The Online Marketing Game

Practice makes perfect
Any professional athlete spends more time practicing and training then actually playing on the game. That’s how they become so good at their sport and are able to compete at a professional level. What makes them pros is that they never settle for second best, they continue to develop themselves and strive for improvement. Why should online marketing be any different?

What does continuous improvement really mean?
The challenge to constantly improve oneself is what continuous improvement is all about. It’s more of an online marketing philosophy and a way of life than anything else. With a kindred spirit of an athlete strategies and design should be refined based on actual in-market observations of how online consumers respond on your website.

Online marketing discipline

It takes discipline, dedication and patience to implement a continuous improvement process. Online marketing does not end when a website is implemented. Improvement is organic and requires constant change. Dedication requires continuous measurement in order to benchmark improvements. Small incremental steps are key. Each business goal will go through the improvement cycle several times with increasing results each time. Online marketing is honed to gain peak performance with a bit of patience. The biggest mistake online marketing can make is trying to accomplish too much at once or rolling out with a complete redesign without knowing any metrics or benchmarks from the previous website. By jumping in all at once, you will never fully understand what factors were responsible for which result, wasting money and time. That’s not how athletes train and that’s not how online marketing should be done. Success in optimizing your marketing is based on incremental and constant improvements.

According to Shop.Org the average conversion rate of their members is about 1.8%. (State Of Online Retailing 3.0 - April 2000) A top athlete wouldn't settle for these stats, why should you?