting your attention to what you already have right under your nose: your good-old, standard, traditional, Web 1.0 website.

So, while you are sorting out all of this new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff and trying to figure out what direction you or your company should take, try the following 7 ways to make your site work harder for you in a down economy:

1. Update your images/photos to something a bit more current. This is a quick and easy way to give your site a makeover while spending next to nothing. (iStockPhoto is a great place to start).
2. Write in your blog. Don’t have an on-site blog? Do the next best thing and start a FREE off-site blog. Just go to Blogger and set one up. Then, in your blog posts, insert relevant links to content on your website.
3. Read all of the content on your site out loud. This is a great trick to find out if it reads smoothly or if it needs a bit of tweaking. Be brutally honest with yourself.
4. Find some great content out on the Internet (for news stories on almost any topic, I like, for example, AllTop.com). Create a simple Resources section on your Home Page (or elsewhere on your site) and post links to the content you found for the benefit of your visitors.
5. Install Google Analytics, one of the best darn FREE software products available today. It helps you figure out site visitor behavior, traffic sources, and lots of other good stuff. Bottom line: this software helps you figure out what’s working and what’s not. And, it takes just minutes to install: you just put a short bit of tracking code that they provide onto every page of your site that you want to track.
6. Request backlinks from other sites: find sites that cover similar topics/industry niches to your own site. Then, e-mail their webmasters and ask them to link to your site. This is a great way to build backlinks. (If you are serious about SEO*, use this fee-based service (Linkvana) that allows you to create your own backlinks on other, high PageRank sites).
7. Refresh your content frequently: be sure to update/refresh your site’s content every 1-2 weeks at the minimum. Search engines love fresh content!

* Another hot SEO tip: you can get FREE SEO advice from yours truly, including a FREE “spot analysis” of your site, by visiting: Custom-SEO-Audit.com.

Here is a short comparison of the advantages of spending your free time blogging vs. using Twitter (or “tweeting”):

Advantages to blogging:

1. You can post the content to your own website (if the blog is hosted there), helping to create more keyword-dense, optimized content for your site
2. Off-site blog content can be embedded with valuable backlinks leading back to your website
3. Leaves a more permanent, easily-accessible record of your writings
4. Easy for readers to pick up a “connecting thread” or theme among your various postings
5. Easy to have your writings indexed by other services like Digg or Technorati

Advantages to tweeting:

1. Your entire posting will likely get read, since it is limited to 140 characters
2. Followers immediately get access to your tweets on their own screens as soon as it is made
3. You are more likely to create more value-per-word, given the short posting size
4. You get to enter into a multi-person, continual “conversation” with others, which feels more alive and evolving than do one-way blog postings
5. You get access to other people’s “best stuff” for the reasons stated in #3 above

Both are excellent options, and a good SEO and/or community-building strategy could well include both. Happy posting!

Advantages to tweeting:

Here are some tips on what makes a great blog. These thoughts are in my own words but borrow directly from a very informative (and entertaining!) recent talk given by Sonia Simone of Copyblogger:

1. Keep it personal and entertaining: people want to know how your content relates to them, and they don’t mind being entertained in the process.

2. The days of respecting “authority for authority’s sake” are gone. Nowadays, people want a “cool friend” who is both cool and an authority on a given topic. People will listen to their cool friend before they will listen to what is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

3. Give people a “cookie” every time you submit new content. In other words, given them something they can use right away without trying to sell them anything. This will make people love reading your stuff because they know that they will always walk away with something they can use right away to make their lives or their businesses better.

4. Looking for content ideas? Check out AllTop, the self-proclaimed “online magazine rack” of popular topics.