The following is a list of patterns that many visitors follow, and you can use these suggestions to better your site.

1. Your visitors often stay for less than 30 seconds. This is a very bad sign! There are a multitude of solutions for this. Often when a visitor leaves that fast, it's because something almost "forced" her (the average e-consumer is in fact a woman!) to leave. Frequent causes of this are ugly sites! I use the term ugly because many ugly sites are bringing in more money than you can imagine, but truley ugly sites, or ones with very hard to read / obnoxious text will force a visitor away.

Your site may load far too slow! If your site loads slower than 20 seconds, you are literally driving away a third of your traffic. By the time the rest of the traffic gets there, they will be fearful of clicking a link because the same load times may apply there too!

Improper image loading or garbled code can also apply, but another factor is AD clutter! AD clutter is when you have simply too many ads in comparison with actual content. If people think your site is selling a product so awful that you have to rely on mounds of ads to survive, then they won't be ready to buy from you!

2. Your links get more traffic than your content pages! See reason one for possible solutions, as this trend often means that your links are looking more promising than the rest of your site to your visitors!

3. Your visitors hardly ever return! This one is harder to fix, but just as important as the ones earlier. If you can at all, give away a free product or sample in exchange for an email address, and use that adress for follow up emails, to keep the visitor aware of your services.

Many potential customers won't come back because they don't have a reason too! Update your site with meaningful information, or considering adding a messageboard/forum.

That's all for now, see part 2 for more information!

Mark Shay and Chris Everson
http://www.TheRealIncome.com ~REAL residual income