The invisible cost of website sales being lost

 "The single biggest cost website owners incur is the invisible cost of sales being lost." Since it is invisible, you have to look HARD and DEEP to see it. Are you willing to do that? Do you have a website? Would making 10x-100x more than you are now be important to you? The next few paragraphs can help you accomplish that and it is free for the reading. You are even entitled to disagree with me but you would be 100% wrong. Don't get those feathers ruffled yet. I am gonna make anyone who reads the following and has the NERVE to understand it, a LOT of money.

This is the 3rd time I have pointed this out during this short blog. But I have never devoted the time to dissect this ONE piece of the puzzle. This KEY piece.

Let's start like this. The last thing I will tell you why this is so important to me. But I WILL tell you. But before I do this let's look at this the right way. If you have a store on Main Street or in the mall and 1000 people walked in and NOBODY bought anything, would you continue to do business as usual or would you make some adjustments? Well if you do nothing, you will soon be out of business. On the net, MANY think there is a different equation. Are they kidding? If you make no sales, you will soon be out of business.

So let's say you sell widgets. 1000 customers come to your website and nobody buys your widgets. You think that is OK??? You close 1 in 1000 and you think THAT is OK??? You accept that? Are you nuts? You would not accept this in the REAL world and you should not accept that in the VIRTUAL world.

Assuming you have good widgets and there is a market for your widgets then there are techniques to close more sales by improving your website and your customer service. Why do so few even talk about this? Well how many people in the universe even know about this subject? Then from there you have to separate the ones that actually know what the hell they are talking about from the ones that are full of crap.

All I can tell you for a FACT (assuming you have a good product or service) it does not take a lot of effort to take 0 in 1000 or 1 in 1000 to 10 in 1000 and maybe 100 in 1000.

And NOW the REASON why I am so hung up on this single BOTTLENECK. When I send traffic to folks that are only closing 1 in 1000 I am making a fraction of what I could be making if they closed more sales. So for every million I make TODAY, that same traffic could easily earn 10x that. 100x that. THAT is the reason. Selfish as it is from where I sit, it's not selfish to tell merchants that they are aiming LOW when they should be aiming HIGH. Merchandising a website is no different than your physical store. Your traffic flow is no different than your physical store. But to be blunt, it takes a different set of talents to close a sale on your website than it does in your store on Main Street  or in the mall. Wine is wine until you find a connoisseur to explain the difference between a $5 bottle of wine and a $500 bottle. Art is art until you find an expert to show you the difference between a $10 print and a $10 million original. So if you want to see what is not visible to YOUR EYE you need to find folks that have the talent so you can use THEIR EYE!

The problem is probably only a few hundred people on the planet have such a talent, maybe less. So you either have to find them (And they are likely not available) or learn to see this for yourselves. The best I can do is introduce you to this line of thinking. How did I learn? Lots of experimenting over many years with hundreds of millions of unique visitors to my domain names. I had to learn to make lemonade from lemons from the ground up and using virtual lemons.

"The single biggest cost website owners incur is the invisible cost of sales being lost." I cannot repeat this enough. Not visible to the naked eye. At least an UNTRAINED naked eye. I see it like I see the screen in front of me. It is THAT clear. I hope you can see what I see. If you don't see it....it's not because it is not there.

Have a GREAT Day!

Comments

[Jeff Reynolds]

Exactly right. Getting better conversions is part art and part science. You have to test, test and then test again. Tiny changes in font size, color, language and positioning can have a huge impact. I'm always amazed at how many people never visit their own sites and go through the process as an average surfer. Do it, make a list of the quirks as you go, fix them and then do it again. It should never be "good enough." Make it better and never settle for 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100. If you can convert 1 in 100, then you can easily convert 2 in 100, thereby potentially doubling the cash in your pocket. Most people hit a certain level of success and then sit back a bit. This creates OPPORTUNITY for those willing to push a little harder. So, go push.

[Kevin]

Taking these thoughts over to the domain sphere and opening some eyes to the invisible cost of "Traffic" being lost in two important ways.

I'm convinced many major sites with so called great affiliate programs are actually in the affiliate business for the explicit purpose to NOT generate product or service sales, but rather to grab aka steal as much affiliate traffic as they can and then resale that totally "free of cost" traffic to major advertisers on their sites.

Imagine a site with 10,000 affiliates and each affiliate sends them just 10 visitors per day. That's 100,000 free of cost visitors daily, and 3 Million visitors monthly the program gets for FREE! Don't know about anyone else, but I've yet to see any pay per action affiliate deal making any large number of affiliates any really large paychecks. On top of this, webmasters with hundreds of sites often lose track of their outbound program links and keep sending traffic for years without making any sales to these dud programs. What a great game.

So I'm not a fan of sending traffic with the expectation and dependency on someone else having to close a sale for me to make money. Forget about it. I'm in the traffic business. I sell targeted eyeballs. As far as I'm concerned, it's the advertiser's job to close a sale off the traffic sent.

Next up, PPC Landing pages. To me PPC landing pages are a short term, easy way to make money solution and that's the extent of it. In reality the PPC landing page model has "invisibly" cost domainers hundreds of millions of dollars, probably even billions of dollars.

