Running a Successful Online Business – Laser-Like Focus on Your Number

As you begin to buy more websites your portfolio will obviously grow. If you’re careful, your total time invested will remain about the same (there is ALWAYS an incremental time cost when adding to your portfolio unless you just let a site grow moribund and die).

If you really want to run a successful online business you need to make sure you’re focused on the things that matter most. At Prosperly we have a laser-like focus on one metric only:

Revenue per Visitor

One of our employee’s job every morning is to run the previous days stats, calculate the total income derived from all sources for each business and then divide that by the unique visitors.

Each industry is different. Some have a naturally high revenue per visitor, others aren’t so high (though still highly profitable because traffic acquisition is easier — obviously).

One thing this has done for us at Prosperly is really help us recognize what is in our control. We can control revenue per visitor much more readily than we can our rankings in the search engines. We control revenue per visitor more than any other aspect of our sites because we have complete control over the site.

There have been times where we’ve made changes to a site and then watched our income fluctuate (up or down) — growing antsy with the change. Was it right? Will this be more profitable? We didn’t always focus on traffic AND revenue (which revenue per visitor is). So we’d see a dip in profits and be worried that a site change was unsuccessful. In reality, visitors had fluxed.

Now, realize that when you’re simply looking at one site day in and day out, it’s easy to monitor several metrics separately (conversion rate, revenue, traffic, search engine rankings for key phrases, etc.). However, as I mentioned above, your portfolio growth will necessitate that you dial those metrics down to one (maximum two) that truly matter. As you become dialed in on the metric that determines your online business success, you’ll see decisions are made more quickly, with better outcomes.