StartupBooster.com » Success

51 Reasons Why You Should Not Be Afraid to Fail or to Make Mistakes

Guna — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:55:15 +0000

Many people don’t realize that they are making a mistake when they don’t make any mistakes. Making mistakes and not being afraid of failure should be in your blood if you are an entrepreneur. If you don’t make mistakes, then you are not really trying hard enough to be successful. This indeed is a mistake on it’s own. How could you understand your potentials if you don’t try hard enough?

I’ve collected a few quotes that I thought you should read to motivate you to try a little harder. Don’t let the fear of making mistakes stop you from achieving higher success. Making money on the internet is not that difficult but I can guarantee you that you will not make money on your first attempt unless you’ve paid for a money making system and follow it step by step… even that doesn’t work for many people because they expect to make money overnight and also they are afraid of making mistakes!

Oprah Winfrey once said, “your mistake does not define who you are, you are your possibilities.” Your success will indeed define who you are. In order to get there, you must make many mistakes.

You should read my previous post on “Why Your Blog Will Fail” as well. It tells you what you need to do to be successful in making money on the internet.

See below for many more similar quotes that came from successful people… they were not afraid to try and they were not afraid to make mistakes… you shouldn’t be either.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw
Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. – Andrew V. Mason
After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. – Sophia Loren
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. – Niels Bohr
Any fool can try to defend his mistakes – and most fools do – but it gives one a feeling of nobility to admit one’s mistakes. By fighting, you never get enough, but by yielding, you get more than you expected. – Lawrence G. Lovasik
As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes. – Mel Brooks
As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not everyaction will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right. – Jack Canfield
Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can’t accept your imperfections, that’s their fault. – Dr. David M. Burns
Be thankful for your mistakes. They will teach you valuable lessons. – Author Unknown
Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones of genius. – Elbert Hubbard
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams
Don’t argue for other people’s weaknesses. Don’t argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it–immediately.Stephen Covey – Stephen Covey
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. – Franklin P. Jones
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. – Mahatma Gandhi
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge. – Igor Stravinsky
I have to say I’ve made many mistakes, and been humbled many, many times. But you know what? It’s never too late to learn. – Kathy Ireland
If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner. – Tallulah Bankhead
If I had my life to live over… I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. – Nadine Stair
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake. – F. Wikzek
If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down. – Mary Pickford
If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not taking risks, and that means you’re not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more changes to learn and win. – John W. Holt, Jr.
In the game of life it’s a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season. – Bill Vaughan
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. – Winston Churchill
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something. – Ornette Coleman
It’s always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile. – Garry Marshall
Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it. – Cullen Hightower
Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.– Weston H. Agor
Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from. – Al Franken
Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience. – Denis Waitley
Mistakes are the portals of discovery. – James Joyce
Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on? – Peter McWilliams
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. – Oscar Wilde
“Picking up the pieces when they fall” begins a journey to living anew with love, courage, and hope for a bright future. – Steve Brunkhorst
Preparation for success means that any failure you meet is seen as an opportunity to learn from mistakes. Remember that failure is your best teacher. – Byron Pulsifer
Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they’re going to make mistakes. – Ross Perot
She had an unequalled gift… of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. – Henry James
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit. – Conrad Hilton
The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy. – Malcolm S. Forbes
The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake. – Nelson Boswell
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. – Elbert Hubbard
The man who achieves makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all – doing nothing. – Benjamin Franklin
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. – William Connor Magee
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. – John Powell
The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake. – Meister Eckhart
There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one’s errors. It not only clears up the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by the error. – Dale Carnegie
To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all. – Peter McWilliams
When you make a mistake, admit it. If you don’t, you only make matters worse. – Ward Cleaver
When you make a mistake, don’t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power. – Hugh White
Whenever you make a mistake or get knocked down by life, don’t look back at it too long. Mistakes are life’s way of teaching you. Your capacity for occasional blunders is inseparable from your capacity to reach your goals. – Og Mandino
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. – Henry C. Link
Your mistake does not define who you are…you are your possibilities. – Oprah Winfrey

These quotes were taken from The Great Inspirational Quotes website.

Entrepreneur: Know The Game Your Are Playing

Guna — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:08:52 +0000

Cover of the book mentioned

I am sure all of you know that in every junction, the decisions you make is essential to the success of your business. You have to make the right decisions to compete with other businesses; you have to make the right decisions to make it through the initial startup stage. You have to know the game you are playing…

Are you playing the right game?

How do you know you are playing the right game? Are you successful with your business and are you satisfied with where you are? Do you know what you need to do so you can be successful with your business? Do you know whom you need to friend with and whom you need to strategize against? Like I said in my opening paragraph, these are all the questions that go through the minds of a typical Executive or a Manager on a daily basis. You need to know at all times, if you change the way you provide a service or if you add an incentive for the customer, how will that change your game and how will it change the game for the market participants. Now who are the market participants? These are your suppliers, competitors, customers and affiliates.

I recommend you read the book “The Right Game – Use Game Theory to Shape Strategy” by Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff. The Game Theory explains the importance of focusing on others. In this book, the author uses game theory to explain and map the interdependencies among the participants in your marketplace. It is important for you to understand who is playing the game with you and what values they add to the game. If you have all of that figured out, you should be able to make strategic moves that will benefit you or even the whole industry.

For example, let’s say you operate a blog. Your blog provides information on all of the new movies as they are released. It is an established blog and you are able to get in front of the line to get real-time interview with the stars. However, there are about 5 other sites that do the same thing. One day you woke up and decided you want to change the game. You want to gain a higher market share and provide more information. So you take the steps to understand the current marketplace. You spend time understanding the value provided by other sites. You spend time understanding the audience. You spend time understanding the success rate of getting an interview with a star.

Once you have all of this information in front of you, you can use Game Theory to map it all out. You can give points to each possible move. Your moves can be to go aggressive or try to partner with other sites. Your aggressive move can be something like offering an incentive for your customer such as free movie passes or coup0ns for snacks. You can also give your customers access to live interviews. Introduce something that will put your competitors at a disadvantage. Before you do this, you need to figure out how they will react to this. Are your competitors large enough to provide the same kind of incentives? In your mapping exercise, you need to map all possible scenarios so you can figure out the best move that will either place you in a better position than where you are today or it will place the hold industry in a better position. You probably won’t want to make a move that will hurt your business.

Once you map it all out, you should be able to decide which move will make you even more successful. This sort of exercise is much better than holding status quo. As an Executive or a Manager, you need to always think about this. You need to know the game you are playing and you need to know what moves you have in your fingertips at all times.

You should read my previous post on “getting to know your competitions.” This story should help you identify your opponents well.

Please let me know if you have any views on this. Thank you.

Blogging: Why Your Blog Will Fail

Guna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:23:54 +0000

Now that you are here and reading my post, I am sure your blog will not be one of them that fails. However, please don’t take this comment lightly. As everything in life, you have to work for it and you’ve got to rise above your competitions.

I will give you $100 US if you guess how many blogs are out there on the internet and how many new blogs are started on a daily basis. I would say there are millions of blogs out there and hundreds if not thousands of blogs emerge daily. Now, many of these blogs go unnoticed. No one hear about it and not many cares about it. However, many people will continue to try and they will continue to copy what others are doing. Of course, they will fail and move on because only a handful will survive to be successful.

Now, how do you become a successful blogger and how do you make sure your blog is successful? Well the number one recipe for blogs to be successful is to communicate with your audience.

You need to learn to write for your audience rather than writing for the sake of writing articles. Many people put together a Wordpresss blog overnight. Then they are excited about their new blog because they too believe they will be able to make the six figure income that many bloggers enjoy.

First of all, when you start a blog, please do not dream that you are about to make a six figure income right away. If it is that easy, then every blogger will be successful. I will be honest with you. I do not make much money with my blog and I am not aiming to make a six figure from this website in the short term. As I mention in my profile, this blog is to pass my time by helping others. I am making enough to pay my bills – which is really important for sustainability. You need to make enough to maintain your blog for a long time so you can improve it on a regular basis. When you maintain it for a long time and provide value added content for your audience, you will eventually make it work…

Going back to communications, you must know your audience and you must learn to communicate with your audience from the beginning. If you don’t learn to interact with your first few visitors, there is no point in continuing your blog because you do not know how to keep those visitors on your site. Don’t forget to read my previous blog post on “getting to know your visitors.”

