This is going to be a long one… but worth it…

It amazes me how hard people work in this business yet they are leaving money on the table every day, and probably quite a bit of money.

They work their butts off for many hours a day yet they skip one of the more important steps for making the most of their work or getting the the biggest return on their time investment.

What is it missing ingredient?

Tracking and testing.

As affilaites there is only so much we can do until we send our traffic to a affiliate program, but it’s enough to make a difference.

At the very least you could be tracking your website visitors, how they move and and even leave from your site. You could learn what content is most popular and create more of it. You might be able to understand why they leave your site and do something about it. You could discover how the traffic get’s to your site and ramp up promotion that works the best.

For blog owners, there are a couple fine plug-in’s for Wordpress that integrate Google Analytics into your site with a couple clicks of the mouse, providing you with incredible data about your site and how your visitors interact or do not interact with it.

The most productive tactic any webmaster can use, which few choose to do for some odd reason, is testing and tracking their ads. Your ads are how you connect your visitor to the affilaite program. Send visitor to program, if they buy, you make money. We all know this, but few seem to understand, they could be sending more potential customers with little extra work.

It’s simple really, if your ads convert at 2%, your sending 2% of your traffic to the affiliate program. For every 100 visitors, 2 will make it the sponsor. What if you double your ad conversions, you would double your traffic to the sponsor and in theory, double your income. Twice the income for the same work.

Do you even have a clue as to how your ads convert? You might be shockingly surprised.

The thing is, it’s doesn’t take that much work to multiply your ad clicks and increase your income. You put your ads in a ad tracking program such as the incredible free program, openads and let them run. Once set up, there is not that much work. You drop the ones with poor performance and let the higher ones run on full throttle. Add news one to test against the controls.

And It’s not just doubling or tripling your click-thurs and income, I’ve had plenty of banners that get a 10% click through rate or better.

You could say, “But golly gee, it would take me time to install and learn how to use the ad tracking program (whine..)”. Whine somewhere else. These same people that would whine are the same ones complaining they are not making enough money. Gee, wonder why?

Not to mention, once it’s set up and loaded with ads, how much work is there? Monitor the ads and switch out or add as needed. Would it be worth it?

Let’s be realistic here, when you started in this business, how much did you know? For most people, not much, it took time to learn how to make web pages, how to build free sites, how to submit, how to get traffic, blah, blah, blah. But yet they don’t want to take the time to learn and use one of the most important tools that could increase their income.

You spend time making sure your free site is done right so it gets listed and gets traffic don’t you? Other wise you get no traffic and you make no money. So why wouldn’t you make sure you ads are getting the most clicks they can? Same thing, no clicks, no money. People are missing part of the plan. What could be, the most important part of the plan.

Recently on one of the boards a new paysite owner was asking whether to use trials or not on his web site. Said he didn’t want to test them all… trying to take the easy way out. Course most of us do by nature.

Why wouldn’t you want to test each and every one? How are you going to know for sure which is really best? Opinions on a message board are just that, more often than not, they are guesses. Not to mention, what works for one site and their content, could very well NOT work for another program.

Going back to Google, they host an amazing webmaster tool called Web Site Optimizer and it’s free! With it you could test numerous price points and sales pages. Once set up, it runs for you and in the end tells you exactly (no guessing) what converts the best, or what makes the most from your traffic.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not to crazy about leaving my income in the hands of guesses and opinions.

Do I do all of the above? No, but I do most of it, thats what counts, I am in the game playing and I know it’s made a difference when those checks come in the mail.

The only question left is, What are you going to do?