The Web Marketing Pipeline - And Why Yours is Leaking Money by Gihan Perera

It's easy to get confused by all the things that you hear people say about making money with the Internet. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, blogging, shopping carts, e-zines...It's all too much!

Let me simplify this for you...

There are - fundamentally - only four ways to use your Web site to increase your income:

Lead: You bring more traffic to the site.
Sell: You persuade more of those people to buy from you.
More: You increase the amount of each transaction.
Again: You make repeat sales to those customers.

In other words, your job is to sell more things to more people more often for more money.

That's the Web Marketing Pipeline.

The big mistake

Most Web site owners make the mistake of trying to focus too much on the first of these four steps - i.e. getting more traffic. They obsess about Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and every other new Bright Shiny Object that comes their way. And they try to use these tools to drive traffic to their Web site.

Why is this a mistake? Because it's hard work. Sure, it works - but it takes work. A lot of work.

Think about this: Isn't it hard enough getting as much traffic as you're already getting? Imagine how much more work it would take to double that traffic. And it's not just good enough to get twice as much traffic if it's low-quality traffic. To double your sales, you would need twice as much of the same sort of traffic you're getting now.

And that's not easy.

Here's a better way...

Rather than obsessing about getting more traffic, turn your attention instead to converting the traffic you do get. In other words, look at the "Sell" stage of the Web Marketing Pipeline.

It's absolutely true that if you get more traffic, chances are you'll make more sales. But it's also true that if you were able to improve the conversion rate of the people you're already getting, then you'll also make more sales. It's often much easier to improve the conversion rate than it is to get more visitors to the site, and it's also much more cost effective.

The good thing about converting people on your Web site is that conversion rates are pretty low in general. I bet you're not convincing even 1% of your site visitors to take action.

But don't be disheartened! If you're getting a 1% conversion rate, you have 99 people out of 100 not buying. Believe it or not, this is good news! If you can reduce that to just 98, you just doubled your whole conversion rate, which means that you've doubled your profits, you've doubled your sales, you've doubled everything.

Compare that with trying to get twice as much traffic to your site!


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