Insider's Guide to Increasing Online Sales

Maximizing online sales begins with an understanding of how people behave and think when using a commercial web site. There are certain elements of a web site and the online experience as a whole which affect how internet users form their buying decisions. In this guide we will highlight the major stumbling blocks to online sales. We will also describe how these stumbling blocks can be replaced with solutions that lead to dramatic increases in online revenue.

Purchasing a product or service online is a multi-part process. It begins most often with a search using one of the three major search engines and ends with an online payment process. Or does it? There's good reason to consider the after-sale process as a means of generating repeat business, but we will talk about this later on. For now, let's just focus on the online buying process from search to online payment and dissect the issues one by one. It's important to think of online sales as a process and to remember that the bottom can fall out of the process at any stage. Each stage is equally important to the desired end result.

I mentioned that the online purchase process begins with a search. And it certainly does. The majority of any web sites visitors will be generated thanks to search engines such as Google. This is the first stumbling block along the process. If your web site is not listed in the first page or two of search results, your web site will struggle to receive visitors and therefore sales. Search engine optimisation services can remedy this problem.

Many search engine optimisation firms will charge a high price for their services. And many will charge a high price and offer little in the way of real results.

The truth is that you can optimize your web site yourself. If you want to spend the next six or seven months of your life learning every thing you can about search engine optimisation it's completely possible. There's no shortage of information about the subject and it's readily available online. Its kind of mind boggling how much information there is really. There are blogs and e-books, forums, software, books, entire web sites full of information to absorb and reference.

Of course you will also have to spend a good deal of time sorting out which information is relevant, which information is accurate and which information is current.

Search engines change the way that they index the world wide web as often as you and I change our underwear. That's quite often…at least I hope it's quite often…It should be often. The point is, the rules change with search engines quite regularly and there's a lot of information floating around the internet that is outdated, woefully outdated in fact. Advice outdated to the point of causing some serious damage to your search rankings if you followed it.

So there are a few pitfalls involved in learning enough about SEO to achieve good search rankings for your web site. It's time consuming. It takes a lot of patience and effort and a lot of trial and error. It could lead you down some twists and turns which could bring your web sites a few setbacks.

You could always experiment with a trial web site. You could throw together a site which is not related to your commercial site and spend a few months fine tuning it for search rankings. In fact I highly recommend that you do this if you are serious about learning the ins and outs of search engine optimisation. This is the quickest way to discover what works and what doesn't in terms of search engine rankings.

Whether you hire an SEO firm or optimize your own web site all that matters is that you rank well in search engine for terms related to your product or service. There are no shortcuts here and any way that you slice it, you will need to spend money or time and effort, or all of the above in order to see real results.

Let's get back to the subject of increasing your online sales and assume that you have hired a reputable SEO firm or have optimized your own web site and that you now enjoy good search engine rankings for terms that are related to your product or service.

What's the next step along the online buying process? What is the internet user greeted with once they click a link in the search engines that is directed at your site? It's your web site. Don't make the mistake of thinking of your web site as an online document, a mish mash of images and web pages and links. Instead, think of your web site as part of the buying process, which it is. It's the front door of your business, its your sales person, its your customer service representative, your secretary, your image, your reputation, its your sales pitch, your marketing message, its all of these things and more, but most importantly, it's the make or break step along the road to generating online sales.

What is the first thing that your web site visitor sees? Hopefully its something related to the search term that they typed into the search engine a few seconds ago. Hopefully your web site has some information of use and value and interest to this visitor. If not, it's just a matter of clicking the back button in their web browser and searching for it on another web site.

Hopefully you haven't made the mistake that many web site owners make and decided that your web site offers wonderful opportunity to be creative. Hopefully you haven't indulged in some vain, egotistical impulse to design the web site your self just to have some bragging rights at the dinner table. If this is the case and you are more concerned with your web site's bells and whistles than you are with making money then you might as well stop reading this report right now.

On the other hand if you would like to know how to increase your web site's earnings keep reading. Still with me? Good. Look, your web site has to give people the information that they are seeking and has to give this information easily and quickly.

You have about 3 seconds on average to convince a web site visitor that they have found the right place. They will scan your site, give it the once over, if it isn't immediately obvious that they have found what they where looking for they will go somewhere else. And why not? There's about 50 billion other web sites to look at.

Why would anyone waste there time on a web site that takes forever to load, or requires sorting through irrelevant pages to find the right info?

The information displayed on your web site has to be easily accessed. The navigation of your site must be straightforward and simple to use. There must not be any obstacles between the web user and the information that they require. This includes images, video, flash, music, animation, anything that takes a long time to load and really is not that important to making a sale.

This also includes the design of the site, highly contrasting colors, text which is difficult to read, navigation which is difficult to understand or use. Every aspect of your web site should be thoroughly analyzed and put under a critical microscope. If it isn't important to the web visitor, then why is it there?


Part One - Introduction to Online Sales
Part Two - Web Site Usability
Part Three - Defining Calls to Action
Part Four - Optimizing Sales Copy
Part Five - Online Purchasing Behaviors
Part Six - Price Comparison Behavior
Part Seven - Building Online Trust
Part Eight - Understanding Conversion Rates
Part Nine - The Payment Process
Part Ten - After The Sale


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