This post will guide you towards setting realistic targets that will make your website or blog more successful.  It will help you get more enquires or sales from your website and give you some actionable ideas that you can use do to make it happen.

If you want any help getting more enquires or sales from your website then don’t forget to contact us.

So it’s 2010 and the January is nearly over.  The northern hemisphere is generally cold, wet and miserable and wherever we are, we are all experiencing strange weather.

It’s a time when:

• Many people feel the affects of SAD – (Seasonal Affective Disorder) – even if they don’t know what it is or fully understand it,
• we have broken our New Years resolutions – if we made any,
• and even if things are going well, some days we find it hard to motivate ourselves – the Christmas season has disappeared for another year and it’s still many months to the summer.

Ring any bells?

Image, if you are feeling like that then it is highly probable that your blog readers and customers are too.  Depending on your industry and the content of your blog it is quite possible that your website hits have varied over the past few weeks – some will have gone up but many will have gone down.

Why? – Obvious really, it’s all about trends, what people search for at different times of the year.  Historically, in the UK, businesses involved in travel and holidays have their busiest period in the first few months of the year when people are making plans for the summer.  Likewise, the toy industry has its busiest time in the last few months of the year as people buy Christmas presents.

But wait a minute – this is not about the internet is it? Yes it is, but there is one big difference, the internet is global.  This means that the trends change depending on where you are in the World.

What people are searching for today in the UK they may not be searching for in say Australia.  The same is true in reverse.

So I think it’s time for a kick, a jolt – something that you can

• get enthusiastic about,
• that breaks the strangeness of  January,
• work towards
• that gets you going
• and really something to help lift the spirits.

Its time to really look at your blog or website – study it, read it, and get to understand it.  I know that sounds strange as it’s your blog or web site and you should know all about it, but do you really?

• Does your blog or website have seasonal trends?
• What are your blog readers or site visitors really interested in?
• Is there a way you can follow the trends to attract more work and readers?

The answer is yes, generally there is always something you can do.

Start by setting some goals, become more pro-active rather than reactive.  That means not just sitting there and waiting for it to happen, go and make it happen.

• You want more enquires or sales from your website?
• What can you do to make that happen?

OK let’s me more specific.

So you want more enquires or sales from your website. – I’ll let you into a secret – so does everybody else!

But consider this, be specific. Set a target.  Something by which you can measure the success of your efforts, don’t just say (or think) I want to be on page 1 of Google – that may not be achievable – and often not practical.

Here’s an example, we design develop WordPress themes.  Try searching Google for WordPress themes and you will find over 28,000,000 – yes 28 million web pages – indexed by Google for the search term WordPress themes.  Is it realistic for us to be on page one?  Honestly no, would we like to be yes, if we were on page one would it be practical? No, we’d have great page hits, and probably a large number of enquiries, great, but may be just a few too many enquiries for the size of our business.

The target you set should be achievable and sensible for your business, one you can cope with, one that makes sense for your business.

Say you are a small hotel with 20 rooms, that gives you 7300 (365 days of the year * 20 rooms) nights you can sell.  You can’t sell 7350 you just don’t have the capacity.  If you think that a good hotel may have an occupancy rate (i.e. sales) of  60% – that’s 4380 daily room sales then a target may be to increase that figure from say 60% to 65% – 4380 to 4745 daily room sales.

Having set a target now you can plan how to achieve it.

• How will you attract an extra “365” daily room sales?
• What action can you take to convert more of your website visitors to guests?
• How can you drive more visitors to your site?
• And importantly how many new visitors to your website do you need to attract?

Now you have a second ‘realistic’ target – new website visitors.

You already know (or should) how many people visit your website so you can calculate how many of those visitors become guests, do the maths to calculate how many more visitors to your website you need to sell those extra “365” daily rooms.

Hopefully you get the idea – set realistic targets for your blog or web, ones that work for you and your business.  You will probably find that the targets actually set themselves once you start thinking about it.  Again, be pro-active rather than reactive.

If you want any help getting more enquires or sales from your website then don’t forget to contact us.

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