The very first step of an Internet marketing campaign is setting up a website, and the success (or failure) of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. You really should know what you want your site to accomplish, because if you don’t, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without setting specific goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

Normally a marketing website has to stimulate visitors to take some form of action. This can be filling out a form,so you or someone from your company can contact them. It can be joining a newsletter or just simply urge them to buy a product on the site. Several steps can be used to make sure a website is fully optimized for your visitors.

Of course the most simple method for finding out how your site is doing, is finding out how many visitors have visited the website. Most hosting accounts offer c-panel access, which includes a visitor statistics script like awstats. A month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities, is a good baseline measurement.

Keep in mind that just because hunderd of people have visited your site, it does not mean your site is successful. As said before, marketing websites are mostly designed to make the visitors actually do something there. Next the number of visitors, it is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This is called the conversion rate of the site, and it is an essential element of the efficiency of your website.

If one wants to calculate the conversion rate of a site, take the total number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action the site is set up for. If for example, there where 2,500 people visiting a site, and only 20 of them purchased a product, the site conversion rate equals 0.8%. To get this figure, take the number of visitors who have made a purchase and divide that figure by the total number of visitors. Then multiply that result by 100 (25 / 2000 X 100).

If you are doing ongoing affiliate promotions or promoting your own products, you should continue to improve your sales using split-testing software.
This way you can
.. test competing affiliate programs and find out which program is most profitable.
.. split-test your landing or home page to see which page converts better so you make more sales.
.. test your opt-in page so you build a bigger list.

GoTryThis is a great example of such software. In 2006 it was selected the Best Internet Marketing Product of the Year. GoTryThis will not only let you do split testing, but you can also track and cloak all of your links. Use it on your own site and learn what links people click on. This way you can optimize your site even further. Also use it in your advertising campaign and you will have live updated stats of which campaign is working for you and which campaign should be stopped.

In July 2006 GoTryThis accepted only 1500 customers to buy their “black hat” full options version. Now, for only a limited time, you can get your hands on one of the best tracking, cloaking and split testing software.