Home Business Tips

Tracking to Generate Sales

Now that the website of the home business is up and running, perhaps all that the entrepreneur needs to do is to sit and wait for the orders to come in. But nothing happens. Did visitors really reach the home business website? If yes, why didn’t they fill-up the order form?

Obviously, there was something unattractive to the website which prevents visitors from placing online orders. Perhaps something about the instructions was confusing. But how will an entrepreneur know which part of his website made a potential customer leave the site? The solution to this a process called “tracking”.

With a tracking system installed in a home business website, the entrepreneur or owner will have an idea about the number of visitors who opened the site and what percentage of this number explored other links. The tracking system can also identify how many of these visitors have joined the mailing list, have downloaded the free e-book or software, and have taken any survey.

When the information from this tracking system is presented, the home business entrepreneur can determine which part or parts of his website need changes and improvement. Here is one typical example.

A home business website may have four pages. The first page or the homepage is where the product is introduced or how the product can best help the target clients. This page contains a link to the second page, which contains the primary “sales letter”. This page has two more links, one towards the third page where commendations from clients are found, and one towards the fourth page which is the order form.

If the tracking system reports that only 6% of the visitors of the homepage proceeds to the second page, this means that the first page was not interesting enough. The home business owner may need to change the headlines and/or the articles. He may add graphics or remove some. After all the changes have been made, the tracking system must be reset to zero.

After a week, the statistics from the tracking system must be checked again. If the percentage of visitors moving from the first page to the second page has increased, then the changes made were positive and could lead to additional sales. But if the percentage has decreased, the changes to the homepage were not advantageous at all. The homepage needs more improvement.

Once around 40 out of 100 visitors in the homepage click the link to the second page, then the statistics of the second page must be studied next. The tracking system will provide the data that the home business owner needs. If the percentage of visitors in the second page going to the third or fourth page is extremely low, such as 1 out of 20, this means that the second page needs changes.

The second page will undergo the same process that the homepage went through until the percentages from the tracking system are satisfactory. Then, the other two pages must receive the same attention.

The changes made to the home business website will result to more sales. And these changes are guided by the information provided by a tracking system. Thus, installing a tracking system greatly helps in generating more sales.

Small/Home Business Tips, Sales Essentials 2006-02-27 Home Business Tips