With the advent of internet services and numerous advancements in information technology, building a website is a piece of cake for any computer literate person. Once your website is all set, the first major challenge that you encounter is attracting traffic to your site. This can be frustrating especially if you don’t know how to go about it. There are numerous webmasters that lose out on huge profits because of lack of knowledge on how market their sites effectively. There are few things you need to understand in order to market your site effectively.
In order for you to fully understand how your site is faring, you need to know about conversion ratios and server statistics. It is indeed funny how, many webmasters do not actually have an idea about their site statistics. If you are one of these webmasters, then you might be operating on guesses and fantasies as to how well your site is doing.
Server stats are important in determining your site conversion rates. Site conversion rate or ratio can be defined as the sales per visitor in the site. It is not always, that a hit results in a sale and you need to know that people are doing more than just log on to your web. One visitor may have several hits but what is important is whether that visitor makes a purchase or not. Conversion rates will vary per product but if you find them going as low as 1 in 500, then you are in for a rude surprise in terms of profits unless you wake up and do thorough marketing.
The easiest way to increase your site conversion ratio is to make it convenient for your customers to purchase. Using advertising links might actually cause poor sales. If you use a link to advertise a product, make sure the link connects directly to the product or page. The link should never connect to the home page. Making potential customers search through several pages to get to the product will just make them navigate away from the page. To retain traffic that is converting into sales, make the purchasing process as simple as it can get.
The loading time is also very important in marketing your site. Seldom do you stop to think about 40% of the internet users who use dial-up modems when on your cable or DSL hookup internet. What may seem fast on your cable internet may be painstakingly slow on a 56k modem. If you have incorporated a lot of images and graphics on your site, the speed will even be more reduced. Instead of speculating the speeds on dial-up modems, take one and test it then modify your site appropriately.
If your site is already modified, take care of glitches. In spite of speed, most commercial websites will have glitches when a customer has filled out an order form and is waiting for the information to be validated or the credit card processing system to be secured. To make sure you do not lose customers on the order page, increase the speeds. This should increase your site conversion rate.