You can read the first article in this series “how much traffic do you need to make money online” here.

As far as conversions rates are concerned, it doesn’t always mean the prettiest sites will get the best results?

So what else can you look at?

We’ve already decided that it’s important to step back, and have a think about what your site is there for.

Is it’s purpose to generate adsense clicks or affiliate sales. If your main purpose is to get affiliate sales, why would you want visitors leaving your site and generating you maybe just 20-50 cents a click. That $120 adsense could be up to 600 visitors that clicked away from your website, how much might you have made if they’d left through your affiliate links, if you didn’t have adsense on the site?

I’ve seen websites where they have adsense at the top of each page or post, with no obvious “call to action,” maybe even a small “more info” type link at the end of the content, which is actually their affiliate link. The only thing that’s possibly effective there is the adsense placement, sometimes that’s the idea if the site’s “made for adsense,” but it won’t do well for affiliate sales.

Confusing or over elaborate site navigation can also be an issue, if your visitors can’t find what they want, they’ll leave.

I don’t know what it is currently, but they reckon that you’ve only got something like 5 seconds to get a visitors attention, it doesn’t really matter exactly how long it is, next time you’re looking at stats, see how many visits to your site were less than 20 seconds.

Before I give you a few more things you can check, let’s remember we started this series with a website that had massive traffic, but issues with it’s focus, and conversion rates.

Remember 15,000 visitors a month for about $150.

Now take a site that gets just 10 visitors a day, but has a 4 % conversion rate. Average product price is around $300 and pays 20% commission, so that’s $60 per sale.

Just 300 visits a month but it can generate $720 – that’s more like it!

You don’t always need masses of traffic to make some reasonable money, but you would need more websites.

For any sceptics out there, there are plenty of commissions like that to be made, you just need to dig into the right affiliate networks and find them.

One of the affiliate programs that I use pays those sort of commissions, in fact, they can go as high as 20% of just over $2,000.

Yes – that’s a $400 commission for just one sale!

It just gets even better though, because after the customer has purchased, their details are linked to my affiliate account, so I get all the commissions on future purchases they make as well – which is very nice!

If you want to find out about niches like that, just spend a while trying to dig them out.

Or you could always join the Achievers Inner Circle?

Next time you’re struggling with a site, just consider a few basic points like these:

1. What is the main goal for my website?
Adsense, selling own product, affiliate sales, opt-ins, services.

2. Is the website correctly focused on the target market?
Are you targeting businesses, individuals, what demographics etc

3. What type of keywords are fetching traffic?
Informational, buying, reviews.

4. Is the content appropriate and focussed?
Appropriate for visitors, and focussed on the task.

5. Is your content informational or review based?
Should it sell or pre-sell.

6. Is there an obvious “call to action”?
Make sure visitors know what to do next.

7. Is the site navigation clear and easy to follow?
Remember how long visitors might stay on your site.

8. Are you promoting the right products to the right audience?
If they’re not buying, maybe try something different.

I hope you find this article useful and please don’t under estimate the difference a few subtle changes can make to your website?

Now go and have a look at your websites conversion rates,

It’s Time For A Pay Rise!

Or why not Join the Achievers Inner Circle?

You’ll get much more really good  tips, tactics, and training to improve your business, and it only takes one or two more sales to cover your entire monthly membership fee!

You can read the first article in this series “how much traffic do you need to make money online” here.

In the previous article we looked at defining the real purpose of a website, and how that can help to increase your conversion rate.

We’re now going to have a quick look at a fairly extreme tactic that was used a couple of years ago, it’s all to do with what people see as site quality. The search engines also have there version of site quality which is judged by their algorithms, as well as by a manual human review at some stage.

Using this tactic now can be risky, because if your website is perceived as being of too lower quality, then your rankings will suffer, it could even get you de-indexed. There is a valuable lesson here though, and if you know how, the tactic can still be applied in a way that keeps everyone happy, including the search engines.

