You’d be surprised the number of folks who go through their Internet marketing day without a clue of anything that’s going on around them other than whether or not they’ve made a sale. If you’re going to be able to optimize your business, you must track everything that you do. This article is going to cover some of the basic items that you should be tracking. While this is by no means all inclusive, it will give you a good starting point for getting a feel for what’s really going on with your business.

The first thing you should be tracking is the content that you’re using to get people to your sales page or web site. The reason for this is simple. You need to know what ads, articles, or whatever it is that you’re using to get people to your site, are working. For example, let’s say that you write three articles each day that you submit to article directories, have an autoresponder series that sends people to your sales page and also send out solo ezine ads. Each day you make two sales, but you have no idea where they are coming from. By tracking each item separately, you might find that your articles and solo ads are bringing you all of your sales while your autoresponder series is not performing at all. This will give you the info that you need to make changes in your autoresponder series in order to improve it.

You should also be tracking and testing your sales page itself. To do this, you should split test it against another version of that page, maybe with a different headline to start. Since headlines are responsible for about 80% of your sales, split testing two different headlines would be a good place to start. This alone could increase your conversion percentage by a percent or more.

Of course that brings us to conversions. You should always be tracking what your conversion percentage is. If you put up a sales page and you’re converting at a tenth of a percent, that probably means that there is a lot of room for improvement. That doesn’t mean that just because you’re converting at 3% that you can stop tracking. Percents can change even if your sales page doesn’t change. The market itself might change. Maybe a better product has come out which is taking sales away from you. So tracking conversions is always important.

These are the basic things you should be tracking and testing. They are by no means all inclusive, but this will give you a good start as far as getting your business to the point where you are actually maximizing your profit.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim