Thanks to the incredible possibilities Internet has created for us, everybody is now able to make a website from scratch. Since many people are joining the World Wide Web community every single day, the number of opportunities for running an online business is also growing.

More people decide to create a website for one purpose: making a living on the Internet. They assume that an Internet business normally gets up and running much easier and faster than the traditional (offline) one. On top of that, a business website could reach more prospects, 24 hours a day. So, there will be no limitation on both time and place for a web business in comparison with the traditional model. Not to mention that the startup capital for an online business could be suitable for any kind of budget and the maintenance costs are far lower than the offline type.

On the other hand, there are thousands of ordinary people running their online businesses from the comfort of their homes earning 4, 5 or even 6 figures income every single month. I am talking about tons of success stories about powerful and popular websites that have been created based on some simple, yet unique ideas and now generating a nice and solid income for their owners. Isn’t that cool?

It Is TOO Good To Be True, Right?

While we cannot deny these real case studies, we cannot either ignore this fact that getting rich quick doesn’t exist. Having the right mindset before creating a website plays a very large role in your future success. Many people just build a website and expect to get fast results. Unfortunately, they don’t get desired results very quickly. The bottom line is that they become frustrated very soon and decide to quit.

What most people don’t seem to understand is that they have made the same biggest mistakes over and over again. Just if they knew what the mistakes are, they would have probably avoided them. So, the very first thing most people should know in creating a website is finding out the common mistakes many beginners make. That way, you would be able to act more carefully and try to not repeat those mistakes.

5 Biggest Mistakes Most People Make In Creating a Website

Basically, the number of mistakes a beginner could make is a lot. As a matter of fact, you cannot avoid them all. Fortunately, some of them can help you improve your business through testing and analyzing. On the other hand, there are some other big mistakes that can cost you a lot, both in time and money and you should only avoid them. Period! Otherwise, your chances of success will be very low.

1. Choosing a Very General Topic For Your Website:

Believe it or not, this mistake is the biggest and most common mistake many beginners can make. They select a very broad topic for their websites trying to cover everything under the sky. To put it simply, they try to build a site like Yahoo.com or About.com. Not only this mistake would confuse the audience of the website, but also it would be a tough job for the owner to provide content for its readership due to the heavy competition and also information overload.

Instead, you can go for a specific topic representing a niche market for attracting targeted visitors. That way, you would not need to worry about the competition, providing content and converting prospects to customers.

2. Selecting the Over Saturated Topics Such as “Make Money Online”:

Sometimes, I cannot believe that there are so many websites around saturated topics such as “make money online”, “Internet marketing”, “blogging” and so on. I really wonder if they make any money from their sites and blogs. But let me give you an advice:

Don’t even think about creating a site around those niches unless you have something new to offer and have become successful in this field. I mean I have seen tons of websites about “make money online” and I guarantee that they don’t even make a single dime from their online businesses. Why would you want to bother yourself reinventing the wheel?

There are literally hundreds of high quality, popular and successful resources that are considered as authorities in these niches. Can you compete with them? I mean, let’s face it: I have seen huge number of websites about getting traffic while they just get 5 visitors a day. There are thousands of web pages about building a website and when you check their web pages, you would realize they don’t know what they are talking about. Did you get the picture?

This mistake can cost you a lot of time and even money. Unfortunately, these people get frustrated very soon and quit immediately before even discovering the main reason of their failure.

Instead, they could have built a very successful website based on something they are knowledgeable or passionate about. Just sit down, get a pen and paper and list what you like, know and can. Then, select the best topic and start generating ideas around that. After that, you want to research the market and find out if there is money to be made in that market. If yes, you’re good to go for a profitable website.

3. Getting FREE Stuff Such as Domain Name & Web Hosting:

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a professional website. Like I said, your website is your online business. You should treat it as a real business. Why do you want to skip the most essential tools and expect good results? One of the biggest mistakes most people make is getting a free domain name and hosting.

