You Better Get A Solid Handle On This
I made this mistake early on... and believe it easily cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With all of the different online paid advertising channels available to us today (i.e. PPC, PPV, CPA, CPM, email drops, etc.)... not too mention... all of the different freebie traffic generation opportunities... it's very easy to lose track of which channels, methods and tactics are actually producing money and which ones aren't.
The result is that most online marketers don't really have a true handle on their marketing and sales metrics.
Sure, most know some of the basic metrics like total unique visitors, visitor value, and average sale.
But, when it comes to being able to tell you ROI for each and every dollar and hour invested in all of the various channels and activities, they can't do it.
And because of that, most online entrepreneurs can't make the most effective (and profitable) decisions for their business: decisions based on objective data.
The ultimate end-result of this is a business that is not scalable.
(It's not scalable because they can't effectively invest more and more marketing capital because they don't know where that additional capital should and shouldn't go. And that's a business-growth killer!)
Listen:
If you ever want to have a monster business online, you can't allow your analytics and metrics to get out of control. (If they already have, you need to rectify that ASAP.)
You need to monitor every single dollar invested in your marketing and advertising... and hold it accountable for a positive return on investment (ROI).
If you can't track the ROI of a particular marketing or traffic-generation channel, DON'T SPEND THE MONEY ON IT.
There's no value in spending money on a particular marketing method if you can't track it's performance and won't have any way to know whether to dump it or scale it.
And, you need to know at all times what activities, channels, and traffic tactics are producing profit and which ones aren't... and at what level for each.
Ultimately, the objective (when trying to consistently grow your business) is to find channels and tactics that give you a positive ROI... scale those... and decrease or eliminate the others.
And, you can only do that if you have a solid handle on your metrics and analytics.
Todd Brown Teleseminar Replay
After receiving multiple requests for the recording of Thursday night's "marathon" Teleseminar I decided to put it on the blog for you.
If you weren't able to make it live, this is your chance to hear one of the most intense, most passionate presentations on internet marketing you may ever hear.
I highly recommend you get a pad and pen before the start of this audio and get ready to take some serious notes. There's tons of internet marketing and business-development gold-nuggets shared at lightning pace for over 2 hours!
Enjoy.
Increase Opt-Ins 46.4% In 2-Minutes With This Little Change
I've learned over the last year how incredibly important testing all of my website changes really is.
In the past I've made some poor assumptions about what I thought would increase response or improve conversions, only to find out after the tests I was off the mark a bit. In some cases, a lot!
Without testing and tracking the results, most marketers are making changes to their website, not knowing whether they're improving their results or hurting them.
Take for example - your opt-in page.
When was the last time you tested a new headline or call-to-action or opt-in form in an attempt to improve the results you're getting right now?
Below is a simple test I'm running right now that has allowed me to increase my opt-in rate on one webpage by 46.4%.
The test... only asking for email address on the opt-in form, instead of asking for name and email address.
Below is what the inside of the opt-in form looked like on the original, control webpage:
Below is the only change I made on the entire webpage:
The result - the slight, little change to the opt-in form showed a 46.4% improvement in opt-in rate.
Is this something you should immediately run and implement on your sites??
No.
It is, however, something you should immediately test on your opt-in page to see how it impacts your opt-in rate in your marketplace.
The SICKEST Blog Tool EVER!!
Hey guys... got an INSANE blog application for you. If you have a blog... any kind of blog... you're gonna looooove this.
Actually, this is really an application you can use on any type of site, but I'm now testing it out on my blog.
It's called Woopra (Woopra - Website Tracking and Analytics) and I have to credit my friend, Rich Schefren, for sharing it with me. (The guy always seems to be on the cusp of everything online.)
Anyway, it's a web analytics program that gives you REAL-TIME stats for your site. In other words, it shows you *LIVE* what is going on on your website. You can even IM visitors LIVE.
It's pretty sick.
I highly recommend you check it out.
Oh, and it's FREE!
The Internet Marketing Tool That Exposes Your Site Visitors
Hey guys... here's a GREAT freebie internet marketing resource for you. It reveals some amazing demographic information about your website visitors and those of your competitors. With this little tool you'll know so much about your site visitors it's ridiculous.
Best of all, there's no cost to use it. 
This Internet Marketing Tool Is INSANE!!!
