Sometimes the changes we make to our web sites, businesses, or personal lives seem small, insignificant, or hardly worth the effort. It can be hard to stay motivated when all we seem to make are small, incremental improvements.There is something powerful about incremental improvements, however.

Linking Incremental Improvements

I was looking at ways to improve some web sites recently, and a powerful realization hit me.

Incremental improvements are linked to each other.

Almost nothing happens in our businesses or lives that doesn’t affect some other part of our lives. One event’s output is the input for another event or process.

The Math of Incremental Improvements

Here’s some math to illustrate the principle. Let’s say that you work hard and make a 10 percent improvement in the amount of traffic that arrives at your web site. Because there are 10 percent more people on you site, you would expect your revenue to go up by about 10 percent (assuming the quality of traffic is the same).

Now let’s say that you made the same incremental improvement in how many people make it to the product or catalog pages. You get a formula like this:

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog = 1.21 Revenue

The incremental improvements are multiplicative, which means that you get a one percent bonus (21 percent instead of 20) increase.

Daisy Chains

The power of incremental improvements really starts to stack up when you have many steps that you can improve. Let’s say you also make a 10 percent improvement in the number of visitors who put items in the shopping cart, order size, and order completion.

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog x 1.10 Add Items x 1.10 Order Size x 1.10 Completion = 1.6105 Revenue

You get a whopping 61.05% (not just 50%) improvement in revenue by improving five steps by 10 percent.

You Can Make Incremental Changes

Incremental changes are often much easier to make than huge, landscape-altering changes. In fact, the expense and difficulty of making huge changes can eat away at the benefits of such a large change.

Set achievable goals, work at them bit by bit, and remember how powerful making multiple incremental changes to your site, business, or life can be.