Blogging: How To Communicate With Your Visitors?

Now picture this. You are in a football stadium and you are one of the 30,000 visitors that day. You start screaming about your new blog and start talking about your ideas and what you have to share. The person next to you start copying you and start talking about his/her website. Imagine now that the third, the fourth and everyone else next to you start doing the same thing. Now imagine more than 30% or about 10,000 fans in the stadium start to shout about their blog and their ideas. It wouldn’t make much sense to the other 70% of the audience would it? They will probably go crazy and won’t believe any one of you. They will probably start ignoring you and they will probably never want to see you again… Well it is no different on the internet. Many people are just shouting out what they have to say instead of speaking to their audience.

Now imagine that you are still in that stadium and the game won’t be over for another 2 hours. So you sit back and do some homework for 10 minutes. You first decide what you want to talk about and then you decide whom you want to talk to. All those 30% of the people are still shouting but you decided to talk directly to a few people around you and start offering them some assistance. They are now engaged. They are listening to you. They want to provide you with some feedback and contribute to your success. Now few people about 50 feet from you see a group gathering around you, so they make their way over to you… your fans are just growing because you are building a momentum and you are not just speaking, you are speaking to those people around you… before you know it, you will have hundreds of people around you compared to your counterparts who continues to shout without any results.

Well in the blogging world, this scenario holds. You will have to understand your business and then you need to know what you are offering to people. Once you have figured this out, try to leverage it by working with your audience. Talk to them individually or as a group. Gain an audience at a time and eventually you will be successful.

I would love to get your feedback on this story. I would love to know how you are doing with your blog (if you are a blogger). I would like to share your stories with my readers. Thank you in advance.

Entrepreneurs: Believe It or Not, You Are Always Right

Guna — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:29:05 +0000

This is something that has been on my mind for the last few weeks as I personally am preparing to make a few changes in my life. More details to come in a few weeks but today I want to tell you all that you are always right. To quote a famous quote, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”, said Henry Ford. Henry was right and many people continue to refer to what he had to say.

Somehow you always seems know to do the right thing, to make the right decision or to make the right move that will shape your path to a successful future. As an entrepreneur, you need to belief in yourself. You need to believe that you are always right. You need to believe that if you make a decision, good or bad, it will always enhance your life. There is no such thing as going back in life; everything you do, good or bad, is always moving you forward.

Changing your mindset to believe in yourself will have a significant impact on achieving your goals. According to many psychologists, we act and perform based on our beliefs. Therefore, it is true that if you think positive all the time, your life will be much better.

However, even with all of these studies and reports, many people continue to fail everyday. They fail because they misguide their inner beliefs; they doubt themselves. Doubting your own inner feelings and thoughts will always misguide you and make you a failure.

For example, if you think something is not possible or it is beyond your ability, then you are not going to spend all of your energy and time to make it successful. You will hesitate to commit your time, your money and your knowledge. Many people think they are too weak to be successful like other well known successful people like Steve Jobs at Apple Computer.

Since we are speaking about Steve Jobs, I want to let you know that I still listen to what Steve has to tell the Graduating Students at Stanford University on June 12, 2005. Anytime you are on a crossroad and is having a hard time making a decision, just listen to his speech. Steve told the graduating class three stories from his life. I suggest you listen to it if you haven’t already.

It is time for you to change your mindset if feel like you are not making any progress in life. If you are doing the same thing over and over again, then nothing is going to happen. So here is what you need to do:

develop your goal – where do you want to see yourself in 3 years?
map out an action plan to get there – whom do you need to talk to and what do you need to do to get there?
do a reality check on your beliefs. Do you believe that you can achieve that goal? Then believe that you will be successful in every one of the actions you’ve outlined on step 2.
so from today, start thinking positively about all of this and go for it. Never settle for a “no” or never settle when you fail until you reach your end goal. You will be successful.

I hope this short posting helps you become successful. I hope you will start trusting yourself, your guts, your inner thoughts and your feelings. You can master your own dreams – go get them…

How to Make More Money: Making Money With Your Website Part 4

Guna — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:20:32 +0000

This is part four of a seven part series to show you how you can make more money with your website without actually making substantial changes to your website.

Please don’t forget to read the previous chapters:

Part 1: How to Make More Money: Find Rich Pages within Your Website

Part 2: How to Make More Money: Understanding the Visitors Coming to Your Rich Pages

Part 3: How to Make More Money: Improving the Content on the Rich Pages

So by now, you will know which pages are the “rich pages” and you would also know why they are rich. You also have up to date content on your pages so that the visitors can really benefit from those pages. Your content must add value for your visitors. You need to give them something that makes them feel satisfied for visiting your page.

The next step in this excise is to now really capture that visitor so that you can make a few dollars – to make a sale or to capture their information.

How to Make More Money: Monetizing Your Rich Pages

There are many things you may want to gain out of visitors reaching your page; however, I am going to focus on monetizing from your page in this section. This is where I will discuss a little about how you can make more money from the same amount of visitors you have been receiving in the past. I will discuss other opportunities, such as lead capturing, you have with the visitors in the sections to follow this.

First of all, you need to decide if you are going to take full advantage of the visitor and make money right away such as to make a sale on the page, get them to click on ads or refer them to an affiliate program.

If you are going to use advertisements such as Google Adsense, you will probably want to consider removing the default ads you have for this page and then play around with different fonts, colors and sizes for your ad units. In one of my previous articles, Testing is Crucial to Maximize Your Revenue, I’ve emphasized how important it is for you to test your ad placements over and over again before you settle down on one. This is how you will know if you are making the most of that page. Therefore, like I said above, remove the default ads for this page and customize an ad unit just for this page. Place the ad units in different locations within your page. Try different colors and sizes to see if it gets users attention.

You can also use other affiliate programs, pay-per-sale or pay-per-lead programs as well. You will just have to again test the placement of these advertisements.

The best way to make more money is to sell your own product to your visitors. It can be an e-book to anything you prefer to sell. This is best because you get to keep all of the money. You also have the opportunity to write your content in a way that can lead to the sale of the product. In other words, you have more options to choose the right words to capture the visitor’s attention to buy your product. When I say “right words”, you should know which words I am referring to by now. These are the words the most visitors are searching in order to arrive on your page. This is the research you have done in the previous chapters. You should use those keywords to really drive the visitor home.

All of you will have different ways of monetizing your pages. In this section, all I wanted to show you is that there are opportunities to maximize your revenue potentials. Imagine that you are getting a lot of people to your page but none are clicking on ads. This is a waste of their time and your time. Most likely they didn’t find what they were looking for. Maybe ads aren’t the best way to make money on these pages. You may want to consider switching your monetization method to something else, like capturing the lead or selling a product. This way can probably get more attention from the visitors than just by having ad units for them to click through.

I hope this section intrigued your creative mind to think creatively about placing ads or selling a product. Give it a try; I am sure you will make more money than today from these pages. Again, use the keywords to offer the visitor a product or a service. Most likely they will click through to find out more information about that product or service.

How to Make More Money: Making Money With Your Website Part 3

Guna — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:19:22 +0000

This is part three of a seven part series to show you how you can make more money with your website without actually making substantial changes to your website.

Please don’t forget to read the previous chapters:

Part 1: How to Make More Money: Find Rich Pages within Your Website

Part 2: How to Make More Money: Understanding the Visitors Coming to Your Rich Pages

So by now you would have figured out which pages are receiving most of the visitors and why the visitors are coming to a specific page. This is the crucial piece of information most webmasters forget to understand. Therefore, they fail to maximize the potential for their website. You can only serve your customer well by knowing what they are looking for.

How to Make More Money: Improving the Content on the Rich Pages

You shouldn’t take it for granted when one or more of your pages are getting visitors on a regular basis. Now that you know what the visitors are looking for and why they are ending up on your page, you need to do your best to update your content to keep it current.