HOLY COW!!... I just had one of the craziest internet marketing experiences I've had in a very long time...I just finished watching a couple of videos of what some of the visitors to one of my websites did while on my sales page. I'm talking about a full-blown video of how they scrolled, how the clicked, what they looked at, what they skipped, and where they spent most of their time on my web page!
It was as if there was a camera recording their screen and every move and action as they went through my website.
Talk about an incredible tool to analyze any webpage's effectiveness, right?
Funny thing is, I first heard about this analytics resource(clicktale.com) a couple of weeks ago when I was at a 2-day conference in Orlando about Google Analytics (hosted by ROI Revolution). But, I've been so busy since that event, I haven't had the chance to take a peek at clicktale.com. Until last night that is...
Once I saw what this incredible website analytics tool does and how it works (there's even a free version you can try), I immediately put it on one of my websites.
And, when I woke up this morning and logged into my ClickTale.com account, I was blown away!
I was actually watching videos of how prospects had gone through one of my webpages.
But, maybe you're wondering what value having videos like that would do for you and your Internet business.
Well, let me just tell you this...
Having, understanding, and using your website analytics to optimize your business (and, frankly, make ALL of your decisions about your web business) is CRUCIAL to your success online.
In fact, write this down and post it some place where you'll see it daily:
"I will never make decisions about my website or web business based on assumptions, opinions or guesses! I will make critical business-building decisions based on the numbers... the METRICS (analytics)!"
Now, for your overall analytics, I highly recommend Google Analytics. It's extremely comprehensive... well beyond what most internet marketers will ever need... and...it's FREE!
But, in addition, I would also recommend you begin using ClickTale.com. It not only shows you videos of what visitors are doing, but it also shows you heat maps of where visitors are clicking and where they're spending most of their time on your site.
Together, these 2 tools will provide you with some killer information about your webpages, copy, layout, navigation, etc.
For instance, now you can see if there's a certain type of testimonial visitors to your site are reading more than others. Once you know this, you can strive to get more testimonials similar to ones getting the most attention.
If you use more than one video on a webpage, you can see the order the videos are being watched, and even if one or more videos is being skipped altogether. This will tell you what order you should put the videos in on the webpage (in order of persuasive ability or priority) or if you should remove a video completely.
You can see if there are images on your webpage that people are trying to click on. If so, you may want to make those images clickable and have them open in another window with some critical copy.
If you use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website you can see which keywords that are bringing you traffic (and costing you money in clicks) are actually leading to an opt-in and a sale. Maybe you have keywords right now that are getting clicked on like crazy (costing you money), but don't lead to an opt-in. Or, maybe they lead to an opt-in, but not a sale. In that case, why bother paying for the clicks and traffic. It's not productive. Yet, without examining our analytics we never know something like, continue to pay for that traffic, and continue to negatively impact our lead generation costs, customer acquisition costs, and profit margin.
And, certainly, you should be using your analytics to determine the true value of tests being performed on your website. For instance, let's say that you've done an A/B split-test on 2 separate landing pages to see which has a higher opt-in rate. And, let's suppose that page B produces a 30% opt-in rate, beating page A, which only had a 20% opt-in rate.
Well, without analytics, we only see a portion of the picture.
For the average marketer, they would immediately think to switch to page B. But, what if page B... the one with the higher opt-in rate... has a much lower "goal conversion" rate in terms of sales, than does page A. In other words, mayeb page by only leads to $1000 in sales, while page A... even with it's lower opt-in rate.... leads to $2000 in sales. Now which do you think you should be using?
Remember, if you have an ecommerce site, opt-ins are a means to an end. Not the end in and of themselves. So, what we're really after are more sales.
That's why we need analytics. That's also why I personally use Google Website Optimzer for all of our testing now. Because it works perfectly with Google Analytics, and it's free with your Google Adwords account (which is also free).
The point is, you absolutely, positively need to look at your analytics to make your decisions. And, by adding in a tool such as ClickTale.com, you can take your analytics and website analysis to a whole new level!
You can check out ClickTale by going to ClickTale.com.
(Note: I don't get paid anything for referring you to ClickTale.com. I'm not an affiliate, nor do I even know if they offer an affiliate program. Frankly, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to publically share this resource... that's how good I think it is. But, it was really just too good to keep to myself.)