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.
