If you’re looking to sell products or services via your website, it’s important that you understand what actually happens when your customer clicks on that mighty ‘Buy Now’ button. This post will briefly explain the process of online payment and then look at four ways to increase the number of converting customers.

The Four Steps of an Online Payment

There are several different ways for websites to safely take money from their customers, but the below is the most common method:

1. Your customer selects the product or service that they want to purchase and clicks the ‘Buy Now’ button. (It’s a good idea to install shopping cart software to make this part of the process easier for the customer and potentially more fruitful for you.)
2. Clicking the ‘Buy Now’ link takes the customer to a webpage with a secure form (ie. with an SSL Certificate). This is where they’ll enter their card details.
3. Those details will then be stored by a Payment Gateway, an agent that can be thought of as a kind of mediator between your merchant account and the customer’s bank.
4. The Payment Gateway will query both yours and the customer’s bank to check the payment can go ahead. A confirmation is then returned back to the website and, if all is well, the transaction will occur.

Now you understand how the payment process works ‘behind the scenes’, let’s talk about how you can get more customers clicking your ‘Buy Now’ button.

Four Ways To Make the Buy Now Button More Clickable

1. Test the language – Are you sure that the phrase ‘Buy Now’ is right for your business? Why not try testing a few different approaches, such as ‘Invest Now’, ‘Purchase’ or ‘Order’. If you’re offering a service such as a paid-for newsletter, or access to some resources, try testing phrases like ‘Sign Up Now’. There’s a great website called Ninja Button that makes this kind of testing easy.
2. Test the design – As with the language of your Buy Now button, you can’t be sure you’re getting the most out your design until you test it. Could it be bigger? Brighter? A different shape or a different colour? Again, Ninja Button, or Google’s Website Optimizer will help with this process.
3. Testimonials – Make sure to add testimonials from happy customers at all stages of the purchase funnel on your website – that includes somewhere close to your ‘Buy Now’ button.
4. Payment methods – Despite the omnipresence of ecommerce, some web users are still understandably nervous about handing over their payment details online. One way you can reassure them is to offer well-recognised payment methods. Paypal has wonderful brand recognition, as does Google Checkout.
5. Professionalism – There are many ways you can convey the professionalism of your business. A well-designed and well-built site is paramount, as is well-written, error-free copy. It can be tempting to draw attention to your ‘Buy Now’ button with flashing or moving content, but this rarely looks professional; best avoid!

If I had to narrow this list down to just one action, it would be testing. It can seem like a bit of a hassle to set up in the beginning, but testing different combinations of language and design can make huge improvements to your bottom line. It’s worth doing!

I often get asked by small businesses how they can improve the results that their website is getting if they don’t have a significant marketing budget and any specialized design or programming skills. It’s a great question, and I’m going to share the answer with you right here. The expertise I’m about to share comes from over seven years designing, developing, and marketing hundreds of different websites.

1. Benefits not Features

Rewrite your content to be focused on your customer, not on you. This focus on your customers has increased the percentage of visitors taking action in every case that we have seen. But how do you turn this somewhat vague concept into something you can implement? Simple: check out this tool provided at Future Now Inc.. It will measure the percentage of “me-focused” content (features) and “customer-focused” content (benefits) on any website URL you provide it. Rewrite your content on your homepage and key pages to be over 60% customer-focused and watch your sales rise.

2. Don’t Make Your Visitors Think

Visitors online do not read, they scan, As a result of this, they are not interested in trying to understand complicated writing that is getting in the way of what they are trying to accomplish. Check out this helpful tool provided by Added Bytes, and rewrite your content on key pages to a 6th-grade level. You will see your number of confused support calls drop and results increase.

3. Make it Easy to Contact You

Add your phone number (and maybe your address) to the top right corner. A significant number of your visitors are driven purely by convenience, and will be turned off if they cannot immediately find your contact information. Check out this answering service website for a good example of what it will look like to add your phone number to the top right corner. An example of using your address in the top right corner can be found on my website design company’s homepage. Make this change and watch as your prospects start contacting you instead of your competitors.

