Steps to a Successful Online Business

Step 1: Targeted Traffic- the most important, these are your customers.
Virtually most of the online business will fail due to targeting the wrong traffic. It is analogous to a real barbershop store set-up in a women community or 98% of town are women. You cannot convert them to be your customer because in the 1st place, all they wanted is a beauty parlor not a barbershop.

Step 2: Conversion - this is a measurement of how much of your visitors are being converted to a customer. Most of the time, it is measured as a percentage. It is commonly known as “conversion rate”. For example, a conversion rate of around 1%, means that 1 out of 100 visitors will become the customer of your website.

Step 3: Sales - the result after conversion. By the way other sites that are not selling items do not have sales. But to measure the success of the conversion is by other means. Like number of times the pages are bookmark. The number of times they link to that page. The number of sign-ups in their newsletter or mailing list. Those are non-monetary measurements that can be used to assess the success of website.

How to get targeted traffic?

In that part of the video I discuss the ways to get targeted traffic. These are :
1. Proper keyword research - targeted customers are using the proper keywords for their business. Wrongly targeting keywords can give wrong visitors and of course cannot be converted to a customer.

2. Get visitors from search engine- Search engine are the main sources of targeted traffic, because it has been taught in schools that to look for proper information, the best way is to use a search engine.

3. Traffic from google is around 60% of the site traffic.- statistically in most websites, search engine like Google comprises 60% of the website traffic. Other sources of traffic includes links from forum signatures, blogs and referral sites (relevant link partners)

Importance of Google 1st page:

1. 90% of the visitors comes from the Google 1st page. - 1st page in Google means Position 1 to Position 10 ranking. Page 2 means Position 11 and downwards. According to a certain study,90% of the visitors will stay on the 1st page and get their information. This how important to be on the 1st page. This means your site will be seen by every visitor querying in Google for your targeted key phrase.

2. Only 10% will care to visit the rest of the pages (from 2nd page to downwards) - the rest will go to 2nd page and downwards but this only comprises 10% of the visitors. And take note that this will gets smaller and smaller as number of pages are increased. So if you are in the 3rd to 5th page, your site almost cannot be seen by visitors in Google. This means you need to go up in order to be seen.

How to get to the Google 1st page:

Two major strategies:

1. Link building - Google value sites with reputation by having links from other important and related sites pointing to yours.
2. Onsite work - Google value sites with quality and unique content.

What is link building?

1. High quality links containing keywords in anchor text.- Google can understand what the site is all about even without crawling at it. This is by the use of anchor text and is an important ranking factor in Google. High quality links means it will provide quality information on the inbound link page and is related to your site. A example of it is when you have a site about “selling guitars”, then you put the link to a musician blog. So it means, visitors in the musician blog may like to buy guitar, then the link in that blog has value. It is a quality link.

2. Putting links in relevant sites. - I discuss it above, as long as the link provides value to that page and is relevant.

3. One way links. - One way links are the best, as it is a perfect vote to a page. This is a true measurement of link reputation, that even you do not ask, they link to you because their site will benefit so much for your content.

What is onsite work?

1. Keywords in title tags. - title in a page is the most important factor as visitor will measure the relevance of the page. To make sure, you will create visitor impact, make sure to have a title very relevant to a page.

2. Relevant and unique content. - Putting relevant and unique content is very important in link baiting process which results to a one way link.

3. Internal links using keywords in anchor text. - Having internal links is important for a visitor to navigate properly in your site and to look for relevant pages. This will help understand the visitor more about the site content. A excellent way to see the power of internal linking using keywords in anchor text is Wikipedia.

Benefits of SEO:

1. SEO cost is around 60% of the adwords cost.- Most of the time, it has been around 60% of the adwords cost, and there were instances that it will go down to 50%. But if you need traffic immediately, I strongly suggest to use adwords first. It is because SEO is a long term solution.

2. Cheaper and Higher ROI. - in long term as you gain organic rankings naturally, the cost of your SEO will be compensated. Thus, it is now cheaper and increases your return of investment.

3. Higher ROI means successful business. - Higher margins and lower cost is a key to a long-running business.

What to do now:

1. Consider SEO as an alternative in getting targeted visitors to your site. - There are many ways to get targeted traffic ( from pay per click advertising, advertised links, forums, blogs) and of course you can do it with SEO.

2. Consider SEO to get higher returns. - SEO has been proven to provide a lower cost in the long run, so it is good to consider it to get higher returns on your business.

3. Consider SEO as a long term solution. - SEO is a long term solution, this means it will take some time to get rankings that will get quality traffic. Typically for most campaigns from nowhere in Google positions to Top 10 positions it may take up to 6 months to one year to do that. It depends on your content, the trust of your domain and the quality of the inbound links.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under E-commerce Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.