Over the years, I’ve been to many pages that were last updated 3 to 5 years ago. They do well in search engines but once you get to the page, you will immediately realize that the content is old. The content will be out of date or not relevant for your need. An example would be, a product review or a “how to” article that was written few years ago. At that time, the article could have served it purpose, so it received back links and recognition from other bloggers and content writers. Therefore, the search engines ranked those pages high. However, the same “how to” article or the product review article may be out of date today because the same product itself could be out of date. The product could have multiple versions and the version that was reviewed on the page could be for an older version.

The reason I want to elaborate more on this point is that if you have content that is doing well, you need to pay more attention to that content. You need to make sure that content is updated regularly so that when users come to that page, it is up to date and that it forces the user to read the entire content. It should convince the user to take actions that will benefit you in a way to help your bottom line (your income).

So how do you go about updating your content?

Research and find out if your content is still valid today. If you content is a “review” of a product or a strategy on “how to” do something, make sure you are talking about the latest technology or the latest product. You wouldn’t want to talk about Friendster or MySpace when everyone else is talking about Twitter and Facebook to improve your social networking. Make addendums to your posting with new content.

If your content is updated regularly for that “rich page”, you would also continue to improve the search engine ranking for that “rich page” because search engines tend to love fresh content. So there is no harm in updating your content regularly.

If your content is not updated regularly, you will lose that customer within the first few seconds. Once that visitor is gone, he/she will probably never return to your page again. So spend time reviewing your site regularly and pay attention to the “rich pages.”

How to Make More Money: Making Money with Your Website – Part 2

Guna — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:58:27 +0000

This is part two of a seven part series to show you how you can make more money with your website without actually making substantial changes to your website. Please read part one, How to Make More Money: Part 1 – Find Rich Pages within Your Website.

Now that you have figured out the “rich pages” within your website, you can now proceed to understand why they are the “rich pages” so you can maximize their true potential. You will need to understand why you are getting regular visitors to this site and where they are coming from. You need to know what will fulfill their quest.

How to Make More Money: Understanding the Visitors Coming to Your Rich Pages

In order to fulfill your visitor, you need to know their need. In order to understand this, you will have to dig a little deeper with your webpage analytical tool. As I mentioned before, I use Google Analytics. I will show you what you have to do next.

The above image is a screen capture of my “top content” on my website. It shows you which web page has received the most visitors for the day. It also shows you how many page views each page had. As discussed in part one, this is how you identify your top content.

Now if you click on each one of those links, you will get more detailed drilled down of the page view patterns.

As you can see from the above image, for each “rich page”, it shows you a lot more information about the visitor’s behavior. It tells you if your page is sticky or not. It tells you where your visitors came from and what sort of keywords they’ve searched for before they reached your page. The links on the right hand side of the above image, will give you individual pages with more detailed information.

For example, the “entrance path” page will tell you the pages within (internal) your website that referred the visitor to this particular page. The “entrance sources” page will tell you which external sites referred the visitor to this particular page. The “entrance keywords” page will tell you which keywords the visitor searched for in order to arrive on your page. It goes on and on but these 3 elements are key to your analysis.

The keywords tell you what they are interested in. The referral sites tell you the kind of websites that are referring visitors to this particular page and most of the time why. All of this information will reveal to you more and more about “what the visitor need from your website.” Your job is to make sure when the visitor leaves your page, they feel fulfilled. That is how you make money and the sections that are to follow over the next few days will show you how you can do that.

The “bounce rate” from the website analytical tool is an important number to keep an eye on. This tells you how many people coming to this page bounces off to “other sites” instead of visiting pages within your website. In other words, what percentage of people leave your website right after they visited this page. A high bounce rate number means a lot of people are fleeing to other sites. A low bounce rate number means your visitors like your content and they are going to other pages within your site. You would want to keep the number low if you can, unless your page is referring to other affiliate programs or other sites where you will be paid a referral fee.

How to Make More Money: Making Money with Your Website – Part 1

Guna — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:29:05 +0000

All of you must wonder at times how you can make more money with your website. It is possible and I am going to show you how you can make more money. I am going to guarantee you that by the time you finish reading this seven part series, your website will be making more money than what it is making today.

This is the first of a seven part series to show you how you can make more money with your website without actually making substantial changes to your website. In other words, I am going to show you how you can make money with what you already got.

Yes believe it or not, if you are not already doing what I am about to tell you, you are really missing out on some incremental revenue from your website. It is easy but you must follow the steps.

