Online selling is very different from selling in person. You’re convincing someone to make the purchase on their own time. Bore them, fail to make the case, and they’re gone, off your site. You may be able to slow them down with a popup window, but you can’t stop them, and you don’t even know for certain what their objection was. How do you improve your websites so that you make more sales?

1. Make it easy to buy from your site.

Sometimes the problem is as simple as people can’t figure out how to buy from your site. The “buy now” button may be difficult to find or it takes to long to go from cart to finished order.

If people have to struggle to buy from your website, they aren’t going to. The internet is a big place, and even if other sites won’t have exactly what they were after, there will probably be something close enough elsewhere.

Links to add a product to your site’s shopping cart or to buy the product through your affiliate link should be easily found. Even if your copywriting still needs work, a clear and simple path to making a purchase will improve the chances that people will buy from you.

2. Make your site easy to read.

An easy to read website is a combination of good copywriting and good layout. A poor job on either of these factors will cut down on your website’s conversion rates.

Most people do better with short paragraphs and bullet points when reading online. You can use longer blocks of text if that’s what it takes to get your point across, but remember that many people skim more than they read online. Make it easy for them, and provide greater detail a little further along for those who want it.

Keep your writing simple too. There’s probably a lot of jargon specific to your niche, and while you may be comfortable with it, others may not be. The same goes for showing off your vocabulary in general. Use simple words everyone understands.

3. Use appropriate graphics.

The right graphics are a big help in making sales. People can’t touch your product when they’re online, so if you’re selling a physical product, graphics are the one way you have to show them what they’re shopping for.

Make sure your graphics look good. If you’re selling a product as an affiliate, there are often good images available for your use – just check with the program you’re associated with. If it’s your own product, make sure you take a good picture. A photo taken with a cluttered background or with several other of your products won’t be nearly as appealing as a clean one showing just the product in question.

4. Establish trust.

If your website gives people a bad feeling, they aren’t going to buy from you. Do your best to make your website look reputable.

In part, this means avoiding hype in your descriptions. Be clear and honest about what the product is and what it is not. People like to know what the advantages and the disadvantages are when they’re shopping.

This also means avoid spelling and grammatical errors. We all make them, but if they’re all over your website, people won’t trust you as much.

5. Encourage newsletter or autoresponder signups.

People don’t always buy on the first visit. It’s often said that it can take seven exposures to convince someone to make a purchase. Having a newsletter or autoresponder for people who want more information about your products can have a big impact on your sales.

Provide solid, relevant information in your newsletter, plus sales links as appropriate. Don’t go overboard on trying to make sales on your newsletter unless you understand that you will get a lot of people unsubscribing quickly. Some people can make that work, but others lose more than they gain that way.

There’s something nice about getting into a good routine with your online business. You know what needs to be done and how to do it. You know about what response you’ll get for the work you do. But are you still taking new risks? Are you experimenting with new ideas to bring people to your online business?

Running any business is a risk, of course. Keeping with a single routine is even a risk in business, as you don’t know if something else will do better. That’s why you should be experimenting with new ideas regularly.

I don’t mean take constant big risks, making major changes and so forth. Going too wild with how you run your online business can take you in the wrong direction with it, and it may be difficult to recover.

More appropriate experiments, on the other hand, can help you figure which directions to take your business. They’re not only appropriate – they’re necessary.

From Beginner to Pro

Experimenting is a big part of how you go from being a beginner with your business to an experienced professional. You learn what works, what doesn’t and get some idea as to why things happen they way they do for you.

Just think about it. How much would you trust the expertise of someone who has always run their business one way and only that way? Would you consider them as much of an expert as one who had tried a lot of different things?

I don’t mean that you aren’t an expert in your business if you choose one way to do everything and stick with it. You could choose to have your expertise in article marketing, for example, and only ever work with that kind of marketing for your business. But if you only choose to market by submitting your articles to the same list of directories all of the time, never trying any other article marketing tactics, are you really an expert on the subject overall? Do you even know if what you’re doing works as well as it should?

Being an expert doesn’t mean you’re safe from making mistakes with your business, of course. We all make mistakes. It does mean you can choose the things you try more carefully. It also means you probably have the things you know work running well as you experiment.

Which Experiments Should You Try?

There are plenty of ways to experiment with your online business. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Offer a new product.

Have you been offering the same products for a long time? Try something new.

Think about your niche and why people come to your site. You should have a pretty good idea of what your visitors are after. Now think about what might improve the experience they have with your business. Is there something that really goes well with what you’re offering that you aren’t recommending yet?

This doesn’t have to be a product you own, of course. That’s what affiliate programs are for. Find a related product you can offer as an affiliate, and you don’t have to create something new of your own.

2. Change how you offer products.

There are a lot of ways to offer products for sale online. You can have an online store, post product reviews, link to products within blog posts, video reviews and so on. However you make it work, it can be worth your time to try a different way, just to see what happens.

3. Try a new link building strategy.

How are you getting links to your website? Is it working for you? Are the links good only for search engine traffic or do they bring traffic to your site on their own merit?

If most of your current linking strategy is mostly search engine food, look at techniques that are more about getting traffic from higher traffic websites. Try building a reputation through YouTube videos, and put your links into the video description. Get active on a relevant forum that allows signature links.

4. Try paid traffic sources.

If you’ve been avoiding pay per click advertising, buying ads in relevant newsletters and so forth, take a look at this option. Paid methods have the advantage of giving fast results and the disadvantage of costing money, which can add up fast. When you make them work, they’re well worth the money.

5. Do more networking.

How much networking do you do, online and otherwise? Is it more than putting up a Facebook page or doing a few tweets here and there about your business? Just a touch of blog commenting once in a while? Are you a real person when you do these things, or just a business with little personality?

Networking is more than announcing what your business has to offer. That’s certainly a part of it if you’re trying to promote your online business, but it’s not all there is to it. If you want to be taken seriously and really make the most of the time you spend networking, you have to be a real person and share advice, relevant links to other sites and be a bit social.

It’s all too easy to go overboard on networking, of course. You shouldn’t be checking your Facebook page or Twitter every few minutes. Many people find it helpful to set up a schedule. This keeps things under better control, so you keep working on your business in other ways as you network.

6. Attend industry events.

Going to an industry event can be a bit pricey, but as an opportunity the right event can be priceless. It’s a chance to get some great information from some of the top people in your industry and to network with others.

You probably won’t know what to do when you first go to an event. They can be pretty overwhelming. My recommendation is to pick the parts you really want to see and don’t go overboard looking for swag. There’s neat stuff to be had at most events, but really, they shouldn’t be the focus of your day. Learning to improve your business is much more important.

What experiments have you done to improve your online business? Any you’d care to share?

If you’ve worked online long at all, you’ve seen plenty of hype. It probably made deciding what you wanted to do to earn a living online that much more difficult. All those images of wealth, all the people claiming their massive success was a matter of months from poverty, or just a few hours a week of work. It sounds nice, but most people know with a little thought that it’s usually not that way.

That doesn’t keep people from wanting to use hype in their own sales process. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business product, a health product, a parenting technique or whatever else. It’s more fun to sell to the dream than to the reality.

That doesn’t make it a better idea, especially if you want to build a relationship with your customers.

There are many good reasons to avoid hype in your sales process. Perhaps the most important is that in the United States the FTC is clamping down on the claims you can make about your products. You have to be able to prove what you say, and you have to know typical results.

In home business products, I suspect typical results is the ebook gets read (well, partially, anyhow) and little to no action is taken. It’s probably similar in other areas.

Certainly there are people who go for hype. There’s a reason why people use it. It’s fun to brag about the more exceptional results people can get from what you’re selling, so long as you keep it honest.

But if you want to build a good relationship with your customers and don’t want to get in trouble for overstating the benefits or possibilities of the things you sell, don’t rely on hype. Go for honesty.

The single greatest thing about being honest about what you’re selling is that you aren’t likely to get in trouble with it. Not from the FTC and not with your customers. Give them more realistic expectations, and they won’t wonder why the miracles aren’t happening.

Ok, so that’s a little hype right there. You’ll always get customers who don’t understand why something isn’t working for them the way it does for others. Nothing works exactly the same for everyone. Still, you should have fewer problems when people know what to expect from what they’re buying from you.

The other great part about honesty is that it brings people back to you. If you tell them straight up what’s good and bad about what you’re trying to sell, they’re more likely to trust you. That gives you more chances to sell to them. Customers who come back are quite valuable.

