The Helpful Pointer

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet
marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site
depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your
website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to
accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.
Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your
website, all your site will be is an online announcement that
you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action,
whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative
can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you
can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak
efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is
working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given
period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which
you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional
activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your
gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want
those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally
important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who
made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate,
and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors
per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually
performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if
you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased
your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get
this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure
by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that
result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form,
make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your
site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is
because not everyone who fills out your form will actually
become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to
sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a
form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or
failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional
marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is
extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve
the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a
search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted
at increasing your position in search engine results so that
consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either
research the steps you need to take to improve your search
engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company
to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved
your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them
by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain
high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to
your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for.
For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form,
is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go
through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get
to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to
another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the
path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website.
The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase
or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared
to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from
your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference
between profit and loss in your online campaign.

One of the key factors in a successful business is to know what
your customers or clients are thinking - about your business,
your products, your services. As a business owner, you’ll get
feedback from your current customers just in the course of
day-to-day business. But the results can be skewed by the
interaction itself, and so most business owners find it useful
to allow their customers to answer questions anonymously. And
that’s where surveys come in.

Some businesses hire market research firms to survey their
customers or target customers. For new or smaller businesses,
this can be an expensive proposition, and it’s helpful to have a
set of resources in your tool box that offer the option of
conducting your own surveys. Here are some great online
resources you can use for surveys.

They range from the simplest polls which you can create and
place on your web site to much more elaborate options. Many of
them allow the survey respondents to see the results from
themselves and others as soon as they complete the survey. Some
of these companies offer a set of services for free as well as
more powerful paid services; others offer free 30-day trials of
their most robust services. Some are geared towards smaller
businesses, other towards large enterprises with thousands of
employees. There’s also a wide range of continuum between
letting you design and add your own surveys to your web site,
versus having them create a survey, find your target market,
query them, and report back the results.

1. SurveyMonkey - If you have a large mailing list or want to
send a lot of surveys, the best deal here is the professional
subscription. For $19.95 month, you can send an unlimited number
of surveys and receive up to 1000 responses per month.

2. Zoomerang - I love their slogan, “Easiest way to ask, fastest
way to know.” Offers a basic product (free) plus paid packages
geared to education, non-profit, and a professional version,
which can send surveys in several languages, and has no limit on
the number of responses you can receive.

3. SnapPoll - Simple site which offers you an easy way to put a
one-question survey on your web site and receive results.
Requires no sign-up, allows you to customize colors for the
form, and prevent multiple “votes” from the same person. Free -
supported by what they call “non-obtrusive advertising.”

4. PHP Form Generator - This is a free survey generator that is
written as open source code. You can choose as many questions as
you’d like - in any format - check, text, drop-downs, etc.) You
do have to create your own stats, but it’s a fairly simple
procedure for small surveys.

5. OneMinutePoll - Software - available at a yearly subscription
price - that teaches you how to write surveys correctly to find
out what your customers want, so you can provide it to them!
Software automates your polls, generates code for your web page,
and allows you to see results in real-time.

6. Advanced Survey - Free and paid services that offer both web
page surveys and email surveys (where you invite participants -
via email - to take a survey). You can ask multiple questions in
one survey, and can ask yes/no questions, open-ended text
questions, customizable number scales (Pick a number from 1 to
10 with 10 being best, for example), and multiple choice.

7. Question Pro - Very sophisticated system for surveying
customers. Has predesigned templates for common surveys:
Customer Satisfaction, New Product/Concept Testing, Product
Surveys, Conference Feedback, and more. These surveys can also
be designed with “branching,” where the answer to one question
is used in a subsequent question. No free options here, but
there is a 30-day free trial.

8. Relevant Tools - This company offers custom web forms with
automatic email response for as little as $10/month for a basic
membership, which includes up to 500 database records and up to
500 email messages/month.

9. HotScripts - A great resource for programmers and webmasters.
It has a host of scripts in various programming languages and is
constantly being updated by programmers from around the world.
If you search on “surveys,” you’ll find lots of scripts in lots
of programming languages you can use.

10.NetReflector - Offers a very sophisticated self-serve
solution for the do-it-yourselfer, and assisted and automated
solutions for companies who need to survey customers and/or
employees worldwide on a regular basis. Offers webinars,
articles, and other resources on creating the invitation, the
importance of regular surveys, and using online technologies for
surveys.

So whether you’re querying current clients and customers, a
potential target market, vendors, or employees, these online
surveys can provide valuable tools for smart business owners.
You can set up and monitor your surveys or pay someone to do it
for you, but online surveys are a great way for you to gain
information. The results may surprise you, or send you in a new
direction you hadn’t thought of. But one thing’s for sure; if
you don’t ask your customers, clients, or employees, they
probably won’t tell!

There are numerous eBay courses that are available on the
Internet today. These books and courses are designed to help you
become more successful on eBay. Unfortunately, not all of these
courses are worth the money that you will pay for them. Some of
them are full of what used to be good information - when it was
relevant - and others are simply junk information, written by
someone trying to make a quick buck.

Before you purchase any eBay course, find out when the course
was written. If it was written in 2004, for instance, you don’t
want it. Even though that hasn’t been very long ago, eBay
changes so fast that much of the information will not be
relevant. However, if the original issue of the course was
written several years ago, but the course is updated each year,
this will probably be a good course for you.

Again, use care when purchasing eBay courses. They can be quite
helpful and enlightening, but only if the information in them is
still good. Talk to other eBay sellers - preferably successful
ones - to find out what courses are recommended.