4. Add Something for Your Visitors

Many of your visitors are not in a “ready to buy” state right now, and they will not feel comfortable contacting you directly or giving you their contact information. Create something of value for them that they can download or read on your website and this will keep you top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Not sure how to create something like this? Make a list of the top 5 ways that someone can achieve some sort of benefit (save money, save time, make more money, meet new people, improve their home value etc.) without spending money. You can create this in Microsoft Word, add your logo, convert to a PDF, and just like that you have a valuable resource to share.

Now go start improving your website!

This tip is more for WordPress theme and plugin developers. I’ve been working on a client project that required MySQL transactions, as I needed to perform multiple deletions on multiple tables, where the data was interdependent. Since I was writing a WordPress plugin, I wanted a way of doing a MySQL database transaction, using the WordPress database object $wpdb.

When you create a connection to a MySQL database, you end up with a connection handle. This is essentially a way of communicating with the database down the same pipe. When you render a page in WordPress (front end or admin area), the $wpdb database object has already been initialised and opened up a connection to the database. Therefore we can recycle this database connection for our own needs.

The $wpdb object saves the database handle as $wpdb->dbh (dbh = Database Handle). Therefore we just use $wpdb->dbh in place of our normal database handle that we’d otherwise use in PHP.

Code Example

<?php
global $wpdb;
 
// @ prefix used to suppress errors, but you should do your own
// error checking by checking return values from each mysql_query()
 
// Start Transaction
@mysql_query("BEGIN", $wpdb->dbh);
 
// Do some expensive/related queries here
$wpdb->query("DELETE FROM table WHERE form_id = '1' ");
$wpdb->query("DELETE FROM data WHERE form_id = '1' ");
 
if ($error) {
    // Error occured, don't save any changes
    @mysql_query("ROLLBACK", $wpdb->dbh);
} else {
   // All ok, save the changes
   @mysql_query("COMMIT", $wpdb->dbh);
}
 
?>

Based on this, you can do your usual PHP and WordPress magic to do what you need.

We spend so much time thinking about how we promote a website online, with search engine optimisation, PPC, social media, we forget about promoting in the real (offline) world. Most of these tips will apply to your website, and most of them are very cheap to implement. So why not give them a try?

1. Get business cards with your Website URL

It seems like a really obvious idea, but so many people don’t do it! If you have a website that’s not really your core business, e.g. a hobby website, a blog, a small shop, etc, then get some business cards made up specifically. If you want something really cute, then I suggest Moo.com’s Mini Cards, as they’re rare enough to really stand out. Moo.com are really inexpensive for small batches of business cards, so it’s worth doing 50 or 100 to try them out.

2. Mention your website when networking and socialising

Advertising your website during a conversation will appear rude if you don’t use a great deal of tact. However, you can always steer the conversation on to what your website is about, and then casually mention it. If who you’re talking to is interested, then it’s a great time to give them a business card with your website address.

3. Get your website address on your Car

A really bold statement is to have your website address on your car, van or other vehicle. Vinyl car stickers are pretty affordable, and can be a great way to let people know about your website whilst you’re stuck in traffic. If you’re a little shy, just go for a smaller sticker for the rear of your car!

4. Advertise on the local radio

Local radio stations have advertising packages that are more affordable than national radio or television. Therefore if you have a website that is particularly applicable to local residents, then local radio advertising is a perfect way to get your message out.

5. Supporting local business directories

Most towns and villages have some kind of local publication with a list of local businesses. These directories or newsletters are usually crying out for advertisers, so this is a great way to support a local venture and get some great advertising locally.

6. Being a story in a local newspaper

Local newspapers (both free and paid for) are always looking for interesting news stories. Therefore if your company or website is doing something a little odd, exciting, community-spirited or anything else that’s newsworthy, see if the local paper would be interested in running a story on what you’re doing.

7. Advertise on billboards and street advertising boards

Traditional advertising does work, therefore consider if your website would get a boost in visitors by running an advertising campaign on bill boards.

8. Use freebie promotional products

Everyone loves a freebie, so be creative with printed promotional gifts, such as sweets, pens, fridge magnets, notepads, etc. You’ll get better results from gifts that have high value or that are highly practical. This is so that your recipient doesn’t throw out your gift!