I've recently done a great deal of research and discovered that the majority of domainers have the bulk of their portfolio loaded with thousands of domains that don't generate any or minimal traffic yet they leave them sitting on PPC pages as if one day a magical genie is going to appear, nod his head and yippeee streams of traffic will suddenly fall out of the sky.

Not gonna happen folks. The only way to build traffic is to BUILD traffic. Domains with NO TRAFFIC sitting on a landing page can NOT be monetized with that revenue model. Let me repeat. You can not monetize a domain that has no traffic with a ppc landing page.

So why do so many sharp and bright domainers do this with virtually all the domains in their portfolios that have no traffic? You got me. I'll confess that I got sucked into the ppc page revenue dream concept too. Most will tell you because they'll probably develop or resell their domains eventually and they figure leaving them on a ppc landing page in the interim is the easiest and best thing to do, (more likely because they see everyone else doing it). Who are we kidding? In reality it's the stupidest thing to do and THE BIGGEST Invisible Cost to domainer's long term wealth creation.

The most valuable asset on the Net is TRAFFIC! So if 75% of your domains have no traffic or barely any, and are just "expectation" domains, and they are just languishing on a ppc page, you are losing profit opportunities 24/7.

Most of these domains have great targeted keywords within them, but they are missing one thing. Traffic. So the simple solution is to find a way to combine targeted no traffic keyword domains with a simple traffic generation system and BINGO!, all of a sudden you'll have a portfolio driving lots of highly targeted keyworded eyeballs to happy advertisers and your portfolio will become incredibly valuable and capable of new and exciting revenue streams.

But do you know what stops domainers from doing this? It's because domainers always think "BIG" and have forgotten about thinking "SMALL".

SMALL is "KISS" to the max!

SMALL is simple!

SMALL is cheap!

SMALL can be duplicated!

SMALL is easy to build and easy to operate!

You don't need a BIG domain and site doing 10,000 visitors per day. You don't need a BIG domain and site doing 100,000 visitors per day. All you need is a 1,000 SMALL domains and sites doing 100 visitors per day and you are in the traffic land major leagues with the big boys. That's the SECRET! Lots and lots of smalls! (notice smalls rhymes with malls) :).

Is getting 100 visitors a day on a domain that previously had zero traffic possible?

YES!!! You just have have to think and build small. Lots of "smalls" will become something "big". And the funny part is, as I've discovered, its as easy as 123, just like PPC, LOL.

HAVE A PROFITABLE DAY!

[Rob Sequin]

"Is getting 100 visitors a day on a domain that previously had zero traffic possible?"

MUCH easier said than done. It takes a lot of time to build a site with content that will draw 100 visitors. Then you convert 1 out of 100? Maybe you even convert 5 out of 100.

What are you getting per click, $0.10 maybe? That's $0.50 per day.

Say it took you one day a year to build and maintain that site that makes you $0.50 per day and say you can do this realistically for 200 days.

You just spent 200 days of your life, a whole working year, to make $100 per day.

So after a year's worth of work, you are making $36,500 a year.

Now subtract domain renewals, hosting, portfolio maintenance and other time and SMALL does not work.

Also, Google will penalize you for low performing CTR and that $0.50 per site will go down.

Sorry to be so cynical but I have done the SMALL way and it does not work.

Let's not be too optimistic about building traffic.

It's WAY WAY harder than it sounds.

[Ed]

I have to agree with Rob, and with that said Kevin makes a good point as well.

Building traffic with small site takes more effort then you think.

It's not only building the site and depending on the project this can take perhaps even more then a day to make a good site, as you need to find content, create content, optimize content for the search engines.

Optimizing your content thus doing On-Page SEO takes research and therefor time.

On top of that you have to spend time building backlinks, etc

Maintenance, monitoring SERPs.

So to benefit from the small makes big scenario you need to have LOTS of time if you're a one man operation and be able to organize efficiently to outsource different parts.

Kevin makes a good point but so does Rob, you just need to find a balance (Time versus budget) and an efficient plan of attack to launch a big amount of mini sites so to speak.

But i agree with the fact a lot of good domains sit on PPC pages without or virtual no traffic whilst they are good domains to build on and increase value when developed further.

I have been expanding to development as well, though with limited resources but the ball is rolling...

Earn revenue, use it to outsource...
And continue building your portfolio to actual websites instead of domains gathering dust on PPC.

It's a double edged sword that needs to be handled with due diligence.

Ed

[Motivational-Depot.com]

What I need is a monitization consultant that works on commission.

[Mike]

Interesting and long post and comments, but that is all kind of obvious. That's what webmasters do all the time, build and test and try to optimize, to get a higher income from their sites/domains. But other than that, was there some point in the post?

[Rob Sequin]

"That's what webmasters do all the time, build and test and try to optimize, to get a higher income from their sites/domains. But other than that, was there some point in the post?"

Yes. Hard to do for 100 domains. Also, hard to go from 1 out of 100 conversions to 2 out of 100 conversions just from development.

Also, google adsense will scale back your entire account if you have underperforming CTR so each new small site you develop that has lousy CTR can actually cause your revenue to decline.

I have lived it.