Want some Tips on Increasing Your Sales? Here are 9 Tips on Increasing your sales.

Do you want tips on how to increase your website sales?
Well of course you do.

Having a website can be one of the most rewarding,
addicting, and obsessive decisions you could ever choose to make.
It can also be the most frustrating, and somewhat depressive
decisions as well.

You put your heart and soul into creating your website.
From your website's design down to the color of your text.
You think about it all day and even dream about it
at night.

After everything is neatly put together, you finally
publish your site with excitement!.....

It's been two months now and that level of excitement
is slowly starting to slip away. No sales...
"What am I doing wrong?", you ask yourself.
I have the best website design and My products or
services are unique.But still NO SALES!

I've been down that road before and I definitely
understand how heartbreaking and nerve wreaking
it can be not to get what your ultimate goal is
when you first consider starting an online business,
which is getting sales and making a profit.

Well here are 9 suggestions I have
to help you convert your traffic to sales:

• Your Website Design: Is your website easy to navigate? Are the colors or fonts hard on the eyes. The background colors you choose can definitely have a negative impact on your visitors and the type of font you choose can be detrimental to your sales as well. Stay away from really fancy fonts or fonts that have a lot of curves to them. Although they might be appealing to you. I would suggest you keep the fancy font for your logos or banner graphics. Buyers may find it hard to read and if they can not read what you are selling then, click... they go to another site. When choosing a website template or design. Keep it simple. Don't choose something with a dark background. This is important if you are selling a product. It takes away from the product. The visitor focuses more on your background color than what you actually have to offer.

• Trusted Seal : Building trust is an essential part of selling online. Your buyer needs to trust you and feel comfortable purchasing your products or services. Make sure to have a SSL Certificate somewhere on your site or a trusted merchant seal. You can have this on your site or within your shopping cart. You would be amazed how many visitors actually search for the seal when they visit your site. Over 60% of online shoppers check to see if they see a trusted seal. If they don't see one, they might leave your site. You can get a seal from Godaddy, your hosting company (if applicable), Hackersafe/Mcafee and other sites as well. Over 70% of online shoppers will abandon a shopping cart if they dont' see this seal. They want to know that their credit card information is safe. Studies show that online websites who display the seal on their site/shopping cart see a surprisingly increased amount of sales after displaying one on their site.
  

• Products : Have a nice amount of products on your site. Before you launch your site. Think about what you will be selling on your site. Make a list of the different categories you will have on your site. Then make sure you have at least two to three pages of products per category. If you make your own products. Don't launch your site until you have sample images of the products you will be selling on your site. Try not to have just two or three products per category on your site. If you only have two products per category. Don't put the category on your site until you have 10 to 20 products ready. There's nothing worst than visiting a site that doesn't have a nice selection of inventory to browse through. For example purposes : Picture this scenario. You walk into a new boutique that has moved into your neighborhood. They have an inviting logo outside that screams come in and buy from us. You step inside and the decor is breath taking. You take a step further and noticed that the inside is HUGE! You take another couple of steps toward their merchandise and in this very BIG place there is only a couple of racks in the center of the store. You look around their two or three racks or displays and tell the store owner that they have a beautiful store and that you will be returning but didn't make a purchase. Why? Because the store didn't have a big enough variety because they were just starting out. I know I have done this before, it was uncomfortable for me and the store owner. You expect to find a nice selection of items when you visit a store and the same goes for an online store. Moving on...

• Price: This is a biggie. You must make sure your prices are competitive but not to low where you are not making a profit but not to high where you are not seeing any sale. What I suggest is that you do a search on Google to find out who your competitors are and see what prices they are offering. Then go back to your site and pick a product and do a test. Perform a test on that product by doing the following: Take the product you chose to do a test on and make a copy of that product so you have two of the same product. Change the name of the second product so you don't confuse the buyers. Make one product's price lower than the other. Make sure the lower price isn't so low that you won't make a profit though. Run this test for two to three weeks. If you see that the product that has the lower price sells better than the product with the higher price, than you know that you need to change your prices in order to start getting sales on that particular type of product. If that doesn't seem logical to you. Just take one product and do a test on it for three weeks. Lower the price on it ( as long as it's not lower than the MSRP), change the description around a bit and see what happens.
  

