Have you ever wondered why it takes so many visitors for your website to make any real money for you? My coaching students email me all the time and ask questions along the lines of - 'I've got 60/100/200 website visitors a day but I'm not making any money yet, what's wrong with my site?' Of course, you need a lot more traffic than that to make a decent income from your site.in fact you need a lot more traffic than you think. Let's go through the numbers.
We'll assume you have a site that promotes either affiliate products or you use your content website to generate leads for another website (like a mini or sales site) or an offline business you have. We'll also leave Adsense revenue out for now, because every click on an Adsense ad takes away one chance you have for selling your 'real' product or service. On average, for every 100 visitors who arrive at your site, only one or two will click on an affiliate link or click through to your main site where you sell your product or service. And then depending on how good your sales copy is (or how well the sales letter of the affiliate merchant converts) only 1% or 2% of the people arriving at that site will make a purchase. So, looking at these numbers, and taking a 1% response rate as pretty normal, you have to get 10,000 visitors to your website to generate just 1 sale (100x100 visitors=1 sale). Now if your site is getting 60 visitors a day, and they are reading on average 3 pages before they surf off to somewhere else, it's going to take you on average 55 days to make each sale.
If the product you sell is a 30 dollar ebook and you earn 15 dollars commission every time somebody buys a copy, you've set yourself up to make 99 bucks a year from your site. Pretty dismal isn't it? Now obviously, the more pages your visitors read, the higher the product value they buy, and the higher your conversion rates are, the better. You could double or triple this number, or more. The point is, you need a LOT of traffic and/or big ticket items to sell to make the average site earn you a respectable living. So, here are my top 3 tips for increasing your website's potential revenue and breaking into the big league of online entrepreneurs. 1) Do some research and find several big ticket items you can promote.
It doesn't matter what niche you're in, you can find things like seminars, big box home study courses, membership sites and the like to promote to your visitors. Sure you can promote $20 ebooks, but the big money is in making $200, $400 or a grand each time somebody buys something through your site. It's a lot easier to earn a hundred grand a year online by making a few large ticket sales than by selling 6,000+ ebooks that make you 15 bucks each.
2) Work on creating keyword specific landing pages for all of the affiliate products (or your own products and services) so that when people arrive at your site they find the exact solution they are looking for right there. Don't make your visitors click around your site while they try to find what they are looking for. Give them the exact solution they want immediately or they will hit the back button and leave without finding what they are after. 3) Build a list and build long term relationships with your readers If you have your visitors' names and email addresses, you can send the same people back to your site (where they are exposed to your affiliate, Joint Venture and product links) again and again instead of just once. This gives you a multiplier effect and can exponentially increase every visitors' value to you. Use a service such as Aweber to send out your autoresponder messages and they will go out in the exact order you want your readers to receive them reliably, on time and automatically.
The main thing is that you get to work on building your list as soon as you can. So there you have it - 3 simple things you can do straight away to get started on increasing your traffic and maximizing the income you receive from every website that you own.
Rocky Tapscott is the author a free 7 Part Mini Course "How To Build The Perfect Home Based Business Around Your Favorite Hobby, Pastime, Sport Or Skill". Which shows how to make money doing what you love. Drop by http://www.hobbyandlifestyle.com/ecourse.html to grab your free copy.