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A 35% increase is no small feat. Assuming you have 1000 unique visitors daily, that will work out to 350 out of the thousand.  Bold claims, indeed. However, I am not bluffing or trying to hook you into buying something you might regret later. I am just going to tell you an open secret you may already know, but fail to harness its power - Heat Mapping your website.

What is Heat Map?

Scientifically, it is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors (You’ve gotta love Wikipedia).

In terms of your webpage or site as a whole, it is the visual representation of mouse clicks on a single HTML page. It looks something like the following image below:

A very bright red colour means a lot of visitors are clicking on that particular portion of the page, while blue means lesser clicks and no clicks shown with no colours.

So, What does Heat Mapping Your Website got to do with Increasing Sales?

It is a very useful tool to help you analyze your website design structure. Heat mapping your webpages allows you to know and understand what and where your visitors click. You can use the information to properly design product placements or banner locations with a higher click ratios (in this case, locations with bright red markings) within. Sales is all about the numbers; therefore, a higher click ratio is equal to a higher sales conversion rate.

Here’s a simple 3-step design checklist:

1. Are your important information being seen by visitors?
2. Are your visitors clicking on the navigation and action items?
3. Are visitors being directed to call-to-action pages in a logical manner?

Of course, the point of this article is to show you what tools you can use to heat map your websites. These tools are going to help you increase your conversion rates by 35% or even more.

There are a number of good heat mapping tools out there; some are paid, while others are provided free-of-charge. The following below are two tools I recommend:

Crazy Egg

One of the best I have seen so far is from CrazyEgg. They have a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

It includes features like: Confetti - which allows you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay - providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing - enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.

They do offer an array of pricing structure, including a free 4 page per website version with up to 5000/site hits.

ClickHeat

If you are not into a paid subscription yet, don’t fret. Although it is not comparable in terms of features, I guarantee that you will not lose out in terms of analytical data intepretation. ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.

Easy to implement too. Just insert a JavaScript into your webpage and the application will track all your visitors’ clicks. Check it out here.

Test, Test and Test Some More

Last but not least, test it out. There is no tried and true method. If you initially thought and placed a banner within a “hot” zone only to find it didn’t live up to your expectations, do not give up. You need to test out your newly designed webpages before hitting the correct spot. Just move the banner or signup box to a different position that is equally hot, but will grab your visitors’ attention.

I just love technology, don’t you? There are virtually endless tools available for you in the internet to be used in helping you perform better in your everyday lives. If you are in need of a budgeting software, there is PearBudget, a really simple budgeting and expense tracking service. Not into budgeting, but just looking to sell something online. osCommerce and Zen-cart can help you manage your inventory while you profit from it. Then there is WordPress.

You just have to love WordPress. The most common use for wordpress is for you to keep entries online, or blog. However, through time and constant development, plus there are so many plugins made for it, WordPress usage has become limitless. Today I am going to show you what WordPress can do other than keeping your journals - that is using it to create your own website!

Get Yourself a Web Hosting Account

Before you start, you will need a web hosting account. Most Web Hosting plans you find will have a one-click script installation module such as Fanstastico. This module helps you install your WordPress software with just a single click of the button. You don’t even need to get your hands dirty in configuring the database.

After you have setup your WordPress the way you liked it, it is time to find some nice WordPress themes. There are tons of great themes in the internet. One such sites is Smashing Magazine. Here, you can find a collection of beautiful themes, all for the cost of nothing.

Upload your new theme into the “/wp-content/themes/” folder. Activate it via the administrative panel. Here is where the fun begins.

Modifying Your WordPress Theme

Note: Before making changes to your theme, make sure to back it up, just in case you need a fresh start.

Like any website structure, your theme is divided into parts. Each part is a single page is intended to perform a certain function. The “header.php” file for instance, holds your <head>…</head> segment. The “footer.php” will have the codes carrying the very end of your webpage; copyrights and disclaimer stuff. This is called Server Side Includes. For more information, click here.

You can modify any part of the theme by opening up the files and changing the appropriate tag values. Most are in HTML tags and should be easy to tweak around. Some are PHP server tags, but even that is not at all difficult. For example, if you do not want the comments and the “posted by… on…” displayed from your blog entry, you can remove:

<?php the_time(’F jS, Y’) ?><?php edit_post_link(’, Edit’); ?>
<div class=”comm”><?php comments_popup_link(’Post Comment’, ‘Comments (1)’, ‘Comments (%)’); ?>

Play around with the codes. If you need help with PHP, you can always reference www.php.net.

Create Some Useful Pages

Add some nice pages to your website. It can be the About Us or Weclome pages. Whatever it is, be creative. You might have noticed by now that whenever you create you page, it will indefinitely be listed on the WordPress navigation menu. Sometimes, you just don’t what the page to appear on the navigation menu. So how do you do that?

Easy, after creating the page as usual, save it but do not publish it. Also don’t make it private. Just save it in an unpublished state. It will not appear on any navigation menus (including sub-menus), but if you access it directly using the URL, you will still reach it.

This is extremely useful if you want to create a page where you will link to it from the main page.

Install Useful Plugins

You might want to add plugins like Google XML Site Map, All-in-One SEO Pack, WP Super Cache, WordPress Stats and many more.

All these plugins will allow you to make your website provide you with vital statistics, improve search engine rankings and feel more complete overall.

Lastly, you can set your website to look even more like one, by changing the index page to display a webpage instead of your blog entries. You can do that from the “Settings > Reading” option.

Just like the example figure, choose “A static page” from the Front page displays option.

Front page: is what will be display when visitors first enter your site, “http://www.yourdomain.com/”.

Post Page: is where your blog entries will be shown. For this to work, you will need to create a blank page and publish it first.

That is all to it. If you need a web hosting plan to get started, you can signup for one here.

Have you ever wonder how much your web hosting bandwidth is costing you? Or whether the bandwidth you are paying is optimal to your ROI? In this article, let me show you how you can calculate it.

Calculating the Gigabytes
First of all, you have to find out the total GB of data a single T1 connection can transfer, assuming that there’s no overhead or packet loss. (If you have stats for your packet loss or overhead, just subtract the overhead from the amount of data that can be transferred and continue with the equation.)

Assuming the optimal, a T1 connection can transmit data at 1.536 Mbps. To translate that to Bytes per second you divide by 8 (since there are 8 bits in every byte), and you find that a T1 can transfer data at 192 KBps. Multiply that by 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, and you will find that a T1 can transfer 691.2 MB (or 691,200 KB) of data per hour. Multiply that number by 24 to get to 16.589 GB per day.You need to multiply it by 30 days to get 497.664 GB monthly transfer.

Your cost per GB of data transferred—if a T1 connection costs $100/month—is 6 cents.

Here’s the Math:

• 1.536 Mbps / 8 = 192 KBps (or 0.192 MBps)
• 0.192 MB * (60sec * 60min) = 691.2 MB/hour
• 691.2 MB * (24hours * 30days) = 497,664 MB (or 497.664 GB)/month
• Hence, if a T1 connection costs $100/month, therefore:
• $100 / 497.664GB = $0.20/GB

Note: To actually get the bandwidth cost, you need to find out how much your web hosting provider is paying for their bandwidth. Alternatively, you can use what your provider is charging you and mark it down 30% to get an estimate on how much the actual cost is.

Now, let us see you if you can apply it to your business metrics.