Are You Tracking?

The first sale off your website comes in. You're so excited, everyone you know hears about it. Before you know you see another, and another. When you are asked where the visitor came from, you may shrug and think it's unimportant. What matters is you got paid, right?

WRONG.

One of the most important aspects of business is knowing what makes you sales and what doesn't. You end up wasting time and money repeating actions that don't make you money. If you knew where those visitors were coming from, then you could duplicate the efforts in that specific area.

Let's put this way. Say you run 10 ads in different places, each costing you $5 each. You make 10 sales from all those ads. To duplicate those results without tracking, you'd have to spend another $50. But if you tracked those visitors you would only spend more money on the ads that worked.

The same goes with other forms of advertising. Let's say you visit 5 message boards every day as your main method of advertising (which we don't recommend by the way). It brings you 5 sales a week. If you track your visitors you can easily see which message board is bringing the traffic, cutting the time you spend on message boards down to maybe 2 or 3 a day instead.

So what can you do to track your visitors?

Simply set up a stat tracker of some kind on your website. And yes, even if you are given a rep website from your company, you NEED a website. This is one of the reasons why you do. We can't stress this enough. Your online business will be VERY limited without your own website.

Tracking is very important to any online business. It doesn't matter what type of business you run, you absolutely need to know where your visitors are coming from to increase your sales.

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Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank, owners of DirectSalesHelpers.com strive
to help women succeed in direct sales. For additional help with your direct sales business, visit http://www.directsaleshelpers.com

Stop Being Lazy and Run Your Business

by Kara Kelso and Anita DeFrank
http://www.DirectSalesHelpers.com

This may be harsh words, but they need be said. Over the past few months we've noticed an epidemic of laziness. It needs to be stopped!

Let us explain a little more.

Quite often we see a post on a group or message board for someone looking for free advertising. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, we need all the exposure we can get on our sites. Not paying anything for it is even better. These posts are always followed by a slue of "me too". Again, this is understandable.

Now here's where the laziness kicks in.

In the past few weeks we've made some posts in search of link exchanges, articles, submissions, and partner exchanges. In other words, free advertising in exchange for several sites. The response? Slim to none.

What happen to all those who wanted free advertising? Did the word "in exchange" scare them away? If it did, then that's a shame. They all had the perfect opportunity to promote their business, but passed it up because in required them to do something. Something other than handing over their link of course.

Even worse, you tend to see the same people asking same questions on many boards. Questions such as "how do I promote my business?" or "I need to advertise, where do I start?". The answers are written all over the place, yet they aren't being read. Either that or it's being ignored because "it looks too hard to do".

Everyone seems to want that magical way to drive hundreds of visitors and sales to their site, without spending the time or money. Let's put this to rest once and for all - there IS no easy way to build your business. It takes time and/or money to build a solid buisness. What's more, no one is going to do it for you.

So while it may sound harsh, get to work! Put those suggestions and ideas for promotion to work. Get more involved with projects others are asking help for. Don't spend all day surfing boards looking for the easy way to succeed. The only place you are going to find success is within yourself!

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Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank, owners of DirectSalesHelpers.com strive
to help women succeed in direct sales. For additional help with your direct sales business, visit http://www.directsaleshelpers.com

Is Lack of Focus Holding You Back?

There are no shortage of marketing ideas out there. Online and offline, there's literally thousands of ways to promote your business. Although if your focus isn't on any of them, how will you succeed?

We admit it - we're guilty of having focus issues. When a new idea or business comes along, it's hard not to get excited. You drop what you are doing and get right to work on it. Unfortunately that excitement fades within a few weeks, and you are back to square one. Before you know it, there's tons of unfinished projects and half-way promoted businesses.

Lack of focus is holding you back.

Here are some tips to help you stay focused:

- Set Goals
Give yourself goals or specific things you want to accomplish before you stop on any given project.

- Set Hours
If time is an issues, set specific work hours. Don't go anywhere between those certain hours. Even if it's just 3 hours a day, it's something.

- One Project/Business
Instead of splitting your focus among many businesses, keep your focus on just one or two businesses or projects. Do whatever time allows you, not just what sounds interesting at the time.

- Wait a Week
If you spot a new business that sounds interesting, don't jump on it. Focus on your original business for awhile. If it still sounds exciting a week or two later, then it might be something worth giving a second look.

There are other ways to keep focus, but these are just a few.

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Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank, owners of DirectSalesHelpers.com strive
to help women succeed in direct sales. For additional help with your direct sales business, visit http://www.directsaleshelpers.com