Although it won’t do you any favours with the search engines now, there was a move towards building low quality websites for adsense and affiliate sites. The theory is that if a visitor gets to your site, and doesn’t find anything worth hanging around for, then they either just leave, or quite often they click on one of your links, especially if it’s right there in front of them.

Mission Accomplished – They Clicked Your Link!

I’m not suggesting you go and build poor quality sites, quality is still the best way forward, but this can bring some good results and is definitely worth having in your tool kit.

It can still be very effective if done correctly, and that’s the thing here, search engines will not rank your site for long if it’s really poor, but you can still use that technique to great effect, if you know how to do it correctly.

It’s something I go into with my Achievers Inner Circle members.

So when you’re thinking about improving your website conversion rates, you might want to take a look at your website and its contents quality, but don’t always assume that that just because it looks great, and it’s got very well written articles that it will be at its best conversion rate.

It’s more important to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve, and then build around that.

When you next hear someone talking about  “being relevant” you’ll probably know that it’s more than just a dog training site, selling a dog training guide that you’ll need.

Is that relevant, or just related?

What about the other factors such as the keywords that bring the traffic, what are the people looking for, and do you have it?

In the last part of this series of articles, we’re going to look at a few more specific areas that can help increase your conversion rates,

Read the next article – How to improve your website’s conversion rate?

You can read the first article in this series “how much traffic do you need to make money online” here.

In the previous article in this series, we looked at why you need to understand about website conversions rates, and what a difference it can make to your results. Now we need to start at the beginning, and see what you can do about improving it.

So where do you start?

The first thing you need to get clear, is what are you really trying to achieve with your website?

You might think that’s simple, “I just want to make a sale” but let’s stop right there for a minute.

Do you want to get a visitor to actually buy a product on your website, or do you want them to click your affiliate link, and buy on the merchants website?

These two things can be approached with some subtle differences, that can make a big difference to your conversions.

The most obvious thing is to think about who is doing the selling, if you want them to buy from your site, then it’s your job to do the selling, if they are going to buy from the merchants site, then they should do the selling.

Your job as an affiliate is usually to pre-sell, or “warm” the customer up, and more importantly, get them to click through your affiliate link.

I say usually because it’s important to take a look at the merchant’s site to see how much of the selling they are actually doing.

With a lot of eBooks and downloadable products you’ll find they do more than enough selling, so you don’t want to be selling to the customer twice.

On a lot of physical goods sites, the selling is virtually non existent in terms of written content, so maybe you can push a little harder.

You’ll also find that the keywords fetching your traffic will have an affect on your conversion tactics.

Do you think that all product based keywords mean that someone is ready to buy?

If that’s the case, all you really need is minimal content, maybe just a short description and an image, together with an obvious call to action such

as “Buy Now!” or “Add To Cart,” just like a lot of shopping site.

Now let’s stick a word on the end of that same search phrase, how about – REVIEW?

The person is now possibly quite close to making a decision to purchase, but is looking for a product review, or possibly a comparison, so you need to provide them with a bit more information.

You can still make the mistake here though of being too detailed, just like in this article.

I want to keep your attention, but I don’t need you to click away through an affiliate  link.

In your product review though, you need to give the person just enough information and facts, then you want them to click your link and go to the merchant’s site. Provide too much information, and they might just revert to “information seeking” because you have effectively “confused” them.

They were probably on the verge of making a decision to buy, but now they think they need to go and look around some more?

You just lost the sale!

So you can see that being clear on what your website is there for, and how you structure the content, links and a lot more can determine how effectively it converts

There’s a rather extreme example of a way around this, that might help you understand it a lot better?

Read the next article – What’s really makes a good website or a bad website?

You can read the first article in this series “how much traffic do you need to make money online” here.

Website conversion rates don’t often get discussed too much around newbie circles, possibly because it’s one of those things that can literally make or break your level of success, so maybe it’s best to keep quiet about it?

The thing is though, once you understand just what a difference getting it right can make, you’ll wonder why it doesn’t get more attention earlier on.

It’s true that you don’t need to worry too much until you start to get some decent traffic, and you can’t optimize properly until you get enough regular visitors to your website to make the data worth looking at, but why lose out on conversions to sales or sign ups when getting just a few basics right at the start can really help?

