What is online marketing?
There is no shortcut in doing online marketing. Spam your potentials does not get you the business. Remember those TV ads which popped out in front of your favorite shows every 15 minutes? Those are instrusive marketing done by our ancestors. Another example is, the huge Bigtree signboard along the highway. I wont buy a Bravia Flat Screen TV because I was so happened drive pass the LDP and have an eye-to-eye contact with the signboard. So, visitors are smarter nowadays.
They know how to read a review, find information they specifically want using Google, etc. When someone found your website using the right keywords, they are giving you the permission to feed them with more information. When visitors post a comment in your Blog, they also give you the permission to solve their problem. In a more layman’s terms, we need to get the permission!
And this is what we call Permission Marketing!
Now, let’s look at creating an online business…
You will be surprised with number of request we have received to develop a second Facebook or another Jobstreet for them. They asked us how much is to develop
e-Bay. We can’t answer them, because it is not website, but a business. Indeed, stories of Google acquiring one-person’s startup with millions are just too hard to resist…
Can you catch it so far? Pin, can you make it simpler?
Ok, you need to understand just two things: Visitors & Conversion
What is Visitor?
Visitors are people who visit your website. A visitor who browses 10 pages of your site is only one unique visitors, not ten. If you have 100 visitors a day, you are doing pretty well. If you have 500 visitors a day, hmm… something you can proud of. Now, you have some ideas about what is visitors ah!
Let’s now look at Conversion. Every website has a conversion. If the owner of the website didn’t define a conversion, then he/she shouldn’t do a website. Save the money for a movie then. But, more than 50% of our web design customers will walk in and tell us they want a website, without telling us what conversion they want :)
What is a Conversion?
It is the goal of your website. If GSC is mine, I would love to have more people to buy the movie ticket online. If I own a corporate website, I wish more visitors will fill up the enquiry form and ask me a few questions about my products. If I have an online store, I wish more people will order and pay online. See, all this actions are, to convert Visitors into Customers. The conversion refers to this process of converting, or when achieving a goal. The more it converts, the better.
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors hitting the goal. For example, if you have 100 visitors a day and 2 out of them make an order online, then your conversion rate is 2%.
So, it is not too difficult to understand afterall!
Basically, the ONLY two things you need to look into if you are a website owner or online business owner. They are
To increase number of visitors
To increase the conversion rate
Enough for lengthy text. You must be feeling sleepy now… pictures come!
Sample website statistic report
The above report shows that the website has about 100 visitors a day averagely. The report was tracked using Google Analytics (free)
Source of Visitors
Basically, website owner just need to know three sources of your site visitors
Direct Traffic: those who type the URL directly on their web browsers
Referring Sites: those who click on your URL from somewhere (email, banner ads, someone’s Blog)
Search Engines: any traffics from search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
Now, what is the values of each conversion? Important…
Assuming we have an online guidebook business. We sell each guidebook at 0.99USD. If we have 100 visitors a day, and with a 1% conversion, that means our sales is about 0.99USD a day.
To push the sales to 99USD a day, we can
- Increase number of visitors to 10,000, or
- Increase conversion rate from 1% to 100% and do nothing to number of visitors, or
- Increase conversion rate from 1% to 10% and increase number of visitors from 100 to 1000 a day
So, it is a game of conversion and visitors.
very useful information. thank u a lot..
Like blogs. We don’t sell product. What is our conversion rate then?
Satisfaction- when someone post a comment, when someone share the same passion like you, when someone likes what you have posted, when you share. Only you know how it is measured :)