Promoting Your Website – Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater!

I’m not a very subtle person. I’m also one of the most impatient people I know. So I know how difficult it is to take things slowly.

But when it comes to promoting your website, you can’t rush things, unfortunately.

Like most marketing, one small change can make a big difference. But if you’re changing EVERYTHING, constantly, then how would you know which small change made the difference?

I know how it is; you read a book, a few blog posts, take some advice from a friend, and before you know it you have a list of fifteen things to change on your website. Each one is sure to be the thing that makes the difference to your listings / traffic / sales etc, right? So you change them all. And lo and behold, it works! Your listings improve / your traffic gets better / suddenly you’re making sales.

But which change made the difference? Right now you probably don’t care, because whatever it was, it worked. But what about in a few weeks, when all of the changes have caught up and suddenly your listings have dropped, your traffic is down and you haven’t had a sale for days? Which one made the negative difference?

You don’t know.

Now look at it another way.

Write a list of the changes you want to make, and make them one at a time. Give them time to ‘take’ and monitor the results for at least a week. When your website starts ‘getting better’, stop for a while before making the next change. That way you can see what is making a difference. If something changes for the worse, revert back to before the change that caused it.

Yes, it’s time consuming. Yes it’s a bit of a pain. But not as much of a pain as being banned from google and not knowing which of 50 changes you made is the bad one, right?