You have a great product to sell, and a beautiful website with which to sell it. However, having an Internet presence alone is not enough, you have to consider every step of the process a potential customer will go through before they make that purchase on your site. Then, you have to increase their chance of making a purchase by doing a few simple things.

1. Traffic.
Increasing the traffic that your site gets is a great start. The more people you can get visiting your site means more sales for you. An even better way to increase sales is to make sure that your visitors are
"qualified" buyers for your product. This means that they fit into a certain group that would be most likely to benefit from your product.
You can get your message out to qualified buyers in a number of ways;
A well-designed banner can get an important message across quickly,
an ad placed in an e-zine involving a related topic is sure to interest qualified buyers, a good description placed in meta tag of the main page is also a good way to get qualified visitors.

2. Navigation.
Your site navigation is an important factor in your sales.
Not only should it be simple and consistent throughout your site, but it should have a purpose. What I mean is that you have to use your navigation as a tool to lead your customers where YOU want them to go.
They have no idea where they have to go if nothing stands out on the page.
So tell them. If you are selling one product or service, be sure that the link to your product is somewhere at the top of the page and be sure that it stands out. You want to make sure that everyone that visits your page will click on that link and at least have the chance to buy.

3. E-mail capture.
It is a good idea to set up an e-mail capture form. Something like a Free Newsletter or Information request that enables you to get a potential customer's e-mail address so that you can inform them of special sales or offers. This is beneficial because the customer has obviously already been to your site and has an idea of what your product is, now you just have to sell him on that idea. The key to sales is in the follow up!

4. Customer Testimonials.
It's a good idea to ask for feedback from past customers not only to see if there's anything that you can improve upon, but also for a customer testimonials section. These are valuable because it is not you talking about your product, it is someone else. Customers often take what other people say into consideration more than what the company itself says about the product, simply because they know that that person was a customer just like them.

5. Updated Info.
If there are sections on your site that are updateable, then do so as often as possible. Updating your site not only increases the rank in some search engines, but it also brings interested potential customers back to your site.
Maybe they didn't buy this time, and they didn't sign up for the free newsletter,
but next week's article on Bee Pollen may bring them back. Not only that, but they might e-mail your URL to a friend whom they think would find the article interesting.

So you see, it's not enough to be online anymore. You have to be online effectively! Do what you can to improve every aspect of your site,
and you'll have them coming back for more!

Derek Podlubny is a member of the Worldprofit Design Team.
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