Conversion is simply the number of people that have to see your website in order for you to get a sale. For example, at my own website, I get about 900 new visitors a day. Out of those 900 people, about 11 of them place an order. That means about 1 out of every 88 people that visits my website ends up purchasing my products and services. So 1 out of 88 is my conversion rate. And before you spend a whole bunch of money advertising your website, you should get a good idea of what your own conversion rate is. You can still be very successful without studying your conversion, but you will definitely make more money and waste less money by knowing your conversion rate.

Because if you study your conversion rate and you find out it’s really good and definitely acceptable to you, then it means you can pretty much stop working on that website and just focus on driving qualified traffic to it. And when I say “qualified”, that’s the same thing as “Targeted” traffic or leads like I described above. Qualified traffic just means that the group of people you are advertising to, is definitely interested in your type of product or service. And the reason you know your traffic is qualified is because they have expressed some sort of interest in your industry. Either by purchasing a magazine about your industry or by doing searches on search engines for your industry keywords. And of course, I’ll go more into detail about your industry keywords later in this course.

But to summarize what we just talked about in the two paragraphs above, there are two major areas to be aware of about your website. Just making sure you have a conversion rate that is profitable and then once you know your website has a profitable conversion rate, your focus is simply to drive qualified traffic(leads) to your website.

You may be asking how you can be sure if you have a profitable conversion rate. Just find out how much it costs you to get 100 visitors to your website. If you know it costs you 10 cents per visitor, then obviously you know it costs you $10 to get 100 new visitors to your website. Then you just need to find out how many people out of that 100 will purchase from you. Even if only 1 out of 100 visitors to your website placed an order from you, that would be a good conversion rate as long as you make at least $20 pure profit from each sale. One sale out of 100 leads doesn’t sound very good, but it’s actually perfect as long as you’re selling an item with a high mark-up. For instance, 1 out of 88 people that visits my website places an order from me. And my profit from each sale is about $80 and that’s very acceptable to me.

If you’re selling something for only $20 it’s more likely that you’ll get a better conversion than 1 out of 100 since a $20 product is considered a fairly small ticket price. If I was selling a $20 product I would like to see at least 1 out of 40 people place an order from me. But that’s just me.

The interesting thing about conversion is that you’ll actually get a greater conversion doing offline advertising than online. About 3% of the people who receive off-line letters end up ordering from the seller. But advertising that same product using a bulk emailing on the internet or just buy a bunch of traffic from a pop-up or pop-under company will only get about 1% of the people to buy. In the pages that follow, I’m going to show you some techniques that will bring that number up to about 2.5%. You’ll even be able to increase that number to 3% with a few of the advanced concepts you’re about to learn here.

The main reason marketers still prefer online advertising over off-line is because online ads are much less expensive so you actually end up getting more sales for your dollar in most cases. Off-line ads are expensive, but bring in serious results. These days it’s probably because there is much less competition in off-line ads. Everyone is putting their money into online ads, so it’s my opinion that your ad stands out better in off-line advertising. But it’s still often times too expensive to justify the high cost of off-line ads.