9. Say thank you…

Find a reason to say thank you and send out thank you cards to friends, business clients, customers, etc. Make your website address clear and bold, and you might even offer an incentive to use the website… e.g. voucher codes, cashback, a free gift, etc.

10. Give a presentation

Find a local group, be it a business group or an interest group, and offer to do a short presentation. The presentation should be of interest to your audience and offer them value (otherwise it’s just a sales pitch). Your website address can appear on any slides you have.

11. Event and conference signage

If you’re at a conference, seminar or other big event, it’ll be worth investing in a large display advertising your website. Typically these events have lots of visitors, so that’s lots of opportunities for your visitors to see your website address.

12. Advertise on clothing

If you don’t have uniforms relating to your website, then getting promotional clothing with your website address is very affordable these days. If your message is funny, there’s more chance that people seeing your message will remember it.

13. Wish ‘em Merry Christmas!

When you send out Christmas cards, include your website address with your message. If you’re dealing with clients and customers, might be nice to say thanks too.

14. Leave a message on your voicemail

If someone calls you, but leaves a message as you couldn’t answer the phone, they’ll hear your welcome message. Update your message to include your website, particularly if you have a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the website that might help them.

15. Mention your website on all printed material

With all printed material that you send out, ensure your website address is on it. That could be on letters, leaflets, envelopes, booklets – basically any printed material.

16. Local cork pin boards

Cork boards at supermarkets, local shops, coffee shops, libraries and gyms are usually pretty cheap. Get a post-card sized advert and really ‘sell’ why people should visit your website.

Any more?

There we go, my tips for promoting a website offline. Have you got any more tips?

Well, Think Visibility 3 was on at the weekend, and it was a great event. Many people I know couldn’t make it (shame on you), so here’s me rubbing it in with what I learnt from the weekend. Here I cover some of the things that I learnt from the event (keeping the very best stuff to myself!).

To those of you who haven’t heard of Think Visibility, it’s a conference covering a range of aspects from blogging, search engine optimisation, affiliate marketing, conversion optimisation, domaining, and more. The event is a pretty intimate affair, with around 150 people attending. As a result, the event is very friendly, interesting and a spectacular opportunity to meet your fellow digital samurai.

Speaker Tom Critchlow – Local SEO Strategies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Tom Critchlow (@TomCritchlow) discussed how to get the best from Google Local, particularly with how you can improve the quality of your local business listing and improve your rankings within the map results. Tom had plenty of practical advice, particularly around citations and reviews.

What I learnt #1: Use your company name as your business name. The emphasis was very much a case of not trying to stuff keywords into the title of your business to improve your rankings. Why? Google actively discourages it and it can damage your rankings rather than improve them.

What I learnt #2: Reviews and citations matter in a big way. Tom said that at the moment, the quantity of reviews from different domains matters at the moment (a bit like backlinks), but quality of reviews (and the trust associated with the source domain) are quickly becoming a major factor.

Speaker Judith Lewis – SEO Case Studies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Judith Lewis (@Judithlewis) had some advice based on her experience as an SEO. Judith specifically asked us not to blog or tweet about what we heard during the presentation. Therefore I am respecting that request.

What I learnt #3: Judith will do anything for (good quality) chocolate! Additionally, Judith’s presentations usually feature free chocolate!

Speaker Stephen Pavlovich – Conversion Rate Tips and Tricks

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Stephen Pavlovich (@BonyToad) runs a successful conversion optimisation business with some pretty significant clients. Stephen clarified what conversion optimisation really was, which is not just about changing your button colours!

Stephen covered the optimisation process, which included researching your traffic, coming up with solutions, testing, and reviewing your improvements. I also spoke to Stephen on one of my sites, where he kindly gave me a few more tips of things to test.

What I learnt #4: Use more tracking tools as well as Google Analytics. Some tracking tools will allow you to work out where people click on your website, which can identify potential issues on your site. One of many tools Stephen suggested was CrazyEgg.

What I learnt #5: Test different pages, but only do a few variables at a time. Testing too many variables makes it very hard to work out which variable is causing the improvement in conversions.

