W Revenue dot ComDouble Your Site’s Revenue - Scott Wainner on Web Business

Ten Business Boosting Quick Tips for Site Owners

This is a simple but important list that you can implement quickly. Some of these are reminders, but we all get so busy that we sometimes overlook the fundamentals:

1. Create DNS CNAME entries for w.yourname.com and ww.yourname.com typo traffic.
   • I can hear you saying “Oh, DUH! why didn’t I think of that!”. I’m not promising you a 50% increase in traffic here, but every visitor counts. Notice that these work: http://ww.google.com, http://w.google.com, but http://w.yahoo.com is basically a 404. Get with the program, Yahoo!
2. Never be afraid to ask for more money or a bigger revenue share from a partner, all they can do is say no.
   • Typically, I’ll join a network and accept their default revshare at first, then after a few months I will call or write and say “you know, we’ve been sending a lot of sales/traffic/leads your way but your revshare is lower than our other deals, what can you do about that?”.. and it works. The exception here would be if you’re dealing with a Gorilla like Google - you’d better be a gorilla yourself to get any kind of special deal in that case, but most companies will play ball.
3. Register misspellings of your domain.
   • You can either spend $8/ea at godaddy or enom to register misspellings now, or $2,000 each to recover the name in an ICANN arbitration later. Don’t go nuts hunting for juxtaposed keyboard typos, just register the obvious ones (plurals, .net, drop off a double letter (letter.com -> leter.com), that is if a domainer hasn’t beaten you to it.
4. Setup Google analytics.
   • Yes I know, duh, but some people haven’t done this. It’s free, and the stats will be absolutely invaluable to you if someone ever wants to buy your site.
5. Keep a changes log
   • Also known as, “Damn, why did my site’s revenue drop 20% on April 18th, I can’t remember what I did?!” Sound familiar? Keep a changes log of every major change that you make to your site and note the day/hour of each change. Just keep it in a notepad file if you want. If you discover a problem later, look back at the date where the problem first occurred and bam, you’ll likely find the change that did it.
6. Make sure you have Adsense on every page
   • If you forgot to put Adsense on a section of your site, you’re losing $. Go through and check.
7. Implement Kontera or IntelliTXT (if even for guests only, for forums)
   • This is a great way to squeeze a bit more money out of your site and as mentioned, these companies will do CPM guarantee deals.
8. Check with your web host to see if they offer an automated daily backup solution like Discsync (which The Planet offers).
   • This is usually pretty easy to setup and offers peace of mind in case of a hardware failure. A failure doesn’t need to end your business or ruin your life, it can actually be no big deal if you take a couple hours to make sure that a server backup system is setup and working.
9. Take an afternoon to organize and prioritize your to do list.
   • You know, all of those lists, scraps of paper, and notepad windows you have scattered around. Somewhere in that mess is a fantastic but forgotten idea just waiting to be rediscovered. Be honest with yourself about what tasks you believe could have the most positive impact on your business and put those at the top of your list. I often divide my list into A, B, and C projects, and I create a separate list for really quick todo items that take a short amount of time and aren’t really projects (and I prioritize that quick todo list separately). Don’t get me wrong, I’m a disorganized mess, but when I take the time to do this I almost always end up getting great stuff accomplished because having a bunch of tasks scattered everywhere often paralyzes me because I don’t know what I should be working on.
10. Check your homepage title, meta description and keywords tags as well as title tags throughout your site.
    • I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve visited where the title is something like “Mydomain.com”. You’re missing out on valuable organic SEO benefit if your title isn’t descriptive. And for the advanced webmasters out there, it’s easy to forget to include a meta description or keywords tag and many search engines still use these.

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Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.