Your Website Should Make You Money. | Dan Martell (@danmartell)

Your Website Should Make You Money $$$!

Posted in 2008 under financial, marketing, metrics, RSS feed for comments
4 Comments

Dec15

Would you hire a salesperson and not track his sales? How about a marketing campaign and not measure the response? If not, then why do you build a website and not qualify it’s value, i.e., it’s money making abilities?

Money = Opportunity = Brand Recognition = Value

Call it what you want—doesn’t matter—but you do need to define it. How much time, or money (or both) did you spend on your website? How much value has it generated? How do you know? I bet you use Google Analytics to tell you how many people visited…but seriously, what does that mean?

Define Valuable Actions

First things first. There are actions that your visitors will perform that you feel are valuable. List them.

Examples:

Fill out Contact Form
Download product PDF
Watch a video
Comment on a blog post
Register
Try your demo

Show Me the Money

The next step is to define a value for each action. It’s definitely subjective; however, you can use existing sales numbers to work through the math. Maybe you realize that the average sale per customer is $5000. You can then work backwards, using unique visits to your website and the number of customers, to get a hypothetical value for each visit. Alternatively, you can use a fixed number, let’s say $10, and split this money amongst all your actions.

Fill out Contact Form = $2.00
Downlaod product PDF = $1.00
Watch a video = $2.00
Comment on blog post = $0.50
Register = $3.00
Try your demo = $1.50

Bringing It All Together

Once you’ve got the “money trail” figured out, then you can optimize your design and content to increase these actions. Doesn’t that make sense?

Let’s recap.

Your site should make you money.
Actions = Value.
Optimize for high value actions.

Do you currently track your visitors this way? What other actions could you attach value too?

Additional Thoughts & Resources

Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus

Startup Metrics for Pirates by Dave McClure

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4 Responses for "Your Website Should Make You Money $$$!"

Michael Beck December 15th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Good advice…
Whit Scott December 15th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
For the most part the internet doesn’t really work like that right? For example I and maybe millions of other people enjoy Homestar Runner, but we enjoy it because it’s free. I don’t mean that we wouldn’t enjoy it if we paid, rather that we wouldn’t watch it if we had to pay. Even if it cost me 5 cents to watch an episode I probably wouldn’t pay.

Instead they sell murchandice. In my opinion this is where the market is for the individual on the internet. If you’re a business, which I would argue that you may be (Dan), then what you’re saying makes sense. You and other consultants can make money selling advice online and in person.

Then there are people like me who can’t really sell my advice, but can sell things like corny tee-shirts, and other crafty goods.

I think what you’re saying is spot on for a certain demographic, but for others, for most, if they want to make money online they may need to look at some other tactics.
dmartell December 15th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
@Michael - Thx!

@Whitt - You’re right, there’s a difference between a company / product website, and a personal site. That being said, if you have a public facing that’s not purely for your immediate family, then each visitor does have value. Maybe it’s commenting on a post, or clicking through to an affiliate program you’re involved in - each person, in some small way, adds value.

The bigger picture of this post was more about setting targets for your site, and insure the time/money invested into it, generates a return over time. This doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary - but you should at least try to put some “values” around the potential actions (ex: referrals, invitations to speak, guest blog post, etc.).

I’ve personally see too many people invest thousands of dollars, without any clearly correlation of how this thing improves (or adds value) to their life. Again, not required for all website, but for most.
Whit Scott December 16th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Got it, and totally agree. So I guess I should figure out what that is for my site and see how I’m doing. Goals are good.