• Images: Make sure that you have clear images. You can have the best products or services but if a visitor can not see what they are buying than they will just leave your site.
  Make sure you have professional images on your site. If you take your pictures yourself, that is fine as well. Just make sure you take your pictures outside or on a white background. You can either use a white sheet or go to your local fabric store and buy a couple of yards of Muslin which should only run you .99 cents a yard. I recommend getting a photo cube. They are inexpensive and creates a professional picture. You can find one on ebay. Your images say a lot about your businesses image. If you have dark photos or photos with the cat in the background, you are less likely to get a sale. If you can not afford a good digital camera and a photo cube. Consider investing in photo background removal services.

• Shipping: Make sure you display which shipping courier you will be using on your site. You also want to display your shipping fees on your site as well. This way a buyer will know exactly how much their total order will be. You can set up a separate page that says "Shipping Fees". Create a graphic towards the top of your website pages that says Shipping Fees and make the graphic clickable to the page that has your shipping cost.

• The Type of Payments you accept: Display what type of payments you accept by placing a payment logo on your site. The closer you have it displayed at the top of your website pages the better. That is one of the first things visitors look for when they visit your site. If they don't know what type of payments you offer than they will get frustrated looking for a payment option and leave your site.

• Pay Pal: Having Pay Pal as your online payment processor can be okay depending on what type of online business you have. If you offer a service to other online businesses. Than this option is okay because most online businesses pay via Pay Pal or know what Pay Pal is. Not all of your visitors know about Pay Pal, to be honest there are a lot of people who have no clue what Pay Pal is. In saying that. I would highly recommend investing in or inquiring about signing up with a Credit Card Processing Company or a Merchant Account Company that will process your credit card payments for you. I recommend Authorize.net or Pay Pal Website Pro. Both have a monthly fee of about or around $30.00 a month. It is less confusing to the buyers and more professional. I have seen and heard about other online businesses seeing an increase in sales when they added a payment processor to their shopping cart.

• Contact Information: This is something that is overlooked or dreaded by small business website owners. It is important to have a phone number somewhere on your site. A buyers wants to see that they can contact you if there is a problem or a question that they have about ordering or an order that they place. If there is not a phone number visible and only an email address or a website contact form. They will become worried that your company may be fraudulent and not purchase from you. I know that you may have concerns about people calling you all times of the night, but there is a solution to your problems. You can sign up for an 800 number. There are tons of services out here that will provide you with an 800 number. I recommend Ring Central. You can set up an option to have them take messages on all calls or you can have a do not disturb option set so your phone does not ring in the middle of the night. Instead all calls will go to an automated voicemail service and you can retrieve your messages when you have time. You also have the option to either except a call when it comes in or to send it directly to the voice mail. When a call comes through to your 800 number and you pick up the phone. The operator chimes in immediately and says " You have a call. Press one to accept this call or two to send this call to voicemail". It's the best option especially if you work from home. You can try them out for Free for 30 days :Try RingCentral Online FREE for 30 days
  
  

I hope you enjoyed reading some of my tips and use them to
help increase your sales.

Just remember to do a lot of testing with your products
or services. See what works. If something
is not working then try a different route.

Think about installing Google Analytics within your
website so you can see which pages are your
highest exit pages and which ones are the most popular.

If you have any questions. Feel free to contact me
or leave a comment.

I am always here to help.

Yours Truly,
Carla Phillips
Your Search Engine Ranking Specialist

Why am I not Getting any Sales?!

It's depressing I know. You get your website set up, add products, optimize your site and get traffic coming in on a regular basis but no sales!

So I was sitting here and getting depressed from hearing everyone talk about not getting any sales or depressed because they are not getting the traffic that we all know you deserve and I decided to do my free tips here tonight.

Okay, so now you have to start analyzing your site and figure out what you can do to convert your traffic into sales.

Some questions you need to ask yourself:

Is my landing page relevant to the keyword used to optimize the page? Just assuming that you optimized one of your pages using the most relevant keyword possible for what that page is offering. If you didn't and a consumer clicks on your link just to find out that the "new" baby blanket they thought they were going to be looking at purchasing is actually a page about used baby blankets then you have lost a sale. Make sure your content matches your keywords/meta tags.

Are you collecting your visitors information when they come to your site? Do you have a form to collect your visitors information visible on your website. If you don't then you are missing out on potential customers. I know in the perfect world you want a visitor to buy right then and there but you are going to have some visitors who love your products but say to themselves that they will come back later or when they get paid. Truth be told, they won't! Statistics say that it usually takes anywhere from 7 to 8 follow ups before a customer makes a purchase from you. So in saying that, it takes me back to my original post. Gather your visitors information by collecting their name and email address or whatever you'd like to collect. You can do this by having a signup form on your site for a free product sample, 10% off their next purchase etc.. By doing this, you get to market to those customers who don't buy right away. You get to send them future offers and follow up with them and therefore increasing your sales. Follow up is the key to your success!! Start collecting email addresses today.