Sure, people do talk about a few things like “be relevant” and “have a call to action,” but do you think there could be a bit more to it than that?

Well if it’s possible to get to 15,000 visits a month and only make about $150, like our example in the last article, maybe we should look a little deeper into this and find out what’s really going on.

If talking about conversion rates seems a little mundane, just think about what that site could do if the conversion rate was more like 4%, even though it could be higher, at 4 % it would probably be making more than $6,000 a month!

Grabbed your attention yet?

There are so many things that can affect an individual website’s conversion rate. I’ve already mentioned relevancy and call to action, but the look of the site, the keywords that bring traffic, page layout, graphics, images, colours, links, content, ad placing, and much more, can all affect your conversion rate.

When you’re getting a lot of traffic you can really get stuck into some detailed analysis, or even hire a professional, to maximise your site’s conversion to sales, opt-ins, or whatever else it is you’re trying to do.

It would involve detailed analysis of various stats, making multiple changes, sometimes only very small changes, and split testing to see which gives an improvement. You’ve probably heard that when you make too many changes all at once, you can’t really tell what helps, or what makes things worse, so it can be a very long, laborious process.

Just remember though, increasing conversions from just 1% up to 2%, would double your website’s income potential.

Now we’re not going to get into that much detail here, it could easily make up a whole course, and maybe I’ll add that later?

Most of the time though, as long as you get the basics right, your conversion rate should be acceptable, then you can always try to improve on it later.

So now you realise what a difference it can make to get this right, let’s move on and have a look at where you can start to improve your website conversion rates.

Read the next article -  What is your website’s real purpose?

Today I want to take a look at how much traffic you really need to make money online?

This is a short series of articles, aimed at helping you to understand some of the fundamental issues concerning why some websites do very well with low levels of traffic. Whilst others that get tons of traffic can struggle to achieve decent results.

Once you get a good understanding of this, it can greatly increase your chances of achieving the results you want from the type of website you’re building, or already have up and running.

I read a blog post a while ago where this person was asking for some help, they had a website that was nearly two years old, fairly well put together, and looked very nice.

They’d been doing a lot of work to get traffic to the site, and it was now getting about 500 visitors a day!

It wouldn’t be fair to name the site here, but suffice to say that it was a competitive niche, selling gadget related products, so 500 visitors a day was pretty good going by anyone’s standards.

Now if you’ve read the article I wrote about the differences between selling physical, or digitally downloadable products, then you’re probably thinking that website must have been making a ton of money?

Fifteen thousand visitors a month, maybe 4% conversion at the low end, so about 600 sales a month.

They must have been making a ton of money just off that one site?

Sit back, feet up, and just chill out!

“I thought you just said they’d asked for help?”

So what was the problem that they needed help with?

Apparently, despite getting 15,000 visitors a month to the site, it was only producing one or two affiliate sales each month, and about $120 from adsense.

I know that might be hard to take in, but the site was only making about $150 a month from over 15,000 visitors!

If you where just starting out and came across that, why would you even bother to give internet marketing a try?

I mean how much time and effort does it take to get over 500 visitors a day?

If you used PPC you’d probably have to be spending over $9,000 a month in that niche, but if you only make $150 back you’re going under fast!

Or if you want natural traffic, how many keywords would you need to rank high on page one of Google for, and how many thousands of links will you need to build to get there? It would probably take months of consistent effort to get that sort of traffic.

All for just $150 a month!

So what the heck could be going wrong, surely with that amount of traffic it should be easy to at least make a couple of  hundred dollars a week. Those gremlins are starting to wake up again, you know, the ones in your head that start you thinking that this doesn’t work very well at all!

If you where in that position, would you just quit, or is there an answer?

Well the answer is obviously to do with the website’s so called conversion rate, “so no rocket science there then” I hear you say, but would you know what to do about it, or just how you might be able to improve your own website’s performance?

Read the next article – why you want to improve your website’s conversion rate?