The scientific method is your key to success if you want to convert your website visitors into buyers. Books, articles, and experience will teach you many things. However, each product is different, each brand is difficult, and each target consumer is different. Trial and error testing will help you identify what works and what does not. Learn from every experience, keep what works, and scrap what doesn’t. Try to scale up your operation, but do not overextend yourself based on your results.
Do Not Overextend Yourself Based On Your Test Results
Even though this process occurs later in the marketing process, overextension deserves a mention right away to help clarify the previous paragraph.
Over time, you will start seeing positive results from your trial and error testing. Your job is to scale up your operation at that point, but do not go too far. Learn to live with the fact that some income streams will not gush money. Some income streams will only ever trickle money.
An Example Of Over-Extending Based On Positive Results
Joe did numerous trial and error tests and discovered that out of every 10 adverts he placed for his pewter pendants, an average of 2 would sell. He set his prices so that even with two sales out of ten, he was still making a profit.
Eager to scale up this particular income stream, he spent a small fortune and placed 100 adverts online. He figured that he would sell at least 20 pendants and make a tidy profit. He only sold 5.
He scaled up too quickly. The current demand was only for 5 per week. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t maximize that particular income stream into a bigger one. He should have scaled up his marketing slowly and accepted the fact that his pendants were never going to make him a lot of money.
Try Selling On eBay First
Start on eBay because you can learn an awful lot from eBay and you can learn it very quickly. For example, your website will have to show images of your product. How do you know which images will help sell the most product?
Use trial and error testing on eBay and quickly learn which images result in the highest number of page views. Work on your item titles with the same goal of achieving the most page views.
Once you have a healthy number of page views, be doubly sure you can repeat your positive results again and again. Now you have found your perfect item title and item image, you can move on to your item pricing and your item description. Again, use trial and error testing and try different descriptions and different prices for your products.
Now Try Affiliate Advertising With Google Adwords
Getting traffic to your website is difficult, but you can use Google Adwords to send people to your website by paying just a few pennies per visitor. What’s more, you can tailor your affiliate advertising adverts and run tests to see which get you the most page views and most conversions.
If your Google Adwords campaigns do not yield positive results, then do not start changing your website right away. Obviously, you should run bug tests to be sure that people are not leaving because of a shopping cart error. Otherwise, you should leave your web content alone because you have already tested it and know it works.
Set A Long-Term Search Engine Goal
Search engines are going to drive more people to your product pages than any other method of traffic acquisition. However, you need a long-term search engine goal. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, you simply have to keep your pages relevant, updated and useful.
Examine what your competitors are doing and see if you can compete using their methods. Update your pages to be sure they are compatible with current technology, and update your page information to keep it fresh and useful. Do not add new pages for the sake of having web content. Only add pages and content that are useful and that enhance the viewer’s user and buying experience.
Driving Traffic Is Just As Important As SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will help bring people to your website. There is no trick to SEO. Once you have your pages correctly optimized, you do not have to spend thousands on off-page SEO. Create as much useful content as you can, write articles, product reviews, images or videos.
Do what you can to drive people to your website. If your website is popular, then Google and the Bing/Yahoo search engines will rank your pages up to their search engine results.
Drive Traffic To Your Tested And Successful Web Pages
Drive traffic with email newsletters, with affiliate advertising, with social media, and with your other websites. Write guest posts on other people’s websites and tout the usefulness of your products. Encourage web and social media influencers to mention your website, and talk to others on the Internet, join Internet communities, give other online users help and promote your website in return. Remember that driving traffic is important, but testing and improving your web pages is your first concern. Once you have a series of successful web pages, you may start throwing your weight behind traffic acquisition.
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