How can you double your revenue in a bad economy without doubling your ad spend? Work on doubling your conversion rates! People often focus their energy on how to get more visitors, which in most cases costs advertising dollars. What about focusing on closing more sales with the traffic we are already getting?

Look at your web site like a it’s a sales funnel, if you look closely you’ll probably find it has a bunch of holes, like a leaky bucket. These are all the places possible buyers slip through without taking the action you’d hoped. For affiliates that action is not a buy on your site, it’s getting a click-through to the merchant.

Average online conversion rates I think are still around 2%. That means that 98% of your visitors don’t take the action that you hope, whether it’s placing an order, joining your list or clicking over to the merchant to buy. If you are an affiliate it’s even tougher because you have a % that will click to the merchant, but then depending on the merchant’s conversion rates only a % of those folks will buy. So regardless of the merchant’s conversion rates, if you can double YOUR click-through conversion rates, then you still stand to double your sales.

The Conversion Rate Experts, just launched a new blog and when I read it I discovered they had updated their FREE report on improving conversion rates. In 2006, when they 1st wrote the guide, it immediately became Alexa’s 3rd-highest Mover and Shaker of the week. They just released an updated version for 2008. It’s filled with gems that could help improve your conversion rates, they say even double them - if you put some of the ideas into practice.

“Google Website Optimizer 101 – a quick-start guide to improving your website’s effectiveness By Conversion Rate Experts. “Here’s our essential how-to-double-your-conversion-rate guide, with 108 simple surefire techniques for doubling your web business.

But when your conversion rate does increase, we recommend you don’t just sit back and enjoy the profits, (tempting as that might be). Instead, we recommend you take advantage of the fact you can now afford to pay twice as much per visitor. This means…

i. You can pay about twice as much per click on AdWords, which can bring over ten times more visitors.

ii. You can start advertising in media that had previously been too expensive for you…

iii. Your affiliates can earn twice as much as before – so the super-affiliate big boys start wanting to sell your product.

- so, in summary, the total number of orders goes nuts!”

Head over to read the rest, but watch out for the squirrels. ;-) (Cute copywriting, guys and cute squirrels too!)