Measuring Online Success for Your Business

If you're traffic happy, hopefully by now you've installed Google Analytics throughout your website. You might notice that on your Dashboard, on your lists for Referring websites, and even for your Keywords, it lists your Bounce Rate. This stat lets you know the quality of your inbound traffic. If people visit more than one page on your website, your bounce rate will be low, where it should be. If they go to one page and leave, it will be high, a big red flag.

The longer people stay on your website and explore your pages, the higher probability they fit into your target audience and will buy your products or services. You may notice that many websites that give you visitors also give you a bounce rate of 100%, or even 90% or 80%. Most of these visitors probably just came to look for a minute or two and will not be giving you any love.

It may appear that your business improves over time because of increased traffic, but if your bounce rate remains high, most of that traffic does not work to make you money.

How do you solve this?

You do not possess direct control over all referring websites, but if you're article marketing, consider narrowing down your niche.

If many of the referring websites do not relate to yours, try networking with ones that do. No point in making a link exchange with a book sales site when you sell car parts. No point in exchanging links with a car parts site focused on Japanese sports cars when yours focuses on off-road trucks.

Try tweaking the language on your end as well. People may be leaving your website because the pages they go to do not effectively inform them about the benefits of your products and services. Cut down the words on your pages to under 500 because people get bored quickly online! Improve your sales copy and you'll improve your bounce rate.

Improve the relevance of your keywords. Sometimes a phrase might sound like it relates to you when it really does not. For example, you might be starting a new freelance teaching company on how to write books. You might refer to yourself as a book coach even. However, targeting the word "book coach" would actually pull in people looking for books on coaching, the wrong audience.

When you do your keyword research, type the phrases into Google and after the search press the "show options" under the search bar. In the list, select "Related searches" and see if those phrases match up with what you thought your researched phrase meant. If it does not, try rewording to hit the right category.

People don't like to be mislead, whether you intended to put them in that situation or not!

People who join your newsletters and opt-ins want ongoing contact, information, and services from you. They basically went the length to trust you and let you market to them because they believe you can benefit them in some way.

When your subscriber force increases month after month, you can bet that all your marketing, PR, website fine-tuning, and online networking continues to pay off. If you compare that with a low unsubscribe number as well, you're dually blessed!

But what if these numbers remain low?

Start thinking free because that's how people online think. Give away a free report, a free ebook, a free anything useful when people sign-up for your newsletter. As long as it helps your target audience with their goals (but not all their goals!), they will thank you and trust you for it.

Stop selling and start telling! When you can help people before they need to pay you for it, they will be more inclined to hand over the cash later down the line when you offer them one of your awesome products or services.

Do not badger your subscribers! They do not need to be bombarded every day with emails from you! Don't become a business spammer! Decrease your newsletter marketing and keep your subscribers for years to come.

This might seem like a no brainer, but some people starting an online business get so fixated on how to increase visitors to website, they forget their overall goal - to make more money. As long as your products and services see an overall rise over time, then the quality of your traffic, of your target market, of your followers, also went up. Do not be surprised on the months where your traffic decreased, but your profits increased.

It's not a fluke, it's your online business running efficiently!