While incredibly unsexy, making incremental improvements to your web site could be the single most important think you do. What do you mean by incremental improvements, you ask? That's a fair question.
Perhaps the best thing about opening and running an Internet business is that you can track almost every single thing you do and have the exact data you need to make good decisions regarding your web business.
For instance, if you advertise a traditional business (or an Internet business even) in a newspaper or magazine, how do you know if spending the money was worth it? There is no way to tell how many people saw that ad and, as a result, gave you business.
The same goes for every other type of advertising out there (TV, radio, trade shows, direct mail, flyers, etc) except Internet advertising.
Because of the tracking ability afforded by having an Internet business you can track exactly how much you spent to get a visitor to your site and even how much you spent to make a sale.
For example, let's say you have a web site that sells video games. Then let's say you find a related site where you can run your ads on (see the Web site Advertising section of this guide). Then let's say you strike a CPM deal with them for advertising and you pay a $5 CPM to advertise on their site. Then let's say you purchase $500 in advertising from them. At the end of that advertising campaign, you'll be able to tell exactly how much you paid per visitor.
Let's say you received a really good click through rate of 1%. That would be 5,000 visitors. Then let's say you converted 1% of those visitors to sales, which would be 50 sales, and let's also say you made $100 in revenue per order. That would be $5,000 in sales. Not a bad deal. But without spending any more money on advertising you could have made sales 4 times that amount. How? By making incremental improvements to your website.
Let's take that same banner ad. What if it had gotten a 2% click through rate instead of a 1% CTR? Then, instead of converting 1% of visitors into customers, you converted 2%? Well, for that exact same $500 you could have had $20,000 in sales instead. That's the power of incremental improvements.
A good web business person will never stop making incremental improvements. They will keep trying to edge that CTR up to 2.05% and then 2.1%, and then 2.13% and on, and on.
And they'll keep edging up their customer conversion rate from 1% to 1.1% to 1.2% and on and on. How do they, and how can you, do this? Testing, testing, and a little more testing.
Let's say you are going to purchase your first ad package from a web site. Let's also say you are going to get 300,000 banner impressions. Instead of running just one banner on that site you should, at a minimum, run three different banners.