It could be because I am from Oklahoma, but many euphemisms come to mind:

· A one horse town.

· A one stoplight town.

· "I bet that for excitement, they sit around and watch the cars rust." --- Cletus "The Snowman" Snow from "Smokey and the Bandit" - 1977

· Don't blink or you will miss it.

· Somewhere in the middle of Egypt.

When I was about nine years old, my family and I were travelling to meet with an aunt and uncle who live in Comanche, Oklahoma. During that trip, we passed through a speck of a town in southern Oklahoma called Pumpkin Center.

I don't know what it was about that little, itty-bitty town that stuck in my mind, but I can see it clearly in my mind's eye even now. One gas station and two houses, and as I remember, a population of eight.

Most of the above euphemisms apply to this dot on the Oklahoma map, except for the stoplight euphemism of course, as there are no stoplights in Pumpkin Center, Oklahoma.

WHAT DOES PUMPKIN CENTER HAVE TO DO WITH ONLINE MARKETING?

Good question indeed. It is the euphamisms of driving through small-town America that has driven my thoughts in the development of this article.

"Don't blink, or you will miss it."

Most webmasters have available to them software, which interprets their web logs. If you don't have this kind of software available, get some. The one that I have always liked the best is HTTP-Analyze: http://www.http-analyze.org/

THE ANSWER IS IN YOUR WEB LOGS

I have always been shocked when I review the "time on site" figures for my websites. Just for the first two weeks of August 2003, I have noted the following figures on my primary website:

· Number of visitors: 933 - Average visit: 118 seconds

· 87.4% of all visitors spent less than two minutes onsite.

· 79.8% of all visitors spent less than 30 seconds onsite.

Believe it or not, these numbers remain fairly consistent from month to month. In July, 85.6% of my visitors were onsite for less than two minutes.

In my mind, that defines a real problem on my own website! Perhaps the same problem exists on your site. I hope not --- I hope your numbers are much better. Even if your numbers are better than mine, I am fairly confident that many of your own visitors spend far too little time on your website to make an honest assessment of your program.

With an average of 1900 visitors each month for the last six months, imagine how much I could potentially increase my sales if I could make the kinds of changes necessary to convince any of those 79.8% of visitors to spend more than 30 seconds at my website! What if I could get them to spend more than five minutes at my website?

If I could only find a way to capture the attention of 80% of my website visitors in a way that I was not doing, then I could realistically increase my sales by more than 400%.

This is the site data that had convinced me to implement a serious site redesign. I have worked very hard to bring visitors to my websites, now it is time to make sure that I can translate my traffic into more sales.

I am not saying that I believe the current redesign is the best I can do for my sales, but I do believe it will be better than what the old design was.

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES

If you are in the same boat that I was in, then please consider doing whatever it will take to convert more of your traffic to sales. It is time for you to do your part to help the American economy.

Even if you are only losing 50% of your website's traffic to the two-minute paradigm, then you could realistically double your sales by capturing your visitor's attention for more than two minutes.

Shoot, we all have room to improve. The only question is how much room you have for improvement.

Copyright Bill Platt - All Rights Reserved

Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com

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