This also means don’t use many of the common online sales tricks. Do you really need to use a bunch of exclamation points? Do you need to pretend that quantities are limited when they really aren’t? Keep it real and make the benefits of your product make the sale.

Yes, you can use a good sales page to manipulate people into wanting your product, whether or not it’s what they need. That will make you sales. It won’t build your reputation as an ethical marketer. If you want the long term trust of your customers, don’t dazzle them with b.s. Dazzle them with your upfront techniques that help them to buy exactly what they need.

Marketing is a major part of any business. If you don’t market, you don’t make sales. But calling it marketing may keep you in the wrong frame of mind.

The word “marketing” puts you in the frame of mind of bringing customers to your business. More of a sales-y feeling. That’s not a bad thing, but a little switch might help you to think of what you’re doing in a way that’s more helpful to your customers and your business.

You aren’t marketing. You’re finding solutions.

You’re finding solutions your customers need. This encourages you to think of what your customers need, rather than just what you want to offer them. You need to think more from their perspective. Don’t market them. Find a solution they want and offer it to them.

There are many ways to think of the problems potential customers are facing. It can be a problem of image. It can be a problem around the house. It can be a problem with their career.

Whatever the problem is, don’t think strictly of what will make the sale for you. Think of what will make the purchase right for the customer.

You’re also finding solutions for your business. What brings in the most money? What works? What doesn’t? What has the best return for your efforts?

When you’re solving problem, you test. That’s something you should always be doing in your marketing, testing. Test sales copy. Test landing pages. Test prices. Test traffic sources. Keep testing.

There are a few things that will tell you if you’ve solved a particular marketing problem, but money is a favorite way for most to know. We’re pretty much in business for the money, with loving what we do as a wonderful benefit that’s almost as important. But few of us can run any sort of business purely for the love of it. A decent income is needed to keep the passion alive.

Not every solution you create will work out. Sometimes you’ll lose money.

But you’ll always learn something, even if it’s “Wow. That really, really didn’t work like I thought it would!”

Most failures have something more to teach, however. There may have been some money earned, and if you can separate that part out, you can find out what part of the failure worked. That’s valuable information you may be able to use on its own or combine with a new solution. Or maybe it brought in traffic but poor to no sales. It’s up to you to figure out if it was purely low quality traffic or another problem.

Don’t fool yourself and think that any business can get away without marketing. Instead, treat your marketing as a chance to find solutions to the problems you and your potential customers face.

Making a home business successful is hard. There are some things you can control, mostly what you do yourself or hire someone to do for you, and other things that you cannot control. It’s really easy to focus on the parts you can’t directly control, forgetting that the things you can control can help the parts you don’t directly control.

Visitors to Your Site

You don’t directly control whether or not your website gets visitors. You can do everything possible to make it attractive to visitors and search engines, but sometimes that doesn’t bring in traffic.

You can control your link building activities. You can control your spending on pay per click advertising. You control whether or not you make videos or podcasts to bring in traffic.

You don’t know for certain if any of these will work or if any will suddenly quit working. But you can learn what makes them more likely to work for you.

With search engine traffic, expect that changes will happen sometimes. Your rankings go up, your rankings go down, your rankings fall into a deep, dark, dank pit leaving you wondering if you’ll ever see them again.

You can’t control that. You can try to influence with link building, but you can’t control it.

Even pay per click traffic you can’t control completely. You may get a new competitor or the algorithm that decides which ads get what space can change and you now have to rework your campaigns to go along with it. That’s online business for you.

Buyers

You can’t control whether or not people will buy from you. You can have the best copywriting, the most useful products and the best price, and still a certain percentage will not buy from you.

You can use what information you have to improve the odds that people will buy from you. You can test ads, ad placement, the copy describing the product, and if it’s your own product, your shopping cart, the checkout process, everything to do with how people buy from you or through your links that you control.

Work on these factors that you do have control over to make the most of the visitors who might turn into buyers. Thats’ the control you have.

Life and Chaos

No one has complete control over how their life goes. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times obstacles throw themselves enthusiastically into your way and make it hard to run your online business the way you used to.

You can control how you meet these challenges. You can hire someone to help you so that even when things get a little rough parts of your business will keep on going with less input from you. You can ask for guest posts on your blog. You can plan for problems.

You can’t be ready for every contingency, but you can cut down the ways that you can be caught unprepared. Think of where you want your business to go and take steps to help it move in that direction.