In this article, I want to discuss something that can help you and your internet business site succeed faster.  It’s called benchmarking.  Benchmarking is the process by which a company studies in depth a highly successful competing company to find their best practices and then adopts them to their own business.  This is very common in the automotive industry where I first learned it.  Manufacturers will buy competing model cars, drive them, disassemble them and find their strengths and weaknesses and build that into their own cars.  This is just one example though.  Benchmarking is popular in several industries.  My purpose of this article is to apply benchmarking to internet business sites and affiliate marketing.  This will be especially fruitful to the novice internet entrepreneurs out.  

So, let’s discuss how to do benchmarking activity.  First, we all know a few people and websites in our chosen niche that are very successful.  You don’t have to know specifics like sales volume or how much money they’re taking in.  If you’re not sure who is successful, you can do a Google search for your niche and see who ranks at the top and use them to study.  My recommendation would be to study three site owners.  Notice that I didn’t say just study three top sites.  The purpose for this is so you can study the site owner’s web design style across a couple different sites and niches.  

From there, I recommend creating a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with each of the site owners you are studying, each of the sites and list all the relevant components of the sites you want to study.  I have created one on my website that you can use for a template.  Below are just a few site components you may want to consider when performing your evaluation.

- What type of site is it? (blog or static)
- Are the site’s affiliate links on the landing page or on other pages?
- Does the site contain an opt-in form?    
- Does the site contain useful information or is it just a sales letter?
- Does the site contain a photo of the site owner?
- Does the site contain lots of graphics?
- Does the site contain videos?
- Does the site contain audio?

These are just a few of the criteria that you can use to perform this evaluation.  Next, compare your results with your own site and evaluate the results.  What I learned from doing this activity was pretty amazing.  I studied three of the top affiliate marketers, Rosalind Gardner, Ewen Chia and Yanik Silver.  By filling in the spreadsheet and comparing apples to apples, I noticed several distinct web design tactics, site layout types and sales approaches.  Furthermore, the results of my study showed me components that are missing from my site currently that could definitely make it more successful.  

The idea behind benchmarking is to open your eyes to what highly successful people in your niche are doing so you can compare your site to theirs and adopt best practices.  Follow these simple steps above and you will see your profits increase and site traffic improve significantly.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my article.  I hope that you will take these tips and put them to good use in your own internet business website.  If you would like to read more, please visit my website!

Thank you,
Robby Wilson.

Robby Wilson is an online entrepreneur with a strong focus on affiliate marketing. His blog website: myquestforinternetprofits.com is dedicated to helping other internet entrepreneurs by providing tools and resources as well as insightful articles on various topics such as affiliate marketing, internet business, book reviews, blogging, etc.
http://www.myquestforinternetprofits.com

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