Statistics Don’t LIE – Use It To Your Advantage!
You often hear people saying that a picture speaks a thousands words. To me, statistics scream out a million words with pictures and videos combined. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but you get my drift – statistics are important.
In Internet Marketing, or any business for that matter, statistics allows you to unearth vital clues which you can then act upon to constantly tweak, improve and refine your business and marketing strategies.
A business is never static. To optimize and stay ahead of the competition, we must always test and test. Once the testing is done, we test somemore, till we go bonkers. Testing is so important, as it shows us what works and what doesn’t. Those that work, we adopt and scale up. Those that doesn’t, we flush it down the toilet bowl!
As I beat around the bush in one big round circle, it boils down to this – statistics is important for testing and we must pay heed to it.
Let’s just focus on Net Marketing and this site for example. I use several web statistical tools, such as Google Analytics, Awstats and MyBlogLog to track my visitors’ clicks, where they come from and their behavior when they come to my site.
So far, the statistics generated from MyBlogLog has proven to be the most useful to me, as I can track the exact referral source, which internal links they click on and which external link they click out. I must said that I’ve learned much from observing the statistics.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve gleaned so far:
1. Remember the post I wrote regarding a visitor from Google search which I did not expect? People are searching for long tail keywords in foreign languages (etc. Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese) but yet they are end up at my site even though my site is in English.
Lesson learnt: It pays to translate. For your information, I use the Global Translator plugin to translate my site to 9 other different languages.
2. I have a ‘Downloads’ resource section for Internet Marketing, Finance and Personal Development. As I monitor my clicks, I realize that things weren’t going great. There are just not enough people noticing this section. So I decided to TEST. I added a ‘FREE’ beside the ‘Downloads’ section, to make it ‘FREE DOWNLOADS’ and straight away I see an immediately surge in click conversion.
Lesson learnt: People are sucker for FREE things. I admit I am as well. Why? There is no risk involved! We don’t stand to lose anything when we download something that is free. At most, we end up wasting a bit of time, with a bit less disk space on our hard drive. That’s all. It shows that we must take note of such small details, as small additions like these can make a significant difference.
3. I put up banner ads in the past, but the click conversion was pathetic. I tried text links that are incorporated nicely and smoothly into content, and the click conversion went up. When I introduced a small arrow icon beside the text link, the click conversion rose further.
Lesson learnt: Banners don’t work. Period. Ok maybe a headline accompanying a banner may fare better, but people usually associate banners as a move to directly sell to them, and they just simply look away. Worse still, people get turn off and interpret the site as just a selling site, and not as a useful content site as they are usually expecting, and they may just leave and not come back.
I’ve have since taken down almost all my banner ads (there are still some lurking somewhere), because I know people on the net are searching for USEFUL content, and not really to get sold on something at first instance (This is not to say that they can’t be sold later. They just need to be warmed up, pre-sold, and that’s where good credentializing value-added content come in).
4. Visitors tend to click on something on the top more than the middle section which in turn has more clicks than the bottom portion.
Lesson learnt: First impression counts. If we can squeeze all the eye catching good stuffs with valuable information at the top, we are putting ourselves in the visitors’ good books. First battle won. You live to fight another day in the war.
If you start selling like nobody’s business right at the very start, you might risk getting killed by your visitors’ sniper bullet before you even know it!
5. I get a lot more clicks on ‘how to’, ‘tips’ and ‘resources’ articles. Articles with catchy headlines get the curious inquisitive votes from visitors too.
Lesson learnt: People appreciate good content. They love it when they discover and learn something new. So I say we give it to them, and keep them coming back for more.
Having said that, a good story without a good headline will not prompt the visitors to even make the first move to read the article. It will be a big waste of effort that was gone into researching for good content as people are not even clicking and reading it to begin with. Therefore, it is important to accompany good stories with attractive eyeball-grabbing headlines (controversial ones help too!) to make it an irresistible overall package.
Conclusion: Without statistics, we are living in a blind world. Without testing, we don’t know what is good and what is bad. We remain static and there will be no progress and development.
So what are you waiting for? We must take ACTION today!
Let’s go find a smoldering HOT statistician as a life mate!
[tags]testing, website statistics, MyBlogLog statistics, credentializing content[/tags]
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