Speaker Kenny Goodman – Dynamite Domains

Photo Credit: sk8geek

The talk by Kenny Goodman (@KennyGoodman) was on “Dynamite Domains”, which was effectively about how to make money from domains and how to get hold of some really juicy domains. Kenny also announced a new tool he’s launching called Domain Face, which is designed to help you find some of these great domains. Kenny did get a little excited whenever he mentioned “dynamite” or “explosive”, I think he thought we were Americans!

What I learnt #6: Ask, and ye shall receive. Kenny kindly provided me with the opportunity to try the tool for free. Thanks Kenny!

Speaker Al Carlton – Making more hours with Outsourcing and Automation

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) of Self Made Minds and Coolest Gadgets was sharing his tips on how to save time and things he does personally to reduce his workload. Al covered a whole range of resources that you can use in order to outsource time consuming or complex work.

What I learnt #7: Don’t create a job for yourself! Essentially you don’t want to outsource in such a way that creates you extra work. You want to minimise the work you do to only work on aspects you enjoy.

Who I met at Think Visibility

I met a whole range of people at ThinkVis, many of whom shared with me some great tips and tricks for my own affiliate websites. Here are a few of the people I wanted to thank for advice they gave me.

• Jon (@JonTiffany) of About Loft Conversions – a long time friend of mine online, so it was great to meet in real life for the first time! Jon gave me some great advice on how to move forward with my career.
• Simon Barker (@simonbarker) of Zath – we had an interesting little natter about the practicalities of running gadget sites.
• Martin Wright (@mawawa – I spent a lot of time drinking with Martin, where he got to appreciate the finer side of my humour. I appreciated someone laughing at my crap jokes.
• Rob Cole of Focus Online Management – who doesn’t do twitter. Rob had some really interesting stuff to say on the topic of bingo websites.
• Patrick Moogan (@paddymoogan), who kindly mentioned my guest blogging platform BlogSynergy.com in his presentation on link building.
• Elaine (@ElaineAllkids) and Lee Forth of All Kids – Elaine gave me a simple tip of how to earn more from a niche website if I have a handful of successful products.
• Richard Kershaw (@QualityNonsense) of Quality Nonsense – a fascinating chap, where I got plenty of interesting ideas to test out on my own websites.

Finally, thanks to the team at ThinkVisibility (@ThinkVisibility) for a great event. You can see the photos of the event on sk8geek’s flickr stream.

If you’re running a website with a number of pages, you might want to disable comments on all pages and posts at once. There’s no feature within WordPress to do this, however, you can achieve this result using a little bit of SQL.

For this tip, I’m assuming that you’re comfortable using phpMyAdmin with your web hosting package.

I’m not aware of a plugin that disables comments, but if you do hear of a plugin that’s able to do this, please let me know. I have no plans to add this to a plugin any time soon. In phpMyAdmin, execute the following SQL, which will disable comments and pingbacks on all currently published (and draft) pages and posts.

UPDATE wp_posts
SET comment_status = 'closed', ping_status = 'closed';

Happy New Year! I’m planning for 2010 to be my most successful year ever, in terms of financial independence and growth. My goals are a mixture of personal development, business goals and lifestyle design. I’m often told I work too hard, so that’s why I’m making plans to play just as hard!

1. Massively increase my website income

I have a number of websites that I run and maintain, but none of them are earning me a fortune. I think that my biggest downfall is that I spread myself too thinly over too many projects. My aim is to have 3-4 great websites rather than 10-20 so-so websites.

To achieve this, I’ll be letting some domains expire, selling a few websites, and pushing some projects firmly into the background. This includes putting my mentoring consultancy on the backburner. Projects that I’ll be focusing on this year include SpyGadgets.org.uk, EnviroGadget.com and BlogSynergy.com.

I’m very unhappy with my current website income, as I feel that it’s very low and has much more potential. My goal is to increase my monthly earnings by 1400% by the end of this year! I’ve intentionally not specified my current earnings, however, to give you some idea, they are well below minimum wage.

Considering I run my websites as my full-time job, I want to be doing much better. It’s a matter of pride as well as necessity.

2. ‘Crack’ affiliate marketing

I started venturing into affiliate marketing in 2009, with some good results (i.e. I actually made money via commissions). However, I’ve still got a great deal to learn. I think I’ve worked out what mistakes I’m making (i.e. why I’m getting poor conversions), and I have several plans to resolve those mistakes in 2010.

