It’s that time of the year again. 2016 is finally here and that means
a brand new year of kicking goals and building a better business.

It’s not hard to get lost in the sea of advice about new things you
should do in 2016. Everyone has some Must Do thing that you should read
about.

We decided to keep things simple this year. Like you, we’re online
entrepreneurs and 2016 is a new year full of things for us to work on.
This is our list of things we’re committed to and we think you should
get working on too!

1. Commit to converting more traffic

New research has shown that for every $92 spent by websites to get
traffic only $1 is spent on conversion optimization. Yes just $1.

It’s getting not just harder but also more expensive to drive traffic
to your website so it makes sense that if you’ve got marketing dollars
to spend put it into conversion optimization.

A simple math example should help highlight the potential benefits.
Say you spend $700 a month getting 1000 new visitors to your site
through adwords with a conversion rate of 3% you’re paying about $23.33
per sale. If you spent some time testing and optimizing your site to
increase conversion to 5% your cost per conversion will fall to $14 per
sale.

It’s a simple example of investing into tactics that will compound
your efforts over time. As more traffic comes to your site the more
sales you make. Simple!
Use tools like Unbounce (creating landing pages) and Visual Website Optimizer (A/B and Split Testing) to get things going. We use them here
at Thexyz and have already seen results from using them.

2. Commit to Understanding your Analytics better

If there is one topic that consistently scares online business owners
it is the word Analytics. Most people find Google Analytics extremely
intimidating with it’s pages of various graphs and numbers reporting
figures you reckon you’ll never find useful.
While we admit that web analytics can be intimidating it is still
incredibly crucial to growing a successful online business. It’s also not
as hard as everyone thinks it is.
The key to mastering web analytics is not to go in blindly trying to
understand every number. Instead ask yourself a business question then
go into Google Analytics to find the answer. Great questions to ask are:

• How many percent of visitors to my site convert into customers?
• Where is my traffic coming from and is it growing?
• Which traffic source is generating the most revenue?
• What time of the day do most customers purchase?
• Does emailing offers lead to sales?
• How many visitors end up signing up for my newsletter?

All of these questions can be answered by Google Analytics you just need to get familiar and know how to use it.

3. Commit to Forming more Partnerships

One of the fastest ways to grow your business is through
partnerships. Yes they aren’t as easy to establish when compared to an
Ad campaign on Facebook but that doesn’t mean you should not invest into
partnerships.

Forming partnerships is all about finding another party who has a
similar audience to you but does not offer a competing service. They are
usually larger than you and can expose your brand to a much wider reach
but you bring a value add to their audience which entices a partner to
work with you.

For example at Thexyz we work with various high profile platforms like BitTian
who have lots of customers using their tools for work. We’ve partnered with them to be the
destination we send our migrations to. Is BitTitan bigger than us, yes, but we bring a service that adds
value to them.

Partnerships can take time and effort but they are incredibly
valuable. They can also be a competitive advantage so why not start the
year by working with partners!

4. Commit to Mobile

It keeps being said every year but that doesn’t change the fact that
mobile internet usage growth is outstripping internet usage on desktop
computers.

Everyday more and more people are hitting your site via a mobile
device and if it’s not mobile optimized you’re losing out on revenue.

2016 is not the year to delay your businesses mobile efforts. Get started now. Optimizing for mobile has become essential.

5. Commit to Experimenting

So this is a little left field to all the other advice out there but
it’s valuable nonetheless. 2016 should be a year that you commit to
setting aside budget to experiment on new things for your business.

This can come in variety of forms like like Pinterest or Twitter
marketing. Maybe it could be trying out running a webinar, podcast or
blogger competition.

The best way to stay ahead of the competition and grow is to always
be willing to push the boundaries, test ideas and discover new growth
avenues.

Make this a year of actively experimenting new ideas! After all, if
you find something that works and your competitors don’t know about it,
well that is worth it’s weight in gold!
I also encourage you to set a real budget for experimenting. Set
aside an actual dollar amount so you really commit to do doing it and
wont have to stall while you decide how much you can afford to test an
idea.

So what are your New Year Resolutions as an online business entrepreneur?Share them with us below!