A Website Is Not Enough!

Many online entrepreneurs will tell you that traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Whether your site is an affiliate marketing site that promotes another product, or it is actually an eCommerce site with it's own products, if no one visits it, then you don't sell anything!

Traffic is good, but conversion is better

While traffic is important, it's not the complete story. If your site visitors don't ever convert to paying customers, all the traffic in the world won't do you any good. You can have have a retail store in a premier location in one of the top tourist destinations in the world, but if all the foot traffic walks on by without stopping, the location doesn't help very much.

You need all the help you can get to convert your site visitors to paying customers. But is your website enough to ensure your online success? A website is not enough! You will need more than a nice banner and some great sales copy. There are some essential tools that you need to add to your website to fully leverage the your traffic and add to your profits.

Here are some key tools you need to augment your website:

Email List Management and Autoresponders

Many of your site's visitors will not be ready to purchase when they visit your site. Marketing studies show that it can take five or more follow up messages to make a sale. With the impersonal nature of the internet, it helps to establish a relationship first. Giving away valuable content is a great way to build trust, a foundation of all relationships. How is this done? By asking them to sign up on your list you will have a way to follow up with them.

Email list management is a service or software you need to purchase in addition to web hosting. Make sure that your Email List Manager has autoresponders. Autoresponders are automated emails to your subscriber that are triggered by some event, such as a subscription to your list. They are critical to your success.

You can also cross promote other's products to your lists. Your subscriber may have not been interested in the raincoats you were selling, but perhaps an umbrella is just what they needed.

Video and/or Audio

Adding video or audio is a great way to make a personal connection with your site visitor. The sound of your voice humanizes your site's presence and adds another dimension to the experience of visiting your web site.

Additionally, adding audio or video helps reinforce your message with your visitor. As many studies have shown, people retain and learn information much better if they receive it in multiple different ways. Think about it, in school, did it help you learn the subject matter better, when you heard the teacher explain it in addition to reading the lesson in the textbook?

With so many websites competing for your visitor's attention, adding a feature like audio that makes it stand out will help your sales.

Tracking and Testing Tools

How do you know that your sales copy is the best it can be? If you are selling golf clubs, what is the best header to engage your visitor's interest? You need to tune your headers and your site so users are captivated by what you offer. A common way to do this, is called "split testing" (also known as "A/B testing"). Here is how it works, half of your site visitors see one version of your site, the other half sees another. You monitor the conversion rate of the two versions. The version that has the highest rate is what you use going forward. You can repeat the process until your conversion rate doesn't improve any more.

If you are advertising your site using pay-per-click ads, another useful metric to track is which ad campaigns are bringing you the highest converting traffic.

If putting all these tools together for your website seems like more than you want to take on, then have someone else put them together for you. You can hire someone or find a vendor that offers these tools in an all in one package. The most successful internet marketers focus on their business, leaving the technical details to others. You would be wise to follow their lead.

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