I want to thank a couple of people who’ve been helping me on my affiliate marketing journey, particularly Mark Boyd (@hairycornflakes) and Kirsty McCubbin (@AffiliateStuff), plus everyone over at Affiliate Doctors. No doubt they’ll be getting more questions from me over the next few months, but I am really grateful for their support so far.

3. Conquer my issues with demotivation

One of by biggest weaknesses is that I get easily discouraged if something goes wrong. In 2010, I will beat this weakness, and become an expert at handling problems with grace and optimism.

4. Clear out unwanted possessions

We all end up collecting crap. I’ve got a load of bits around the home that I’ve been meaning to clear out. In 2010, I will sell off or give away all of the ‘stuff’ that I have that I no longer need or want. I did clear out a lot of stuff in the first half of 2009. Now I need to clear out the stuff that I collected in the 2nd half of 2009.

I get a great sense of achievement when I clear out my unwanted possessions, and all it takes is a little time and effort!

5. Do an evening class at least once a week

I’ve got some money saved, so I plan to do a pottery class once a week. Pottery is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to doing. I didn’t get to do it when I was at school for some reason, maybe I was off sick. Anyway, I’m calling the local college as soon as they’re back from the Christmas break.

6. Do 15 or more professional firework shows

Those of you who know me well, know that I love pyrotechnics! In 2009, I was lucky enough to get a part-time job working for a very reputable professional fireworks and special effects company. In 2009, I got to do a total of 8 shows, including New Year’s Eve 2009.

Now that I’ve done my basic training, I’m keen to do at least 15 professional firework shows in 2010. I absolutely love doing it, and it keeps me happy!

And so it begins!

I’m going to make 2010 my best every year in terms of professional and personal growth. I’m really excited to get started!

Please let me know what goals you’ve set for the new year. You can either write them as a comment, or post a URL to a blog post about your goals. I look forward to reading them.

For most people the upcoming holiday season will be one for relaxing and spending quality time with the family. But, for some of us it gives us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and do some SEO work. Here are 10 suggestions for SEO work which can improve your ranking in time for 2010.

Image Optimisation Tweaks

Optimising images across the site can help drive up web traffic from Google image search and normal search.

1. Rename your images – To help the search engines index and rank your images, you’ll need to help them just a bit. Each product or service should have its own image with a descriptive name as close as possible to the product or service. For example, blue-mobile-cover.jpg has much better potential to rank well for the term ‘blue mobile cover’ than blue-4567-s.jpg.

2. Save in the correct format – Another important factor for optimising images is saving them in the correct format. The best results I’ve seen are when images are saved as .jpg as apposed to tiff or bmp.

3. Populate the ‘alt text’ field – The search engines cannot see the image however they can see its name and alternative text. You can view your ‘alt text’ by surfing your site with the images switched off. Take the time to add ‘alt text’ to each image including the product or service title.

3 Content Optimisation Tweaks

Here we are increasing the worthiness of each page to rank better.

4. Forget the manufacturer’s description and write your own – We all do that at times. We get the product live and use the manufacturer’s description word for word. While it might save you some time, other sites have used the same text as well which will make your version less unique. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just add some notes of your own which could be as simple as ‘recommended for…’ or ‘product benefits….’. 

5. Use keywords within the text – The keywords for which you’re trying to rank for should appear in the text. Avoid keyword stuffing because mentioning terms 10 times won’t improve your ranking. Instead place the keywords within the context of the page and make sure it reads well. Remember the search engines aren’t your customers, you and I are!

6. Add quality content – One of the best ways to increase your worthiness is to add quality content that your competitors don’t. It could be in the shape of editorial reviews, customer reviews and even how-to guides.

3 Code Optimisation Tweaks

7. Unify homepage versions – Your homepage is your most valuable page in terms of SEO potential. So it makes sense that you’d have one version of it instead of multiple versions. The most common versions of homepage duplication which will require your intervention are www and non www versions, .co.uk and .com versions and the biggest perpetrator is different file extensions such as sitename.co.uk/index.php / index.html etc. You should unify around one version of your homepage and set 301 redirects from duplicates to the source.   