How to Make More Money: Part 1 – Find Rich Pages within Your Website

There are multiple ways to make money with a visitor once you capture their attention. You can sell them a product or a service, you can refer them to an affiliate, you can show ads for them to click through, you can refer them to another page within your site, you can capture their email address, etc.

In order for you to capture their attention, you must provide them with what they are looking for. A user may end up on your site through a search engine or referred by another relevant site. It is hard to predict where people are going to come from for your new content but in this series I am going to show you how you can make more money with existing content. This really is the established content.

The content you already have on your website is a treasure that many webmasters fail to understand. The content you already have, especially good relevant content, will have been indexed by search engines and linked by many other websites. This means these pages will receive regular visitors from various web pages including search engines. Therefore, you can actually predict the amount of traffic and the kind of users you would see on these pages. This is why I said earlier that these pages are a treasure that many fail to embrace.

On your website, you need to be able to identify pages that are receiving regular page views. Not all of your content will receive the same amount of page views. Few days ago, I’ve discussed about how to get to know your visitors. I suggest you take a look at that article as well.

Using Traffic Analytical tools like Google Analytics, you can identify and track activities on your website. I use Google Analytics to track my website activities. It is free and it provides me with everything I need for now. You should be able to tell which pages within your website are getting the most attention and why it is getting the most attention. You should be able to track the keywords that are driving the visitors to certain pages.

Like I said, I use Google Analytics so I am going to be referring to terms that are used in Google Analytics but it should be the same for other ones as well. So please bear with me and I apologize if a specific terminology is not the same in the analytical tool you may be using.

Once you are in your analytical dashboard, you would usually see a section called “Content.” When you click on that link, you should be able to see another link for “top content” within your website. Don’t look at daily report or weekly report when you do this. Try to look at a monthly report so you can really tell which page is getting the most page views – the top content.

As you can see from the above image, this is my top 10 content pages. They are ranked from one to ten. You can look at this in many different forms but I usually look at them in the URL form so it is easy for me to tell which URL is doing well so I can quickly go to that page if I have to.

For many of you, the # 1 top content page may be the main page of your website. It is the case for me as well. I think you should ignore that for now and look for other top content pages within your website. Look for pages with high page views. These are usually pages that are sticky and users tend to share them with their peers. These pages are the “rich pages” that we are looking for. Some call them the “money page.” However you call it, these pages can generate you more money than any other page on your website including your homepage in many cases. These pages are recognized by other websites and search engines. They are going to be referring visitors to your site on a regular basis. It is up to you, how you want to monetize these pages.

So make a list of up to 5 pages that you believe are the “rich pages” so you can use them in part two of this series. You can choose more if you like but it is important that you only choose a few that you can actually manage to improve to make more money.

Congratulations, you have now identified one of the hidden treasures of making money online. Look forward to part two this week to learn how you can make more money with the pages you have just identified.

How to Get to Know Your Visitors: Data Collection and Analysis

Guna — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:26:00 +0000

Everyday you receive hundreds of visitors from all over the world. You can’t shut down your website while you go to sleep and then reopen it like you would with a retail business. Who are these people and why are they coming to your website? If you don’t have answers to these questions, you are missing out on the opportunity to make more money. In other words, you are flushing money down the toilet and you don’t even know about it.

Few days ago, I’ve discussed why it is important to know your customer to be successful. In this article, I am going to discuss how you can get to know your customer/audience.

With features such as the comment system, feedback forms and or user registration on your website, you may already know about some of your visitors. This is a very small number compared to the number of visitors you don’t get to interact with. These are the folks that you are really missing out on. They are your true potentials that will allow you to make lots of money. They hold the key and you need to do everything you can to get to know them. In order to be an effective marketer, you need to be proactive and get to know your audience.

By getting to know your audience, you can improve your content, you can shift your sales pages, you can introduce new products and affiliate programs, you can improve your ratio of conversation, you can improve your marketing strategy and eventually you can make more money.

In order to understand your audience, you can take the approach to collect all possible data about them and then analyze the data to improve your game. Therefore, I will take you through data collection in three steps: one to collect useful data with existing tools, collect data using statistical analysis and finally go one step beyond to get data directly from the visitors. This article will only focus on collecting data. In the near future, I will elaborate on how you can use this information to more than double the amount of money you make today.

