10 things you should be monitoring on your website
By David Leonhardt
Every business needs to know how it is doing. That’s the idea behind exit surveys, customer feedback forms, suggestion boxes and other devices. Without feedback from the customer, monitoring inventory, expenses, revenue and other benchmarks, a business can take a quick slide down a slippery slope, without the owner ever seeing it coming ? or being able to stop the slide.
Webmasters also have things they should be monitoring on their websites. Most of these can be classified as traffic related or server performance related. Here is my top ten list.
Monitoring website traffic
Traffic totals. You want to know how much traffic you are generating. If the line on the graph is heading down, you know you have to find out why.
Referrers. It’s not enough just to know how many visitors you are getting. You need to know where they are coming from. I discovered I was getting a lot of visitors from a Thanksgiving site. They were all being funneled into my Thanksgiving Happiness article. Suddenly I knew I should get more links from other Thanksgiving sites. Valuable information.
Searches. Much to my surprise, my happiness site started getting a ridiculous number of hits from the search for “hairdressers”. It just so happens I wrote a humor column on a hairdresser experience. I was surprised to see it getting so much traffic for such a generic, competitive search term. If that had been a term of a little more relevance for me, this information would have lead me to properly optimize the page and get even more traffic.
Pages viewed per visit. If people visit only one page per visit, you have some work to convince them to visit more pages, like those that make you money.
Pages visited. So you threw up on your site something cool as an add-on. How were you to know that other webmasters would link to it and send a whole bunch of traffic your way? Well, now you know, so add some copy to the page to pull visitors into the rest of your site.
Monitoring website performance
Forms. Are they all functioning? A good website monitoring service can keep tabs on them for you. The last thing you want is to have lost hundreds or thousands of subscribers because a sign-up form stopped functioning
Shopping carts. Slow and complicated shopping carts are responsible for an estimated $25 billion in lost sales. Make sure yours is functioning properly. A good website monitoring service can watch this for you, too.
Download speed. Clear your cache and test your pages. Hmm. Maybe those images are a bit large. Time to compress them, or even remove some. Remember that some people are on a much slower connection than you are. I use a satellite connection sometimes, but when I don’t, my connection speed is 28K.
Server speed. re there problems with server speed? Maybe not where you are, but on the other side of the world. Global website monitoring can alert you to a transatlantic connection problem, so you can take it up with your web hosting service.
Server accessibility. All the web hosts promise 99% accessibility. But is that for real? Who monitors them? By one estimate, 75% of inaccessibility is not on the hosting server, but rather on the Internet’s backbone network and in global routing. A global website monitoring service can help identify the problem, so that you can work with your web hosting company to resolve it before too many sales are lost.
Fun. If you are not having fun, audition for that drummer position in the local band. There is no point spending your life doing something that bores you. Webmastering should be fun.
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Determining a profitable website is not easy especially if you are looking to flip it for higher profit within a short time frame. However, with the correct steps and procedures, it is possible even for a beginner to pick up a good site with great potential to start off.
The first step to determine if a website is worth the investment is by the number of income streams it has. Most websites have more than one income channel such as Pay-Per-Click advertisement (Google Adsense etc), Pay-Per-Action programs (AzoogleAds, ClickBank etc) or selling of own products. Basically, this step is to analyze the current profitable channels and see if you can expand or add in other sources of income. Never rely only on one income source for a website.
The second step is to find out where are the traffic coming from. Most websites should have a healthy amount of constant traffic from the search engines followed by social bookmarking sites or regular visitors. If the majority of the traffic is coming from the search engines, proceed to ask the owner what are the keywords that brought in the traffic. Try out the keywords in the search engines and check out the search engine rankings of the site.
You should also check with the owner what are the top search engines that direct the traffic to the site. With these information, check the on-page optimization effort of the site and you may have more ideas for improvements after you have bought it.
The next step is to highlight the areas of possible improvements of the site. If you can come out with at least two quick fixes to the site that can increase the value created to the visitors, the traffic to the site will increase to the next higher level eventually. For example, if you can include an online tool to calculate the financial networth of a person in a financial blog, that would most likely benefit all your readers in a long run.
The fourth step is to check for back links to the site that you are interested to purchase. It is highly recommended to use Yahoo backlink analyzer to check for backlinks since it displays almost all the pages that linked to the site. You may want to use the Yahoo powered analyzer at USESEO.com.
With the above four steps, you should have no problems choosing a profitable website that can generate a stable income for some time. You are advised to check on the seller’s history as well to know more about the seller’s background before confirming the transaction.
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The internet has virtually changed the way we certain aspects of our lives. It has changed the way we view where we get the latest news, how to communicate with one another, how we play, how we shop and even how we trade and make money.
The internet has made these aspects of our lives more instantaneous and, with regards to shopping and trading, brought these activities to our door steps. It now allows us to shop and purchase items that we like by just looking at the items offered in different websites. Ditto for trading, where we now have the opportunity to sell and trade products and, thus earn money, from the comfort of our homes.
