Making Sales on the Internet

The Internet has changed our buying habits. From deciding on which movie to see, selecting a new car, or buying ink for your printer, many people turn to the Internet to get answers and to make purchases. Historically, the company with the biggest marketing budget and best location was able to gain the largest share of their market through traditional marketing spends.

A Level Playing Field

You can set up a business today and be taking orders tomorrow. Google and DMOZ are the key players in creating this equilibrium because they don't rank companies by how much they can pay. They judge on the quality of your site's content and its "reputation" or backward links. Sounds great, doesn't it?

It IS great, but it is not as easy as many hucksters on TV and the Internet would have you believe. In order to get great traffic and sales, your site must be *better* than the rest! Why would someone buy from your site when there are likely to be many sites out there selling similar products or services? What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?

The following concepts can help you to succeed, even if your site exists solely to support a bricks-and-mortar business.

Usability and Design

If you appeal to your target audience and design for their likes and dislikes, they are more likely to buy from you. If you sell used video games, your look and feel should be different than if you sell scented candles. One size does not fit all! Think carefully about the "voice" of your site, and carry that over into the graphics and copy. Think about the type of hardware and software your customers are likely to have. Are they using AOL? Do they have older browsers? Or perhaps they have state-of-the-art equipment. Not all target markets are alike.

Build Trust

Buying something on the Internet is still a scary thing for many people. Always use secure pages for transactions and have a privacy policy -- then STICK TO IT. Testimonials are another powerful way to instill trust, as long as they are sincere and believable.

An "About Us" page is always a great idea; people typically want to know who they are buying from. Avoid personal information here unless your customers need to know more about you personally. If you are an artist selling your work or an individual providing services, personal information can help build trust. However, if you are reselling software, people really don't need to know that you are a major Star Wars fan who likes to dress up like Darth Vader and scare the pizza delivery guy!

Add Benefits

If a customer can get MORE at your site -- whether it is a wider selection or a special offer -- they are likely to hang around. Offer free advice, sample downloads, tutorials, or anything else that would be useful to your customer. Don't fill a page up with junk just to have more content; only add things that will be useful to your targeted audience. For example, a news feed with SEO articles would be a useful thing to have if you sell Web-building software, but a general news feed on a site that sells sunglasses would be a distraction.

Add Informational Content

Often, when faced with the unknown, people will assume a feature is not present unless the copy clearly states that it is. The more information you provide about your product or service, the better. People and search engines like to learn more about what you have to offer.

Consider adding a forum! Forums are a great way to build a community around your products and also get valuable feedback.

Long-term Proposition

All of these things take time and ongoing work to keep up-to-date. You can't simply expect to link to a product database and get high rankings and lots of orders. You certainly can't get into DMOZ that way, nor can you expect high rankings in the other search engines. As with any business, if you build a better company than the other guys you can come out ahead. With lots of unique and useful content and a design that appeals to your audience, you can rank well with a commercial site and build a good business while you're at it.

**A word of caution: anyone who builds their business by being dependent upon free search engine traffic is building a house on sand. The sand can shift at any minute. If you absolutely must have traffic to your site to survive, make sure you invest in alternate marketing strategies such as pay-per-click, online advertising, and traditional media. Even if you achieve great rankings with your site today, when you are dealing with free search results there are no guarantees that these will last.**