If you are probably on a tight budget. It’s fine. I understand that fact. But please, take this as my previous experience: a free domain name and web hosting can cost you more than a real paid one. Trust me, I have made the same mistake before. It is not worth it.

First off, your visitors would not consider you as a real business by looking at your domain name. You need to look professional. Second off, you would not have full control over your free stuff. Once the provider decide to shut down their service, your business would be gone forever. It has happened to many small businesses that had created their websites on free stuff.

Instead, you can go for a pro account and get real paid domain names and hosting plans. That way, you would not risk your business and have full control over your own stuff. Also, bear in mind that your audience would regard you as an expert and take your recommendations more seriously which means profit.

You can always get those free stuff for testing the market and even some other reasons like branding and promoting purposes. That’s why I have published a video on this website showing you the free resources. I am not against that. However, you can get actual domain name and web hosting for very cheap prices. If I were on a tight budget, I would prefer not to start until I got financially better.

4. Pushing the Visitors To Buy Something:

We all know that the main goal of creating a website is making money. That’s true. We also know whether we sell our own stuff or other people’s, visitors must take action and buy something which would end up bringing us profit. But, do you think people would act if you push them to purchase something? I doubt it!

More specifically, if you have an affiliate website promoting the merchant’s products and services, your job would be much tougher. Because you should convince the visitor to buy something you don’t personally own. I know it is really hard. But, what many beginners don’t seem to understand is that people don’t like pushing. You cannot force them to do anything. Even if they are in the mood of spending money, as soon as they notice you are promoting something heavily, they would immediately ignore it and leave your website. That’s why 95% of affiliates fail.

Instead of selling, you can presell by providing helpful content to your visitors. This concept applies for any model. Whether you are the merchant or the affiliate, you should give value to your visitors by providing them with useful information that help them learn more about the product. That way, the prospects would give you more credit by considering you as an expert or even authority in the market. The bottom line is that they would take your recommendations very seriously. Guess what?! They act and purchase the product making you tons of affiliate commissions even if you didn’t ask them to buy anything. You see how simple that is!

5. Not Tracking and Analyzing the Results:

To be honest with you, only 1% of website owners track and analyze the results they gain from their web pages. This mistake is so common that can even stop you in this process and make you quit. How could you find out what works and what doesn’t? I mean, if you have made a sale, you must know the source of that action. That way, you would be able to improve that source and make more sales.

Tracking and analyzing is not that complicated. Today, you can run a third party tracking program on your website that does all the work for you. Instead, you just log in and check out the stats. If it’s reliable, you will be able to analyze the results, test new stuff and compare the results. Remember, only through tracking, testing and analyzing, you would be able to get good results. Fortunately, there are really a ton of good tracking resources and guess what?! One of the most powerful programs is absolutely FREE; Google Analytics.

I guess I have covered the biggest mistakes one can make in creating a website. Now, it is your turn to make a decision and see what you have done so far and what you must do. Trust me, don’t just overlook these mistakes. If you have read between the lines, you will understand what I exactly mean. Hope you find it helpful.

Your Success is My Concern!

Sincerely,

Hooshmand Moslemi

]]> http://www.makeawebsitenow.com/5-biggest-mistakes-most-people-make-in-creating-a-website/feed/ 3 http://www.makeawebsitenow.com/analyzing-your-own-website/ http://www.makeawebsitenow.com/analyzing-your-own-website/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:40:10 +0000 Hooshmand http://www.makeawebsitenow.com/?p=79 Analyzing Your Own Website is the very last stage of website development and management when you analyze your efforts and figure out how you can improve your results. This stage of your business should be the core of your next moves and can be considered as the secret key to your website success.

As  mentioned before in the step of Tracking, your job is to find out what has worked and what has not. Then, you start testing different elements and techniques in order to discover the winner strategies. Now, it is time to sit down, prepare a report of your Tracking and Testing and Analyze the results. That way, you would be able to know how to remove the losers, avoid your mistakes and strengthen the winners. No wonder you will get promising results.

When it comes to Analyzing Your Own Website, it doesn’t matter if you do the job by yourself or ask someone else to do that for you. The only thing that matters is to list the most important factors of your website to be monitored and get to work on. But, what factors?

