Failed Online
Marketing
It should be easy peasy finding failed online
marketing attempts. But it's not.
| Over 90% of all online businesses are the
result of failed marketing attempts. These sites just don't
make it. |
Failures rest in the dark recesses of search engine
NeverNever Land. Successes raise to the top.
Just think. Every time you do a search on any topic
at all, in any search engines, you get back a long list of "hits".
The ones that are good are on the top. The un-good sites fall way,
way down to the 2435th page, and no one ever sees them. The ones
on top have benefited from a technique called "search engine
optimization", a skill that you can learn.
Online businesses come and go so quickly,
especially the truly lousy ones, that it's hard to track the actual
percentage of failures. Estimates are that well over 90% of the
websites that are live at any given moment are failures. They make
no money. Zip. Zippety. Zilch.
So what about the failed online marketing
sites. Where do they come from? Why are they even
there?
Well, from personal experience, I can tell you that
some of them are there because they just don't know any better. I
had a failed online marketing site for about three years. Every
month I paid to have the site "live" on the web. And every month
it lost money. In the whole three years I think I made $50.
And it was a pretty site!!
But "pretty" is NOT "successful".
How
do you know if your site is successful?
This is an important consideration, especially if
you are relying on someone else to manage your site. Here are some
success markers that your site should have:
TRAFFIC APPROPRIATE FOR YOUR
BUSINESS CATEGORY.
I
know one lady who operates a very focused niche business in specialized
mortgages. She is thrilled if she gets three or four good leads a
month.
Another person has a site for children's party
supplies, and needs thousands of visitors every day to make a good
living.
Determine what kind of traffic is appropriate for
your particular business, and judge your success on that.
TOP ALEXA
RANKING.
Alexa tracks every single website in
the world, and gives them rankings, with Google being Number One.
(The lowest numbers that Alexa reports are way down in the 20,000,000
range. Below that is "no ranking".) When a website can go from
6.3 million in February:
to 788,000 in
April
like this site did, I consider that a
success. Obviously, something is right or the site wouldn't rise
to high ranks so quickly. By the time you read this, I trust it
will be ranking even higher. You can check it out at the
Alexa
website.
GOOD RESPONSE FROM YOUR
VISITORS
This is a bit harder to gauge because most people
don't use the contact form that is on most web sites. I would bet
that the failed online marketing sites never got messages at all.
But successful sites sometimes do. So watch your message
box.
DOES IT MAKE
MONEY?
The bottom line is, of course, the money
question. If it doesn't make money, it has failed as an online
marketing tool. Rarely will sites make millions of dollars (and if they
do, those sites are doing things that you and I don't want to know
about), but many, many sites do make reasonable income.
And just how much money should a website
make? That question really opens a huge can of worms. There
are so many variables that I hesitate to give out any numbers at all,
but here are a few:
AdSense. If you
use AdSense, you should be able to earn between $0.02 and $0.08 per
visitor to your site. If you get 100 visitors a day, you might
make $8.00 per day from AdSense. (You can really see the
important of increasing your traffic!)
Affiliate
Sales. This varies so widely that there just isn't an
"average". Generally speaking, don't count on any more than 1-2%
of your visitors buying anything at all ... and that's only after they
get to know you. (Again, the importance of solid traffic.)
Figure your commissions as if 1% of your visitors are going to buy
something.
MLM Sales. This
is the toughest of all to estimate. Your upline will tell you
one thing. And I will tell you to cut that number by 90%.
Then you will have a realistic ballpark figure.
Sites that can earn this much are not failed online
marketing sites. On the contrary, they have tremendous potential
to become major players in their field. If your site is making
this much, consider yourself a very good webmaster. If it isn't,
start figuring out why it isn't.
