One of the primary goals for webmasters is to increase traffic. So much time and effort goes into the various tactics intended to drive traffic, but often small tweaks to your website can have an even greater effect. The aim is to increase your conversion rate, whether you are selling a product, affiliate marketing, or making money from advertising. If you have never attempted to improve your conversion rate, chances are it is not particularly well optimized and you may be able to double or even triple profitability.

5 Ways to Make a Residual Income on the Web

Less is More: Improving Conversions with Subtraction

Start Split Testing

Split testing is one of the most effective ways to change your conversion rate, whether it goes up or down in the initial test. You are usually testing two variants, though it could be more, and you observe which has the greater benefit. The key to effective testing is to only test individual elements, so you can find out exactly what gave you the result. You could split test almost anything on your website and it will probably have some kind of small impact, but it is the impact of many incremental improvements that will make the difference to your bottom line.

Use Analytics Software

There are various analytics products – many of them free – that can give you great insight into visitor actions. The most sophisticated programs will allow you to set up funnels, so you can see the percentages of people who took a desired action. You can also make use of heat maps and live recordings, giving you the most direct insight into how a person interacts with your site. Analytics data is invaluable for any webmaster or business owner who wants to understand their audience.

Create Surveys for Visitors

If you want to know what a person is thinking when they visit your website, the best thing to do is to ask them. Many websites implement a customer survey system to find out about their site, brand, and demographics. If you understand your audience, you know exactly what they are looking for. A good survey will only have a small number of questions designed to get to the heart of the matter. If you can offer some kind of benefit or bonus for participation, engagement levels will be higher.

Build an Email List

Email may not get the same kind of response rates as it did in the past, but it still remains one of the most effective ways to get the most value from a subscriber. Many of the visitors to your site will only be casual readers, but if they join your list you can email them directly. This allows you to build rapport and feed them back onto your site, or even to an affiliate product page you are promoting. With so much competition online, if you let a visitor leave without capturing their email address they may never return.
RELATED: Growing Your Email List: 9 Components of a Great Opt-in Box

Building and maintaining a quality website is very time-consuming and costly, so not maximizing your site for the most profitability is a mistake. In many cases, turning a site around is just a matter of studying what your visitors do and then interacting with them. Getting more traffic is great, but making the most of it is really how you run a successful business.