In this post, I am going to point out a few of the most important factors of your web stats information which play a very large role in your site effectiveness. If you want desired results, you’d better analyze each of the following information:

1. Number Of Hits & Visits:

Whether it is Unique Visitors or just Hits, you should be able to know how many visitors you have received in a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Also, you have to find out which days bring you the greatest hits. Moreover, you need to even know at what time your site gets the most visitors. These factor are all crucial for your analysis and help you get a better picture of your website performance.

2. Visits Per User:

Knowing if your visitors are unique and new or returning could determine if your site has been active over time. New and unique visitors are a good sign of being known and popular and is an elementary factor for branding purposes.

3. Average Time On Site:

This factor has a significant role in determining your site feedback. If people enjoy your website, they keep staying on your pages, browsing and navigating your links and getting the most out of your content. That way, you would be able to build a relationship with them and give them value. With that being said, your visitors may trust you and give you credit. So, the more you make people stay on your site, the better chance you have to convert them into buyers and customers.

If your audience don’t enjoy your website or don’t find what they are looking for, they will leave your site as quick as possible. So, your site must be very user friendly and offer the right solution to their problems as soon as they land on your site. Usually, most people leave a useless website in less than 30 seconds. So, your site should look like an eye-catching and outstanding website in the first look. Then, it must deliver the great content to the targeted audience. Sometimes, it is called the 5-second rule which means you must grab the attention of the visitor in the first 5 seconds of their visit. Otherwise, they will leave and won’t even look back.

4. Bounce Rate:

This data is very closely tied to the previous factor, Average Time a visitor spend on your site. Basically, it  refers as the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. They could click on a link and go to that website or type a new URL Address in their Internet Browser and leave the site. Eventually, some of visitors push the Back button or close the Window or Tab.

Bounce Rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low Bounce Rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website. Although there is not any certain standard amount of maximum and minimum time for Bounce Rate, it can be determined by the session timeout of the analytic tracking software.

So, for having a more effective website, you should require your visitors to be active on your web pages and want them to stay and navigate instead of leaving instantly by providing them with high quality content. Since this data could be tracked quickly by some reliable tracking software, you will be able to get an accurate feedback of your website in a matter of days, not months and years.

5. Most Visited Pages:

The pages your audience visit most of the time can also be monitored and tracked. Knowing what pages have been seen by the majority of your visitors can help you find the winners and cut the losers. That way, you can improve your effectiveness of your site by increasing the quality of your Most Visited Pages and also put your Call-To-Action Elements on those web pages which can end up in very high conversion rates.

6. Referring Websites:

Referrers are web pages out of your site that have linked back to your website and referred their visitors to you. It is crucial to find out what other websites have sent you a flow of traffic. If you figure out that the referred traffic is targeted, then you should maintain and strengthen the source of that traffic and improve it. No matter if it is a simple blog, a newsletter or an authority website. As long as it works, it is worth working on.

7. Entry & Exit Pages:

Entry Pages are pages of your entire website that a visitor has entered from and Exit Pages are those that a visitor has exited the site from. Probably this data is tightly connected to the “Most Visited Pages” data, but it can more specifically show you how your site quality affects your visitors.

A powerful and attractive Entry Page can cause the visitor to fulfill the website’s goals. If people land on an attractive and interesting web page being asked what to do next, they will easily do it. On the other hand, an ugly and complicated Entry Page just confuses the user and makes them leave the site as quick as possible.

Discovering the Exit Page is also important especially if the people who leave don’t convert. You see, there should be a problem or a weak point on that web page that causes the visitor to exit the website without taking the desired action. That way, you would be able to improve the page and increase its quality. The bottom line is getting higher conversion rates.

8. Demographics:

Nothing is more important than finding out your audience Demographics Profile. If you don’t know what kind of people visit your website and take the desired action, how could you focus your efforts and improve the results? Your  Visitors’ Demographics Profile is an essential data for your Web Analysis.

