Okay, you’ve got a tracking system, and you have your pages prepared to test, now what?

For our example, I’m going to use the article that was recently republished on Site Pro News. Using this method, when I get published for free in a major publication like that, it’s as good as money in the bank. And they’ve been gracious enough to publish me five times just this year.

If you take a look at the article – 5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs To Publish A News Feed – you’ll see that there are 3 major links leading back to my site in the article, the one in my resource box, that points to my blog, my feed (after the link for Pluck, which really leads back to the Pluck downloads page – it’s just a forwarder for easy subscription, so that one doesn’t count), and the one minute tutorial.

Each of these links addresses my audience in a different way, and leads them to a different method of using my site, and ending up as part of my audience.

The first link in the article will give anyone who cares to learn more about me the subscription link to my feed. They can use it to check me out, and decide if they like my content enough to join my audience. In the article, I even tell you how to use it.

If they get so engaged in the feed, they’re already subscribed and can come back to the rest of my content later. Great.

The second link in the article leads to the one minute tutorial. These are the people who my book would really help the most. When they get to that link, they can read through the instructions, but at the end of my post is a link to my free five day ecourse.

The last link at the bottom is just a link to my blog. That day I had an alternate way for people to sign up for my eCourse with a longer explanation of why they’d want to have a news feed and a few hints on how easy it is.

So how can this work for your site.

It’s a little concept I like to call the garden path.

People are busy. They won’t always feel like they have time to read your whole site, and most people skim the Net, they don’t read it avidly as often as we’d all like to think when we’re creating our entralling content.

So how can you make this fact work to your advantage.

In every traffic campaign I begin, whether it is free traffic or some that I paid for, I set up my in-coming traffic to meet three objectives.

First, I want to provide enough value to create a return visitor.

Second, I want the person who comes to the site to sign up to be contacted again. They can join the members resource area, subscribe to one of the feeds, sign up for the newsletter, or purchase a product.

Third, I want to spark some form of interaction between them and my site.

With the garden path, every time I promote or market, I make sure that the target page (the page they land on) gives them the opportunity to chose to come back. The next step will let them see the products I am offering, with incentive to decide now.

If they reject that opportunity, that’s fine. They’ve already said they’d be back. We’ll find out if I can help them later.

If they accept, I want them to be engaged, I want them to get as much value out of their decision as possible. Then we’ll both be happy – I made a sale, they made an investment in their business they can be proud of, that will produce the results they desire.

So when you set up a campaign, you’ll want to make adjustments to the landing page so that that it’s focused on the action you want them to take. If you want them signed up to your newsletter, the only thing that should be on that page is information about it, and quick, easy sign-up. If you’d like to make a sale, in my experience, the page they land on should capture their information and Then lead them to your product.

This is because conversions for getting a newsletter sign-up are typically much higher than they are for making a sale. So instead of converting, say 3% to a sale immediately, you can get that 3%, plus whatever percentage of the 30% or so that signed up for the ezine to buy later.

I’m writing a more specific guide for this in my upcoming book, and due to space and time limitations, I can’t really go into details now.

But for the moment, as you set up your next campaign, think about it, what do you want your prospect to do when they get to your site, and how can you set up your pages to lead them to your desired course of action?

The rest of the day will be focused on extras. The sun is shining out here in Nevada, which means it’s almost time for me to take a break.

Until I see you next, have a happy day!

So you’ve got the people coming in, but they are leaving without buying anything? What’s the solution?

First thing – you want to make sure you have implemented is a tracking system. But let me back up for just a minute.

The biggest traffic secret, as far as I’m concerned, is that you don’t need thousands of visitors to your site if your product is converting well to sales. What’s well? I could quote you industry standards and all that, but I have another idea.

Realistically, how much would you like to earn in a day? Maybe you love your work and you have no intentions of quitting your day job, you just want to have a little something hands off on the side, enough to eliminate your car payment. So you’d like to see one sale a day of your $20 product.

If, for every 100 visitors to your site, you can make one sale, and you have 100 visitors a day, this time next month, that’s $600. Keep your expenditure low to get that visitor, and it can be mostly profit.

Personally, I average somewhere between 4 and 14 sales a day when I have promotions, free or not, running. It’s not always on a premium product, but it makes for enough not to have to work outside the home.

What I’m going to tell you now is just a gloss over of the system that works best for me. I will go into a lot more detail when I’m done updating my Free Traffic Primer.

So back to the tracking system. Make sure you know not just where every sale comes from, but every newsletter or free course sign-up. This will be essential for testing.

Before we proceed, I suggest you make a copy of the location where you have people sign up or buy at your site, at least one. And if you can, code your buy links and order/invoice numbers according to where they came from. I can look at the item number and tell whether one of my site members bought something, or if it came from an advertising campaign, an article, PPC, etc.

I’ll keep going down this path momentarily in part two.