| Internet marketing is a fairly easy business to learn. Most anyone can learn the skills needed to build a successful business online. You don't need to be an MBA but you will need to know how to figure out a few internet marketing metrics.
You see, with all kinds of marketing you need to be able to determine what works and what doesn't. All forms of marketing cost, whether the cost is in money or time. You can't afford to waste either one on a marketing method that isn't producing results.
This is where internet marketing metrics comes into play. As an online business owner you need to devote your resources only to those activities that actually help you make money. All the other things are just a waste of time and should either be totally eliminated or outsourced to others so you can give your undivided attention to those activities that will increase your bottom line.
Here are just a few of the things you need to be able to monitor to make sure you are getting the most out of all your online efforts:
1. Website traffic. Of course you want to know how much traffic your site is getting but there are many other things you want to be able to follow too. There are the unique visitors vs. the repeat visitors.
Knowing where the visitor is coming from as well as where they go when they leave your site. How much time does each visitor spend on your site? What page(s) do they go to?
All of these things will help you get a very complete picture of your website visitors and their behavior. That in turn will enable you to more effectively target them.
2. Knowing where visitors are coming from is also important if you want to know which marketing methods are the most effective. Most internet marketers will use various methods to get visitors to their sites. As I said above, those methods will require either time or money and you don't want to waste either on things that don't work.
Finding what keywords and marketing methods are really driving traffic to your site is very important. You can throw out those things that don't work and put more effort into those that are extremely effective.
3. Email marketing is a very effective way of establishing rapport and trust with your website visitors. But, how can you know if your emails are getting opened and read?
What subject lines seem to work and which ones don't? You need to be able to make changes and monitor the results of each change so you can hone the process down until you have the highest open rate you can get.
I know, if you are just starting out, that all of this can sound really confusing. But it's not, once you get to know it. When you are just starting you will only be concentrating on getting traffic to your site, then you can start to learn how to tweak things to get the absolute best combination of settings.
There are many free tools that can help you with internet marketing metrics. Don't let it overwhelm you, just take it slow and you will figure it out. |