8. Speed up the site – Google recently announced that at some point during 2010 the speed of your site will effect your ranking. SEO aside, it has always affected your conversion so you should look to improve its speed regardless. The more costly option is to invest in more hosting resources and the cheaper option is to display less products or services on one page,  save images as jpg (see tip 2) and improve your text to code ratio. 

9. Find and fix error pages – These 404 error pages could prove to be a pain. Some of them, such as old product pages, old press releases and newsletter copies might have some SEO value as back links. Try and point them to more appropriate pages on your site using 301 redirect to such pages as the product’s category or a closely related product.

A final piece of advice

10. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Optimising your site to achieve high levels of web traffic can take time, sweat and a few tries to get it right. In the mean time, look at other channels of traffic such as social networks, paid search and even affiliate marketing.

Good luck in 2010!

This is a guest article by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct. Inkjet consumables online store selling products from Inkjet cartridges to photo paper. 

Regardless of what website you have, are you tracking your visitors? The usual answer I get to that question, is “no”. However, if you’re not tracking your visitors, you should be. If you don’t know where to start, use Google Analytics because it’s effective and free.

The aim this article is to get you using some slightly more advanced visitor tracking enabled on your website. I’m writing the article from the perspective of an affiliate marketeer, however this Google Analytics advice can be applied to any website, such as landing pages, online shops, blogs, and so much more.

Affiliate Marketing – Very Quick Intro

Affiliates are people who advertise products and services that you can buy from a third-party merchant. In return for a sale, affiliates earn a commission from that merchant. To reach a larger audience and to save merchants hassle, affiliate networks look after the tracking and payments from merchants to affiliates.

Affiliate Link Tracking Codes

Typically as an affiliate, you create a direct link to a product or service page (called a deep link) that you encourage your visitors to click. You typically generate these deep links using the affiliate network’s deep link generator too.

As part of that deep link, you can include a reference. For example, a deep link on the Webgains network looks a bit like this (programme and affiliate IDs have been changed to protect the innocent!):

http://track.webgains.com/click.html?wgcampaignid=5678&wgprogramid=1234&clickref=my-useful-reference&wgtarget=http://www.mytargeturl.com/product.html

And a deep link via on the AffiliateWindow network looks like this:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=123&awinaffid=456789&clickref=my-useful-reference&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mytargeturl.com%2Fproduct.html

I use a different reference for each product, and therefore affiliate link that I have to the merchant. Here are a few examples.

• Product A – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=1&clickref=product-a
• Product B – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=2&clickref=product-b
• Product C – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=3&clickref=product-c

When you get a commission, that click reference shows up next to the commission that you’ve made (in the reports generated by the affiliate network). For example, here’s a small slice of my earnings via Webgains:

Webgains Transaction Report (click to enlarge)

In the diagram above, you can see the date of the transaction, the merchant, the commission and the click reference. That means I know exactly which product and link is generating a commission for me.

What’s the key benefit? I can determine which products make me money, and therefore spend more time on those product pages to earn even more! You basically get extremely valuable information about the products that either do or do not earn you money.

However, that’s only half the story. What about tracking what buttons/links/images your visitors are clicking on? Don’t forget, only a small number of visitors to your site will actually purchase something from your merchant.

We also want to know how successful we are at sending visitors to your merchant. That’s where we use Events in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Events

Google has a very comprehensive guide to events, so I won’t repeat it here. Essentially it’s an extra bit of javascript code that you add on to your outgoing links that allows you to track some information when a visitor clicks on that link.

This is ripped straight out of the Google’s Event Tracking Guide:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

• category (required) – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• action (required) – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional) – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• value (optional) – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

This is how I suggest that you use it:

<a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Affiliate', 'Click', 'The Product Name');">Shop Now button, etc</a>

This means we group all outgoing clicks to affiliates under the category ‘Affiliate‘, and we call the action a ‘Click‘, and we label each link for each affiliate with ‘The Product Name‘. I’ve ignored the value parameter because we don’t need it. You’ll probably be using big red Shop Now buttons rather than a text link too.

Assuming that tracking code exists on all links that go out to your merchants, that means we’re tracking all clicks by your visitors to your merchants. We are also tracking exactly what link they are clicking, i.e. what product is causing them to visit the merchant.

Why bother? Well, we need a screenshot.

