This is a BIG one that I’ve been VERY guilty of in the past.
Consider this scenario…
Your business is humming along, you’re making a solid profit. So you get lazy, you let things run on autopilot.
Then one day you wake up 6 months later and you realize your profits are down by over 50% from what they were 6 months ago. You thought it was just a slow time in the market, and that things would pick up but no you realize it’s something more.
You’ve been schooled by increasing competition.
By the time your realize what’s happened, you’re F’d and might as well start something new.
I’ve personally been in this scenario and seen a lot of people fall prey to this.
So what’s the alternative?
Make consistent improvement to your business on a weekly, EVEN DAILY basis:
SPLIT TESTING
Split test your landing pages until your blue in the face. I don’t care if you can’t think of anything more to test, just make something up and TEST IT.
This is the ONE biggest thing I’ve been doing lately that has skyrocketed my profits and allowed me to blow past my competition.
Now you want to have a SOLID SYSTEM in place for split testing, whether it’s a custom php script or google website optimizer, or whatever. As long as it’s something you feel comfortable with and do NOT have to ask an outsourcer for help every time you want to setup a new split test.
Remember, the biggest key is here to consistently split test. 8 out of 10 of your split test will be duds, it’s the 1-2 that will skyrocket your profits. You gotta keep testing until you find those!
IMPROVE & EXPAND YOUR SITE
You need to be constantly be working on ways of improving your site content, adding more content, working on your search engine ranking and SEO.
It’s important to have a system in place to get these done, you do NOT need to be the person doing these.
COMPLIANCE
This one’s a big deal, that almost NO ONE gets. You have to constantly ask yourself : “How can I make my site and product offerings more compliant?”
and
“What are some of my most compliant competitors doing that I’m not?”
You can do all the split testing in the world and have a massive conversion rate. That’s gonna mean NOTHING if you get slapped by Google.
Hi Amit,
Thanks for the post. But how to find the compliant competitors? how do we know whether this competitor is compliant or not/
Another complexity is that Google do change the rules and so you may be compliant but they change the rules and suddenly you are non-compliant.
You have to learn to expect the unexpected and not put all your eggs in the one basket.