Now, I know you can probably feel your eyelids getting
heavy at the mere mention of the word statistics, and I agree it wouldn’t be
top of my list of ‘fun’ things to do either … but if I told you that by
taking a passing interest in your stats you could increase the size of your
list (and consequently your sales) without any extra work generating traffic or
spending any more on advertising than you already do … I think you’d probably
agree that would be worth staying awake for…

Firstly of course, you need to know where you are starting from, and if you
don’t have access to any stats already, the easiest way is to get Google to do
it for you. Pay a visit to Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/
and they will give you a bit of code to pop on your site to monitor the
visiting traffic. It’s free, and after a couple of days (or even better a week)
you should have something you can work from.

Before we go any further, please be aware you won’t be studying anything in the
minutest detail to start off with … the main things you need to know at this
stage are how many visitors your site is getting, and how many of them are
joining your list.

Of course Google Analytics will give you lots more information than this, but
there is absolutely no need to bother yourself with such things as ‘bounce
rates’ at this point. (And if I was to go into more detail about what that,
along with some of the more tedious aspects of on-site stats was all about, you
definitely would start nodding off…)

So, once you’ve got your starting point, you are then in a position to ‘tweak’
different things (only one at a time though) and monitor the results to see if
it increases the amount of people joining your list. The most obvious things to
dabble with initially are of course to try different variations of your
headline, or maybe adding (or even taking away) from your list of the benefits
offered by your free report (or lead magnet) … even things like changing the
background colour has been known to affect results.

And don’t think anything is too small to test and try … a year or so ago two
of my students changed the size of the image of the free report they were
giving away (making it look like it had fewer pages so it would not be
perceived as too much ‘hard work’ to read it) and changing just this one thing
increased their conversion rate from 25% to 33%…;-)

So rather than throwing more money at your Google ads campaign or spending
hours trying to increase the amount of visitors to your site using SEO
techniques (probably the only thing more tedious that looking at stats) you
could possibly look at getting the absolute most out of the traffic you are
already getting…

Until Next Time,

Tim Lowe

Publisher, Tim’s Business
Lowe Down