Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Qualifying for a Makeover from Lagging Sales

One no-fail indicator that your online strategy needs help is steadily falling sales. The issue always boils down to numbers — the number of products sold, the number of site visitors, and the last number on your bottom line. They're all connected, and that connection has everything to do with sales.

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that you have immediate, and often real-time, access to online sales transactions. At any hour of the day, you can determine exactly how many dollars your Web site is generating. You then know whether your business is having a good day. What happens, though, when it's not a good day, or a good month?

If sales are down, start by asking yourself two basic questions:

• Do I need to pull in more visitors?
• Do I need to convert more visitors to buyers?

Sure, sometimes you answer “Yes” to both questions. Typically, though, your problem stems more from one reason than the other. Either the number of people coming to your site has decreased and your sales are affected, or the proportion of sales to the number of visitors is off because people are leaving your site before making purchases. After you decide which issue is most responsible for weighing down sales, you can begin addressing the problem.

Increasing the number of visitors to your site

If you need to increase the number of visitors to your Web site, concentrate on these areas to give sales a lift:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Reexamine the ...