While getting the accurate data about your site users’ information is not a simple task, it is doable by reliable tracking software. When it comes to Demographics Profile, information such as Location, Age and Sex come to our minds. However, some tracking efforts could end up in finding out more detail information such as Race, Income, Educational Attainment, Employment Status and so forth. Sometimes, you may even be able to know what kind of Internet Browser your visitors use and which Operative System they have on their computers. All of this data should be used to optimize your website for compatibility with as much audience as possible.

9. Search Engines:

Traffic from Referring Websites can be divided into many groups. One of the largest groups of traffic sources are Search Engines. Finding out which of them has sent you the most traffic can be monitored very closely and determined if it is effective or not.

Visitors who come directly from Search Engines are generally considered as targeted traffic. With that being said, you need to know the best referrers and analyze the results. Then, you can implement your techniques on other players and get similar results. Of course, each Search Engine has their own rules and strategies, but when it is doable in one of them, it is achievable in others, too.

10. Keywords and Key Phrases:

This data is tightly connected to the traffic from Search Engines and represents the words and phrases visitors typed in the Search Engines before finding your site in the results and clicking through it. This information is one of the most crucial data for analyzing your site traffic and Search Engine Optimization. If you find out what keywords your website has ranked on the search Engines for, you would be able to optimize your site better for getting more targeted traffic.

11. Click Through Rate:

This data is referred as the ratio of the users who clicked on a link on a web page by the number of times that link was shown. It could be an advertisement, an affiliate offer or a link to other web page of your website. Whatever it is, you should be able to track the Click Through Rate (CTR) data and Analyze your results. Sometimes, by just changing the position of an ad or its color, you could get tremendously higher CTRs.

12. Conversion Rate:

Finally, it all ends here: Conversion Rate. A data that represents the ratio of visitors who convert into a desired action by the total number of visitors. No matter if it is impressions, clicks, a simple download, free sign up, a trial or a purchase. You need to know how many people have converted, what’s the percentage and how you can improve it. With some reliable tracking software, it is possible to determine a desired action or completed goal and check if you have received any result or not.

While there are tons of Tracking and Analyzing Programs out there that can help you monitor your website and find out the weak and powerful points, I can only recommend one FREE program. As mentioned before, it is called Google Analytics and empowers everyone to test, track and analyze their site traffic with tons of compelling features.

By Analyzing Your Own Website you could tweak your site performance and deliver the exact thing your audience is looking for. You might not overlook this step if you want better results.

Stay tuned and subscribe to the Blog RSS Feed that guarantees you to not miss any future posts and articles. Go ahead and do it right now!

All the Best,

Hooshmand Moslemi

If you don’t track your website, you would put all your efforts to waste and lose money. Even if you don’t lose, you would miss a lot of money on the table. You see, tracking is not about realizing how stuff works, rather it is about what stuff works.

If you track your own web pages precisely and properly, you will lower your hard work and increase your profits. This process is such an extensive process that cannot be simply covered in a single article. In fact, there are tons of features, factors and elements related to your website that could be tracked and tested on the Internet. By figuring out every single aspect of the entire process, you can move your online business to the next level, creating and running a website that works.

Website Tracking is generally referred as an act of recording and monitoring changes made to the website and tracing the flow of visitors to and from the web pages. With that being said, we can basically divide the process into 2 sections; Tracking the Traffic Sources and Tracking the User Experience.

1. Tracking the Traffic Sources:

This action is finding out the source of your visitors. You need to know what web pages have sent you the most traffic. Whether it is an authority website, a search engine or a simple blog, you must figure it out and realize if the traffic is targeted and qualified. That way, you should improve the source of traffic and increase the conversions which in turn can result in higher profit margins.

The most popular aspects of checking Traffic Sources that should be tracked and monitored are:

• Direct Traffic: People who visit your website directly from their Internet browsers.
• Referring Sites: Other web pages linking directly to your website and referring visitors to yours.
• Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN that are mostly the main source of web traffic.
• Keywords that are connected to the Search Engines & reveal the topics people want to search.