Collect Data with Existing Tools

Like I said above, you already have a few means to collect data on users that visit your site. Most of these data is collected in the backend system you may be using. For example, if you run a blog on wordpress, your wordpress system will collect information on those who leave comments, feedbacks and user registration. This data is very important because this tells you the kind of people that you have successfully converted to participate on your site.

Comments

You have to be engaged with your users to successfully build a profitable website. You need to follow the comments that are left behind by visitors. You should respond to comments and sometimes you should take their comment and generate content from it. You should then give the credit to the user for providing you with an idea to generate that content. This will allow you to learn more about existing users but it will also encourage new users to participate.

User Registration

If your site allows user registration, it will allow you to collect as much data as you want about that user. Many websites tend to keep the user registration forms short so they can encourage users to register. However, once they register, most websites allow users to update their profile, etc. This is where you can get more detail about users. This information will help you to target your marketing efforts.

Feedback

Many sites have feedback forms on their website. I am not sure how many of them take advantage of the feedback they receive from users. If you don’t have a feedback form or a contact us form, make sure you create one. Not a lot of people will send feedback but those who choose to send feedback, you will definitely get lots of useful information that you can take advantage of.

Statistical Analysis

If you are not using a traffic analytical tool such at the Google Analytics, you should get one right away. Most of these tools are free to begin with; hence you should take advantage of it. This sort of tool provides you with a lot more information about visitor patterns. They provide you with information far beyond what you may need to improve your marketing strategy. I am going to focus on a few key features of these tools so you get a sense of what to look for.

Source: Robert Robles

Traffic Source

Knowing where your visitors are coming from is important so you can focus more and more on improving the strategy to drive even more people from the same source. This is where you find out if your marketing strategy is successful in driving visitors to your site. If you spend time promoting your website on Twitter, you will see the amount of traffic coming from Twitter with these analytical tools. This information tells you the interests of your audience.

Keyword/Search Term

This is the best tool to find out the interests of your visitors. If people are coming from search engines, you should be able to track down the keywords they searched for before they reached your site. This piece of information is “key” because you can continue to focus on improving your content so you can drive more people to your website. This tells you which keywords are working for you and which aren’t. Knowing this information, allows you to focus on improving the ones that are not working for you.

Time on site/Bounce Rate/Loyalty

Finally this information tells you how much they love your site! So all of the above tools provide you with information as to who they are and where they come from. This information tells you if your website is sticky or not. If you find that the numbers low for these three key elements, you need to make adjustments to your website and the way you present your content. Lots of people may be visiting your site, but if they don’t stick around to read what you have to say, then you are wasting your time.

Content/Page Views

In order for you to distinguish between what is working and what is not working on your site, you need to dig into users interest a little bit further. This tool will tell you where the users are spending more time within your website. This tool will provide you with information that you can take advantage of to improve the content on your site. If you see users spending more time on one particular page within your site, you may want to consider changing the design and look of other pages OR work on improving contents on other pages. In other words, you can at least find out what sort of information on your site is drawing the most attention.

The above are just a few key features of analytical tools. You can use other features if you wish but the above features should be sufficient to let you know what is working on your site and what is not working. It will also tell you why people are coming to your site.

Get Data Directly From Your Audience using Polls, Surveys and Other Features

As your business grows, you may have the need to get to know your visitors even more. In order to get more details, you can implement the following tools.

Source: 6Smarketing

Polls

Polls are quick and are painless for people to complete. It usually takes a few minutes for someone to complete a polling question. Therefore this approach is easy to implement and probably will have more participants. You can choose how often you want to run a poll on your site to better understand your audience. You can plan out a polling strategy that spans our over a number of months. Then hit the users with a series of questions every week (or however you prefer) that will better inform you of who they are and what they are looking for once you’ve completed the full questionnaire.

Surveys

Surveys are sometimes difficult to pull through. In my experience, it is very difficult to get people to participate on a survey because it takes more time for them to complete a survey than a poll. However, a survey can be targeted and it will provide you with the best information once completed. You should plan out your survey so it will convince the user to complete it. You should try to keep it short in order to increase participation. You should also think about giving away a free product in return for them to complete a survey. This will motivate the visitors to participate.

