It’s been an eventful week in the world of online marketing. MySpace got a nice new design in a bid to prevent its slide relative to Facebook. Social media website Reddit went open source, at the same time taking a swipe at reported Google target Digg.

In addition, a week on the web wouldn’t be right without hearing about Google. They’ve continued to steamroll everyone else when it comes to search traffic. They also released Google Trends, a nice tool where you can view statistics of any website on the internet (provided its a certain size). These statistics include its traffic, other websites that its users visit, and the main keywords used to find the site.

Incidentally statistics from Google’s sites, such as Google.com itself, YouTube and Blogger.com are all hidden. This has created quite a lot of controversy, especially given that no one else can opt out of Google Trends, and is something that Google should look to fix asap.

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the best articles from other sites over the past week:

Yahoo The Failure: Myth Versus Reality

“As SS Yahoo appears to be sinking, let me be the contrarian about her future. I admit, I find it as hard to believe as anyone that Yahoo has much life left in it after all executive departures this week, plus the latest news of Delicious founder Joshua Schacter going. But since Yahoo’s leadership has done a piss-poor job making people believe there’s hope, I’ll step up and give it a swing.”

Top 3 Web Tools to Find Out How a Blog Performs Over Time

“Why would you want to find out how a blog performs over time? Either it’s your blog, you want to buy a blog or you want to find out how another blogger made it and when. Last but not least for SEO reasons you always want to find out more about other blogs.”

Definitive Guide to Fark and Getting Mass Traffic

“Take a look at the amount of traffic you can get from the site, this is in a one month period: 304,980 visits in the month of April, 2008. That isn’t a photoshop or a typo, that is real potential to get massive traffic from a big online community. I’ve helped get clients over 550,000 social media visitors in one month so this isn’t a once off and very achievable if you have the time and resources.”

With an online business it’s easy to always be thinking of the next big idea, the killer viral technique or website feature which will catapolt your site into the bigtime.

It’s perhaps not surprising as huge internet success stories are always be talked about, perhaps none more so than YouTube’s rise from nothing to a $1.65 billion sale within 18 months. However, the norm is that the internet is characterised by businesses which follow the standard growth pattern. Big ideas aren’t always there and even when they are it’s questionable quite how important they are - do you actually need a USP?

Those people that talk about becoming the industry-leader rarely achieve their goals through a masterstoke or big idea. Instead it’s often best to focus on small incremental improvements made with relentless consistency, improvements which when added together can make a huge difference. One step at a time.

Improvements can be made in all kinds of areas. Not all of them will be relevant to your business but many of them will be:

• Conversion Rate: how can you convert more visitors into registered users, and registered users into paying customers?
   
• Your Product / Service: perhaps a free trial or lower cost version of your product/service would help to move prospects down the marketing funnel?
   
• Quality of Leads: is too much time being spent on low quality leads? How can this situation be rectified?
   
• Website Interaction: how can you increase page views and encourage your users to interact online?
   
• Repeat Visitors: how can you get people coming back to your website?
   
• Viral Marketing: does your site and/or sales process lack any viral aspects?
   
• SEO: can the pages on your site be better optimised?

 
For each of the questions above you can come up with a number of ways in which your website can be improved. For example, if you start by focusing on increasing your conversion rate:

• Is your registration process too long? Do you really need users to enter their address to register or verify their email address before making a purchase?
   
• Why would people trust your website? Do you have a detailed About Us page? Even one with photos? Do you feature customer testimonials or those from the press?
   
• Is it clear what you can provide? Are the benefits stressed or is the information confusing?
   
• Do you lead visitors through a clear conversion process? Or do they come across the registration/sales page more by luck than judgement?

 
One good way to make progress on these small improvements is to write a to-do list each day or week. It helps to focus the mind and gives you a sense of achievement when each item can be ticked off the list. To-do lists encourage you to work in the same way as batch processing, and can help to make you a lot more productive.

Before you know it, by focusing on small incremental improvements your business can begin to grow dramatically. Consider the example where registered users are deemed a business goal:

• No. of unique visitors per day: 1,000
• No. users which register each day: 30 (3.0%)

 
If you were to increase the number of daily unique visitors by 10% and increase your conversion rate by 20% (3.0% to 3.6%) you’d be looking at the number of users registering each day jumping from 30 to nearly 40 (39.6 to be exact). This is a growth rate of 25%, the kind of growth that large established business strive to achieve annually. Yet, through simply adjusting your registration process and optimising your website for search engines using basic techniques this kind of growth is very achievable. Imagine what your growth rate could be if you continued to make additional small improvements each and every week.

Whilst it’s nice to try to dream of the killer application or ground-breaking feature it’s worth making small incremental improvements with relentless consistency. A year or two down the line you may find that you’ve reached the point you’ve been striving for without ever thinking of the big idea.