- The thin line between success and failure
- 2009-07-27: Marketing by numbers: I often feel the line between a roaring success and abject failure is very thin. Take the changes I made to a B&B website's front page a few days ago. They were fairly subtle, nothing major. Just a tweak of style, a little more warmth, a bit more of a textual hug for visitors.
- Our Google traffic for those who didn't already know our name has gone up 100%, and our conversions the same.
- In a key place, it can just be a word added or removed that makes the difference. The key is to know what to change especially since it's not all positive, make the wrong change and your Google position can drop, sometimes dramatically.
- That's why everything I do is a test, an experiment. So next time, I know what worked. And I do that all day every day. Years of testing. Lots of learning. Lots of knowledge. It makes getting out of bed easier to do .. I want to get in the office and check my lobster pots, see if I've caught anything.
- The good thing is, it might take just the right tweak in the right place to get your business to the next level. Tweaks are inexpensive. They might hold the key.
- It does make it interesting come invoice time. "So Mr Allsopp, you've charged me this amount, what did I get for my money?", "well, most days I spent 45 minutes working out what to do on your site, then actually doing it took maybe a minute".
- The thing is not to confuse activity with progress. You can work as hard as you like at Internet marketing, but if you're not doing the right things, you're wasting your time.
- And the difference between second page and first page is a matter of those subtleties and tweaks. Internet marketing snakes and ladders. Make the wrong tweak and it's a snake for you. Make the right tweak, and it's another ladder.
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