Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Year after year the internet becomes more predominant in attracting the dominant share of the marketing spend from small business. For the first time ever, in 2008 we saw the worldwide advertising spend on the internet surpass all other mediums

As small business demands greater returns for their advertising dollar and move more and more of their advertising spend to this medium, the internet is quickly becoming crowded and highly competitive.

Over the past 2-3 years costs for pay-per-click advertising (PPC) have more than doubled in most markets as the competition hots up for the popular keywords and phrases across all sectors.

The difference between a number 1 ranking and a number 10 ranking on Google can mean the difference between 60% of total search traffic for a particular keyword or phrase right down to 1% – this is what we mean when we talk about high visibility. This variance in the volume of visitors to your website based on your ranking could mean the difference of hundreds or even thousands of leads to your business every year.

Whether your website traffic comes via PPC advertising, banner ads, links, search engines or a raft of other channels, the challenge facing all businesses marketing on the internet is to convert as much of this traffic as possible.

Conversion is the single most important internet marketing metric. Expressed as a percentage, it is defined as the ability of your website or blog to make visitors to your site take a predetermined action. Facilitating this “call to action” should be the focus of your internet marketing efforts.

If we use the example of a Business Consultant, a call to action may be encouraging a visitor to fill in their name and email address into a form on your website in return for a free 2 hour consultation. If you have a 100 people visit your site and you get 10 people to fill in the form, then you have a conversion rate of 10%.

Simply achieving an increase in your conversion rate can mean an increased ROI without any additional spend. As the competition increases, the challenge is to remain competitive by at least maintaining your conversion rate or examining ways to increase it.

If we look at your website/blog in isolation for a moment, you can easily work out your cost per lead based by adding all your total costs for running and maintaining the site plus any costs involved in your offer (such as your opportunity cost for a free 2 hour consultation or the premium on your giveaway), and divide this by the total number of leads.

Higher conversion rates (leaving all things constant) will result in lower cost per lead; the lower the cost per lead the greater the profit and the higher the return.

During this series on website traffic conversion strategies, we are going to examine a range of low cost and no cost conversion tactics that you can apply immediately to your internet marketing.

Next post on Increase Your Website Traffic category – Running the numbers

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary