You cannot know if you are successful unless you have defined what “success” means to you. Maybe you are looking for new customers, or maybe you are trying to increase the average amount of sales per customer. Or if you have a community-based site you may simply be looking for more people to be involved in a project (rousing energy for community-based projects can be more difficult than closing a sale!).
No one needs a web site. Businesses were perfectly successful before the web came along. There were auctions before eBay, bookstores before Amazon, and you could even get a mail order bride before sites like Match.com and Lavalife came along. A web site should help your business, not just act as a time sink. You need to determine where your web site can automate tasks and allow you to manage your time more effectively.
You need to work towards achieving the right milestones at the right time. Everything that you do to your site should be to either:
- fix an existing problem
- improve your client’s experience with the site (and therefore with your business)
Avoid adding new features to your web site just because they are cheap to add; instead save up for the features that are really going to make a difference to the user experience. Solutions are not always easy to quantify. By deciding how you will measure success before implementing changes you will be able to determine whether or not your changes were “effective.” This how part of evaluating success is referred to as “metrics.”
In the six-page workbook, Measuring Up, you will learn about three free analytics tools to measure your success and five powerful tips that will improve your search engine rankings.
Download your free copy of Measuring Up: Tools and Tips to Create Popular Web Sites
