Setting up a website is usually the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success, or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals.

If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything at all. Without goals to guide you, in developing and monitoring your website, all your website will be, is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form, so you can follow up with mailings, or purchasing a product, there are several steps you can take, to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency.

One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you, is finding out the number of visitors in any given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates, does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there.

It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them, who actually performed the action your site is set up for.

For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors who actually bought and divide that figure, by the total number of visitors. Then multiply by 100, to get a percentage.

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is, between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone, who fills out your form, will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service, or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success, or failure of your website, whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies, if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods, to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly by launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results, so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take, to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company, to do the work for you.

In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them, by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts, to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine, is how easy it is, for a visitor to your website, to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form, or ordering page is quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase, or to fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job, from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference, between profit and loss, in your online campaign.

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Derek Robson has been a successful Internet marketer since 2003. He has a vision of empowering others, particularly fellow South Africans and other non U.S folk, to have equal opportunity and success on the internet, by finding solutions to the many obstacles facing them. He is a syndicated article writer. He and his wife Sally, have started a string of sites, resources, courses and articles, as part of Dersalsites. For informative articles on making money, setting up a simple business that actually makes money, Internet marketing, South African online business, list building, affiliate marketing, article marketing, blogging, seo, the law of attraction, rugby and other general topics, such as gardening and fitness, visit Derek and Sally at their blog, part of http://dersalsites.com/