Testing each and every source of traffic to your own web pages enables you to find out what the best, targeted and high quality traffic is. Then, your job should be focusing on those sources and improving them. That way, your conversion rates will reach the roof and you will get the most out of your efforts.

2. Tracking the User Experience:

Sometimes, it is not only enough to know your Website Traffic Sources. You would need to know what your visitors do on your web pages, which part they see and interact, what pages they visit, which links they click and so forth. It is called the User Experience and plays a very large role for determining your site conversion rate.

Conversion Rate is a ratio of visitors who make the needed commitment and convert to a desired action based on your request. So, if, for example, you want your audience just to click on an ad or a link, your web page must lead the visitor to that action. Then, you need to be informed if it is done properly or not. That´s when Tracking the User Experience comes to play.

The most popular aspects of checking User Experience that should be tracked and monitored are:

• Click Through Rate: The ratio of users clicking on an ad by the number of times it is shown.
• Average Time On site: The time a visitor spends on a site for browsing and navigating.
• Bounce Rate: The average percentage of visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site.
• Conversion Rate: The ratio of people who took the desired action or fulfill the certain goals.

Now, you have learned how important it is to track your website traffic and user experience. No matter how you look at it, you have to get a tracking system to do all the work for you. You can either pay someone to create it for you which is a very costly process, use the FREE tools out there which is quite useful but not that comprehensive or use  an online paid tracking management system.

AdMinder is an Ad Tracking Tool that enables you to track response to your ads such as text links, banner ads, ezine ads,  etc. Now, you can efficiently manage your ad campaigns and easily calculate return on investment with the AdMinder website advertising manager.

HyperTracker is another Tracking solution for webmasters and advertisers who want to track, measure and view unlimited campaigns, automatically and instantly isolate which ads, visitors and products are productive and much much more.

And finally, if you are looking for a FREE solution, then I cannot recommend anything more than Google Analytics, a reliable tracking system that helps you track, test and improve your websites. If you don’t go for the paid solutions, then I highly recommend this tool from Google.

Bear in mind that Tracking Your Own Website should be always monitored and analyzed appropriately. In the next posts, we will talk about it more and show you how to Analyze your Own Website.

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To Your Success!

Hooshmand Moslemi

The purpose of this step is mainly tracking the traffic resources to your website, finding out where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website. It is so important that many smart marketers and webmasters do it on a daily or even hourly basis. Correct tracking and accurate analyzing could mean more profits for every business owner. So, if you want to be one of those successful people, you need to put high weight on this vital step, as well.

As a matter of fact, like the previous steps, tracking should be performed and monitored from the beginning. It may be regarded as the last phase, but some elements must be put in the building step, as well. So, as you see, nothing is totally separated here. All steps are like loops of a chain.

This step can basically be divided into 2 parts. One of them is more technical and the other is analytical. No matter if you are a beginner or an expert, you can do it with the right knowledge and powerful tools. Here are the 2 parts:

1. Tracking

In order to find out how much traffic you have received, where your visitors have come from and how they have interacted with your website, you need data and statistics. In short, tracking technically means getting those data and stats and it can be measured by some tracking tools and programs on the Internet.

Today, you can track everything and receive data and stats such as number of your site unique visitors, page views, hits and downloads. You are now able to find out incoming and outgoing links. You can also get data on more specific details. For example, you can find out how long your visitors have stayed on your web pages, when they have come to your website, which country they live, which Internet browser they use and much much more.  

2. Analyzing

Analyzing your website is actually the most sensitive part of the entire process. If you analyze the data and statistics you have received from your tracking efforts in the right way, you will boost your profit and increase your revenue.

With an accurate and deep analysis you will realize what is working and what is not and then you should cut off the poor elements and strengthen the positive ones to make the highest possible profit. That´s how business works.

So, nothing is more effective than testing, tracking and analyzing your website. More details about each of the above-mentioned parts will be covered In the next posts. Subscribe to the blog RSS Feed in order to get the latest updates.  

To Your Online Success!

Hooshmand Moslemi