The potential for online trading is so great that there are now people who do this professionally. They have quit their regular jobs and instead work and support their families by buying and selling various products online.
One of the most lucrative and interesting aspect of online trading is the buying and selling of used or second-hand goods. Through the power of the internet, web based marketplaces have sprouted all over where visitors can browse around for various second hand goods and purchase them online. It is like a virtual flea market where you can browse through different items of interest that have been owned previously by other people. The significant difference between doing this in an actual flea market and selling it online is the number of people of potential customers that will see your items. Potentially, the people that will be able to see your items online can number in the high thousands, and that is just a conservative estimate. What?s more since you sell your items online, you won?t have to man any stalls or booths. If there is a person who wants to buy your items, then you just get notified by email. Isn?t that convenient?
People who would like to try selling their used goods online don?t even have to set up their own websites ? which can be quite difficult especially since you will need to install a payment gateway which can be quite hard and expensive to set up. They can always go join online communities that encourage the buying and selling of used goods. Communities like http://www.usedjunction.com make the task of selling used goods so much easier. These websites already have their infrastructure in place that can accommodate both the buying and selling functions of a virtual marketplace. Another benefit of joining these online communities is that you get to take advantage of the marketing muscle of the website. With minimal marketing efforts from you as a seller, you can be assured that prospective customers will still be able the items that you are selling. This is a tremendous benefit that should not be overlooked. Just make sure that you give a good description of your item, and more importantly good quality pictures of the items that you are selling so that you can be noticed by prospective buyers.
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One thing that people get hung up on is how to make money online if they do not have a website. The thought of building a website terrifies some people so they just do not pursue it any more.
In his brief article we will take a look at 10 ways you can earn money online with no having a website of your own.
1. Join an affiliate marketing program and sell their products. There are literally millions of these you can join and they will give you a website to advertise with your i.d. number coded in it.
2. Join a network marketing program and sell products and sponsor distributors from the company provided website. You can create a residual revenue and retire early as a network marketer and never use anything other than the marketing resources provided by the company you join.
3. Become a blog writer and write blog articles for people. All you need for this is a PayPal account to get paid with and you are off and running. There is a tremendous need for blog writers on the Internet right now.
4. Sell private label rights products. These are already created and you can sell them as is and make 100% of the profits.
5. Sell resale rights products. These are products you would need to buy, but then you would have the rights to sell them as though they were your own products.
6. Start a free blog at blogger.com. Monetize it with the Google Adsense program and receive money every time somebody clicks on an ad.
Google owns Blogger and this is a accepted way for people to start their own blogs. blog marketing is easy to do as you combine social networking with bookmarking blog articles to social directories.
7. Start a blog and add affiliate banners to it. Blogging is easy to do because you do not have to know any HTML code to build the pages. All you do is type and the pages are developed automatically for you.
8. Buy co-registration leads and promote affiliate products to your email marketing list. Build a list of thousands of people and earn a full time income mailing offers out to it.
9. Promote cost per action offers using the landing page that is provided by the company. CPA offers not require your website visitor to purchase anything and you earn money every time they fill out short forms.
10. Take a paid survey or do as many as you want. Compensated surveys are an excellent way to generate a part time earnings based around your own schedule. You can receive several hundred dollars a month taking surveys on the Internet.
There you have it! This is 10 ways you can make money on the internet without a website of your own.
Affiliate marketing is a business model that you can make a lot of money in. However you need to do a few things correctly if you expect to turn a profit.
Unfortunately some affiliate marketers make the same mistakes over and over. Let’s take a minute and talk about three of the most common mistakes I see all the time.
1. Using the replicated affiliate site provided from the merchant is not the best idea. It will certainly get you by when you first start, but if you expect to make long term money you need to build your own websites and blogs to promote your affiliate products on.
The problem with the replicated site is you cannot make changes to it because it is not hosted by you. This means that you do not have the control you need if you want to take a different for future follow up. One of the best ways to sell products as an affiliate marketer is to access your email list and mail out offers to it.
You can not do that if you don’t have a list of mail to. Because one of the best ways to develop a list is on your own website or blog this is another reason not to use the replicated site from the affiliate merchant.
Your goal with your mailing list is to get to know these people is more than subscribers and to enhance your own credibility. In the long run you can make thousands of dollars every month as your list grows and this is a big part of the success you see large super affiliates have.
3. One final mistake I want to talk about is trying to sell too many things on one website. Many affiliate marketers lack focus and create a site that becomes nothing more than a bunch of jumbled up banners and text ads.
Niche marketing has become very popular today because it allows affiliates to take a broad theme and zero in on it little bit. You can’t do that with a website that is full of all kinds of different products and programs. It is confusing to your visitors which ultimately will cost you sales.
A better approach is to focus on one certain product and build it into a profitable income stream before adding another one. This is not to say you cannot sell more than one thing on a website, but do not over do it!
Jeff Schuman helps people make money online. His paid survey. and article marketing websites are available for anyone to check out if they need to make more money.
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