Are the descriptions based off exactly what is being sold on the page showing up in the search engines and does the description state the color, type of product, if it's plain or trendy? A small description shows up under each listing in the search engine for the product or service you are offering. Consider adding the size, color, style, manufac. in the description usually within the first 25 words of your description page. This way when a consumer looks at your listing in the search engine results, they know exactly what they will see and get when they click on that link.

Are your prices competitive? Check out your competitors and see what they are selling their products at. Are they lower or higher than yours. If your prices are lower, don't be afraid to state that in your description etc. "We have the lowest price online!" You will definitely lose a customer if your prices are too high.

Do you display your shipping cost on your site and which shipping carriers you use? Most customers want to know up front how much shipping will cost them if they purchase a product from your site.

What payment type do you accept? Place a logo that is visible for your customers to see i.e. in your header graphic. Top right hand side or left hand side.

Do you ship internationally? I don't know how many times I have received emails from international buyers wondering if I ship to other countries besides the US. By the time I get their email in the morning, they are either sleep or it has been 6 hours since they emailed me and have found the product at another online store. Customer lost! So now I have a message/graphic posted on the home page, although now that I think about it, it should be posted in the site message section so it can appear on all pages! Okay, will do that later.

Are you offering enough products? Do you have enough products on your site or do you have just two or five for each category? Think about expanding your inventory to include more products. Consumers like to have options, items in different colors, option to personalize items, a large variety of items to chose from etc.

Do you have a phone number visible on your site? It is important to have a phone number visible on your site. Half of your visitors will not even bother to call but they feel more comfortable seeing it there just in case they want to call. It's a security feature and a must if you want to continue to run an online business. I know this is not something that you want to hear. I know you don't want your phone ringing at 1 am. But there are affordable services out here that you can sign up for to get a 1-800 number on your website.

I personally use Ring Central.com. There is a device that you can download onto your computer. Everytime a call comes in, your Cell Phone icon starts to ring to let you know that there is a call. You can chose to ignor the call and it will go directly to voicemail or you can chose to connect to the call. You can also place an icon on your site that lets your visitors go directly to the link and enter in their number for you to give them a call. Pretty neat feature if I say so myself!

They offer affordable monthly plans and you can try them out for FREE for 30 days. If you don't like it, simply cancel before your 30 days are up.

Try them out at this link below:

Try RingCentral Fax FREE for 30 days


Last but not least!

Have you sat down and made a budget for PPC campaigns. I know a lot of people tend to shy away from this type of marketing because of the cost and YES natural searches are always the best and I encourage them, but they take time and since some of you do have full time jobs you just don't have the time to optimize your site enough to start to see a ROI, the investment being your time spent away from family, friends and even having a life (which I obviously don't have because I am typing this at 12am.).

Sit down and really think about this, PPC ads are really the best way to bring in traffic and convert that traffic to sales if you have the right landing page and products.

Write down a list of keyword terms that you are interested in and check the daily searches. You can use wordtracker to find these out or find a SEM (Search Engine Marketing) expert that you can trust to help you chose the right keywords that will bring you in some much needed traffic but won't break the bank.

Think about it like this, you are more likely to spend thousands of dollars in advertising cost in the Yellowpages, magazines, print ads, radio ads etc and you will most likely never get one sale from it, not only that you most likely won't be able to track if the sales are coming from them unless you have a special phone number you have set up per ad or coupon code ( If the buyer even remembers to enter in the code with their purchase). But if you set aside some money to use for PPC ads on high traffic websites ( that offer you a way to track your clicks/traffic) or Google Adwords you can see where your traffic is coming from and track your ROI. If you get no sales then you know to move on to another marketing venue.

To be perfectly honest everyone. Marketing takes time and although we would all love a really good get rich quick scheme you know that it's just not going to happen.

So be patient and do your research, find a good SEO company or a SEM company if you don't want to over exert yourself with all of the SEO mumbo jumbo.

That's my tip for the day and I approve this message!

Sorry, just miss hearing that every other 10 mins. on the t.v.

Sending you all positive vibes and hoping that your sales increase even through these bad economic times. Hang in there!