Title: Website Challenge Word Count: 623 Summary: 1. How long does the average visitor stay on your site? If your visitors are not staying long enough to take whatever action or accept the offer you are offering, then they aren’t staying long enough. This deserves immediate attention and testing. 2. What is your conversion rate? While the conversion rate depends on the industry, you should have goals in place where your conversion rate is increasing consistently. If not you need to take a serious look at why not. 3. Wh... Keywords: small business, entrepreneur, increase sales, conversion, website challenge Article Body: 1. How long does the average visitor stay on your site? If your visitors are not staying long enough to take whatever action or accept the offer you are offering, then they aren’t staying long enough. This deserves immediate attention and testing. 2. What is your conversion rate? While the conversion rate depends on the industry, you should have goals in place where your conversion rate is increasing consistently. If not you need to take a serious look at why not. 3. When was the last time you checked your site for broken links? This is my pet peeve. I go to a great site and 10 of the links on the site don’t work. 4. How long does it take for your site to load? Let’s face it we live in a microwave generation, people want stuff right now. 5. How often is your content updated? We are all busy, true enough. But our customers and vistitors not to mention the search engines want to see fresh content consistently. 6. How many names are in your subscriber base? Is it increasing or decreasing? Set some goals and work like crazy to increase this number. 7. Do you keep up with the latest technology? What would we do without podcasting, RSS, blogging, myspace? Either you keep up with the latest technology or you go out of business. 8. How often do you check to see where you are in the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)? Check out Alexa Toolbar. This is a great tool to use to set goals by. 9. Do you have some type of web traffic reporting or analysis in place? I use Google primarily but I am looking into some other ones. 10. Do you set goals for your business as well as your website? It goes without saying without goals how do you know when you’ve gotten to where you want to be. 11. Do you have a site map? Check out Site Map Doc and of course Google for exact guidelines. 12. Do you know who the top 5 bloggers are in your niche? This will help build your list and you will learn a lot as well. You have to make regular contributions and use a signature line. 13. Are you tracking your advertising? Do you know where you are getting the greatest ROI? This just makes good business sense. 14. Are you asking your customers what they want? How can you expect your customers to pay top dollar for a product or service they didn’t ask for and don’t need. Save yourself some time and frustration by asking your customer what they want and need. 15. Are you exercising multiple streams of income? Teleclasses, Workshops, Audio, e-books, Bootcamps, Membership Site, need I go on. 16. Are you at least reading several books concerning your niche weekly? The top paid in their field learn from others and read on a consistent basis. 17. Are you writing a lot of content and blogging weekly? Don’t have time, hire someone else to keep it for you. 18. Are you using offline promotion to promote your website? Use your newspaper ad, radio ads, business cards and gift certificates to advertise your business on. 19. Are you cross selling? Everyone is cross selling so should you. If your customer buys a skirt it would make sense to offer her a shirt or jacket. If your customer buys a teleseminar offer an ebook or special report. Be sure to offer something extra every time, you never know who might buy it. 20. Are you giving away tons of free valuable content? People want free stuff they can use. Most people don’t want to buy anything until they see if they like and understand you while at the same time indirectly building a relationship.