Has your business been struggling this year? Then it is time to take a look at the health of your business and focus on improving the aspects you need to help you succeed.
Everyone who owns an online business constantly worries about traffic, but in order to be successful at online selling, there are a number of other metrics you need to track at your site. After traffic, your second most important number will be conversions, that is, how much of your traffic is taking action at your site.
The next key metric will be your leads. The last two key metrics will be your sales and income and finally your profits.
In order to boost all five of these numbers, you need to have an attractive, professional looking website with a number of important features. Here are several to look at to improve the performance of your site.
Your Site Navigation
Make it easy for people to find what they are looking for through persistent, site-wide navigation. Keyword your navigation whenever possible to optimize your site for the search engines so that you can get more traffic naturally without having to pay for it. In other words, let them know what to expect when they click on that link, with a clearly descriptive name or category.
Your Landing Pages
Every page on your site should have some sort of call to action, whether it be to sign up for a free email newsletter (leads) or make a sale. Don’t just make your placements of text, images, and calls to action based on aesthetics. Try different variations and see how they affect sales. You can do this using any metrics tool, but Google Analytics can help and it is free. Also try Google Optimizer to help you arrive at a winning online sales letter or landing page.
Optimize Your Site Load Time
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to browse an online store that is loading slowly because the images are not optimized and all you see is a lot of blanks space. It’s also unprofessional and erodes trust.
Keep in mind that a lot of people will want to browse many products before buying. They’ll often open as many as ten different products all at once using tabbed browsing in Chrome or Firefox, for example, and compare them side by side. Your server needs to be able to respond to these kinds of requests or else they will click out.
Use meaningful images that have been optimized for the web and populate your ALT tags with keyworded descriptions of the images so that even if the images load slowly or are suppressed, the visitor will still know that they are in the right place.
Use a Professional Hosting Service
If you’re still on shared hosting, or worse still, trying to use a free site, it is time to get an ecommerce optimized dedicated server to help speed up the page serving and shopping process. Then visitors will be happy to browse your high-performance site and you will be to handle the volume of orders you will be hoping for.
Create Great Products
A lot of business owners get it backwards. They create a product, and then try to sell it. Instead, do the market research needed to find out what products your target market is hungry for, and create those. Market research for product creation will save you a lot of time and effort, and increase your overall percentage of hot products in your catalog that will keep selling for you over and over again.
Create Great Promotions
Come up with different promotions and use them to boost your sales. Holiday sales are the norm, but you can create a great promotion at any time to spark interest in your existing products and services, or launch new ones.
Creating special promotions can be an incredibly effective way to get a lot of sales in a short period of time. This is also a great strategy for any month that might be slow in your business.
Check your sales volume at least once a week and check your monthly goals and targets—if you don’t have any, you should set them. Then check your progress at the middle and third week of the month. If you are not going to meet your targets, set up an online special sale and email the people on your marketing list to tell them all about it. Also encourage them to pass the information along to any friends and family who might be interested.
Process Payments Professionally
Credit card merchant service may be beyond your budget when you are just starting up in business online, but fortunately, PayPal will allow you to create a verified business account in just a few steps and with no charge to set up your account.
PayPal processes transactions from all of the major credit cards, plus electronic transfers from banks and even cash if people go into a MoneyGram location. So if you are not accepting PayPal, you should be. Most people who use it already have an account set up, so all they have to do to shop is to remember their email address and password. This makes shopping at your site virtually seamless.
PayPal will take a small percentage and per-transaction fee, but it is a fast, convenient way to process payments online and adds a great deal of trust value to your site when people know they are paying through such a safe and secure method online.
If you feel your site is not performing as well as it should, try these strategies and focus on improving conversions, and see what a difference it can make to your online revenue.
Further Reading
Market Research For Information Product Creation in Simple Steps