Event Tracking Labels (click to enlarge)

This is a summary of labels from one of my websites, namely my Spy Gadgets mini site (Content > Event Tracking > Labels in Google Analtyics). The chart shows the number of clicks per day on one of my affiliate links. The table below the chart shows the most popular products, i.e. those which received the most clicks out to the merchant.

What’s the key benefit? You discover which products encourage clicks to the merchant. That information can then be used to work out where you should focus your attention with the view of getting further clicks to the merchant (and hopefully a sale too!).

Conclusion

I’ve shown you simple ways to track what visitors click on, and what products/links actually generate the commission. That information will help you avoid speculation and actually focus on products/links that work for you. You also get data that allows you to measure the changes that you make to see if they’re an improvement.

Those of you who are experts on Google Analytics will notice that I am just scratching the surface. That’s intentional. I don’t want to give you all of my juicy tricks do I?

When I’m talking to people about what I do, one of the most common misconceptions I face is that there’s still a strong belief that running a website is easy to do. Running a successful website is far from easy, it’s blooming hard work!

So I’ve put together a list of the top 7 problems and issues you’ll soon discover when running a website. My goal is not to put you off, but to highlight that it takes experience, skill and bucket-loads of effort to sustain a great website.

1) Web hosting downtime and poor response times

Your web hosting will go down at some point. Forget those claims of 99.9% uptime guarantees from your hosting company, which mean nothing anyway. Sometimes the server might still be accessible, but the page loads so slowly that your website becomes unusable.

Just accept it. When you least want your website to go down, it will go down. The trick is to find a web host who is proactive about their server management, namely that they’re already working on fixes by the time you’ve noticed your website is not working.

2) Random drops in visitors

Any seasoned website owner will agree with this problem. At some point your visitor levels (and/or sales) will just drop for no apparent reason. You’ll spend hours looking over the statistics trying to work out why. Sometimes you might be able to determine that you’ve had a a random drop in rankings in the search engines.

Get up, dust yourself down, and move on. Often it’s better to spend time getting more visitors rather than establishing the actual cause of the drop.

3) You get demotivated and bored

When you’ve been running a website for a while, you do lose interest. Perhaps your earnings aren’t increasing as quickly as you’d like? Perhaps you’re not making any sales? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas? It’s usually people who persevere through the low periods that become successful.

Try to find ways to inject new ideas and inspiration into your website to give you fresh motivation. I recently wrote a great article on how to come up with fresh ideas.

4) You’re being sued

If you have a website that allows visitor-generated content, such as reviews, comments or forum posts, then there’s every chance that you’ll end up with something offensive on your website. Offensive remarks, in their various guises, can lead to law suits.

Moderate all visitor-generated content. No exceptions. If the content sounds as if it might be an issue, remove or reject it. Moderating user-created content is hard work, but it’s cheaper than being sued.

5) You have no time to update your website

Updating your website includes many aspects, such as moderating comments, adding new articles, adding new products, adjusting the site design, etc. Great websites are constantly evolving and growing.

If you don’t have the time to update your website, then hire someone, be it by outsourcing, via a contract or an employee. If your time is worth more focused on other tasks, then it’s worth spending a little money to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.

6) You need to promote your website

If you want your website to grow, you need to promote your website. However, promoting a website is easily one of the most time consuming aspects of running a website. You need to spend time getting links to your website, you need to create a presence on social networking platforms, you need to establish relationships with other individuals in your community, you need to spend time on marketing materials, etc. The list just goes on.

Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get visitors. Promotion is hard work, and there are no quick solutions either.

7) Competition and copycats

Once you have a great website, it’s not long before someone copies you or starts doing something that’s very similar to you. It’s often because someone wants to replicate your success for themselves. However, they usually don’t realise that they’d be better off doing something different and unique.

Don’t resort to childish behavior (as tempting as it might be to throw a tantrum)! Sometimes you might have a legal case if there’s a copyright dispute. However, I’ve found that working with the competition can yield some great results. This includes advertising exchanges, selling adverts on your website, possibly selling your website to the competition, or even buying the competition!

Any more challenges?

These are the challenges that I’ve personally faced with running my portfolio. What challenges have you encountered with running a website?