On Site Features

With Web 2.0, it is very simple for you to create features that are embedded within your site that will allow user interaction. By following the user interaction, coupled with statistical analysis of content served, you can collect a lot of information about users. You can build features that will fulfill your need to improve the game. For example, if you want to know what sort of products and services will better serve your audience, you may want to build an interactive tool that asks for people to click on products they like. By collecting that data, you will know which product ranks to the top. Once you have that information, you can either create a product that you can sell on your site or signup for an affiliate program and offer that product on your site.

The intension of this article is to provide you with a quick glimpse of available tools to get to know your audience. The features and tools explained in this article are just to get you started. You can be creative and come up with many other features that will help you improve your marketing strategy and eventually allow you to make lots of money with your website.

Entrepreneur: Know Your Customer Better to be Successful

Guna — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:15:19 +0000

If you don’t know your customer, then you don’t have your priorities set for your business. In other words, you don’t know your business. Knowing your customer better must be ranked to the top of your priority list if you want to be successful in your business.

It is not just you. Many business owners, including online businesses, tend to believe that they know their customers. They don’t do any analytical work to actually make the conclusion. They just guess. To be successful in business, you must avoid making decisions with you gut instincts. Yes gut instincts may work but if you couple that with pragmatic analysis of your customers, then you will make the best decision.

Why should you know your customer better?

Respond to their needs

How could you respond to your customer’s need if you don’t know what they want? If you don’t respond to their need then they are going to move on to someone else that can provide them with what they are looking for. Especially for an online business, this is very important because a typical customer will have multiple options with a click of a mouse. Therefore, it is very easy for them to move on from you to someone else.

Respond to your sales pattern

You may have products or affiliate programs that aren’t selling as much as they should. If you don’t do your homework to find out who is buying and what sort of products or services they are buying from you, how could you really decide on adding new products and services? There may be one product that is making you good income for you but if you don’t know who is buying that product, you can’t really make an effort to target the same group of audience to further enhance the sales.

Stop Chasing for New Ones

Many people spend time chasing new customers because they don’t know how to retain the ones they get everyday. This is a huge problem. Why would you spend money and time chasing new customers when you can simply make small changes within your existing website or business to grow your dedicated customer base? It is very simple to make adjustments to the customer’s needs and retain a visitor when they come to your site than to chase for new ones.

So the above points provide a quick summary of why you should get to know your customers but how do you get to know your customers? Well there are many ways to get to know your customers. You can do this by asking your customers to complete a survey, an interview or a feedback form. You can also use traffic analytical tools or hire an outside market research firm to do the work for you. There are many options available for you, especially if you are an online business. Online businesses can take advantage of existing automated tools to track the visitors and their activities.

Once you get to know your customers, you can make necessary adjustments by testing few different scenarios to retain your customers. You may have read my post, testing is crucial to maximize the profits, which explained why you may be missing out on opportunities to make more money with existing customers. Test it again and again to make sure you are hitting the right target and that you are making the most of your business.

The goal here is to understand your customer better so you can fulfill their needs and make them loyal to your business. This way you can avoid chasing for new customers all the time to make your business profitable. Your loyal customers will refer many other loyal customers to you. Therefore, by satisfying your customers, your business will grow on its own.

StartupBooster.com » Success

51 Reasons Why You Should Not Be Afraid to Fail or to Make Mistakes

Related Posts

Entrepreneur: Know The Game Your Are Playing

Related Posts

Blogging: Why Your Blog Will Fail

Related Posts

Entrepreneurs: Believe It or Not, You Are Always Right

Related Posts

How to Make More Money: Making Money With Your Website Part 4

Related Posts

How to Make More Money: Making Money With Your Website Part 3

Related Posts

How to Make More Money: Making Money with Your Website – Part 2

Related Posts

How to Make More Money: Making Money with Your Website – Part 1

Related Posts

How to Get to Know Your Visitors: Data Collection and Analysis

Related Posts

Entrepreneur: Know Your Customer Better to be Successful

Related Posts