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The Biggest Number on the Internet

Paul Carpenter 21st October 2006
Paul Carpenter

If you’ve landed on this page, looking for the actual ’biggest number’, we recommend you check out Wikipedia. The answer is ’a googol’! Otherwise, read on…

It certainly isn’t Amazon’s 12 thousand employees. Nor is it the BBC’s 15 million pages of content. It isn’t even Google’s 9 billion indexed pages.

The biggest number on the internet is 1.

That’s because the huge majority of your visitors are ’one time only’ visitors. Most of them will look at just one page before leaving. If they buy from you, they buy just one item. And it will be the one and only time they ever buy.

Turning 1 into 2

Turning 1 into 2 is about the biggest leap you can make with your online business.

If someone returns to your site for a second time, they are far more likely to buy from you. And if they’ve bought one thing from you before, they are far more likely to buy several things from you in the future. And if they’ve already placed a couple of orders, you can probably look forward to their business again and again and again.

Once you’ve turned 1 into 2, it rapidly turns into 3. And when you hit that level – the sky’s the limit.

Now the hard part.

Take a good, long hard honest look at your website. Can you think of one reason (there’s that number again!) why a disinterested person might visit your site more than once? Is the content that interesting and always kept up to date? Have you ever added a new feature to the site or refreshed the design?

If someone buys from you, is your service so compelling that the customer is more likely to buy from you again? Do you offer something that your competitors don’t?

When someone has bought from you, do you make any proactive attempts to get their business again? Do you contact them a few days after their order has shipped to find out if they were happy? Do you send them a thank you note and a promotional code for a discount on their next order?

Chances are, you can’t answer yes to any more than one (told you!) of those questions. Answering yes to them all is the the first step to turn those 1s into 2s.

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