Why Do Most People Never Make a Sale Online?

Isn’t it funny how all the hype says you can make millions online yet most people who set up a website to start “selling” online never make a single sale or enough sales to cover their setup costs.

Running an online business no matter what you are promoting or selling is just like running any business, it takes focus, dedication and time… Yes, you can make money quickly and sometimes you hit it out of the park first time but mostly you’re going to have to work at it.

Lets look at one thing that you can do to improve your online sales:

Increase your website traffic

Sales is a numbers game. If the average conversion rate for online sales direct off your page is under 1% and you only get 10 visitors a day, you will have to wait at least 10 days to get a sale (on averages). Truthfully though, most sites have an onpage conversion of 0.01% – 0.1%. You can work out the math on the numbers. It seems obvious but more visitors means more sales (yes there is more to it but it gives you somewhere to start)

To increase your traffic you have many options but the 3 main ones when you’re starting out are

• Pay per click -  Google Adwords
• Organic traffic – showing up in Google free results
• Social Media – Facebook and twitter traffic

Pay per Click

So you can buy instant traffic at around 50c a click minimum. It can quickly add up to $$$ but you do get guaranteed traffic when you want it and as much as you can pay for. The one thing you have to make sure of is that your ‘offer’ is really good or that you capture them to an email list so that you can continue to market to them. If you just let them go, you will have wasted your money.

Organic traffic / SEO traffic

Search engine optimisation and link building can push your site up to the top of the search engines. It takes time to rank for any  competitve keywords and up to 6 months for you to see real results in most cases.

As an SEO specialist, I can honestly tell you that most sites need a lot of work before they move up to where they get a lot of traffic. That’s especially true when you are competing against the whole world rather than just other local businesses. So learn the basics of SEO, read everything you can about link building and get to work!

Social Media

If you are comfortable with social media, you can build a group of people who are interested in your area of interest or website topic then ‘lead’ them over to your site when you post new information. The quickest way to do this is to build your site on WordPress and use an RSS feed to autopost to Facebook or Twitter etc.

A Final Thought

A combination of the 3 techniques works well. You buy some visitors, work the search engines and build your followers to build a stream of traffic. Once you have good traffic, you can work out your conversion ratios then start to improve those by making changes to your site and sales copy. Until you have at least 100 visitors a day, it is hard to make any sort of accurate assumptions about what to change or why.

So start out by increasing your website traffic which will have a flow on affect on the number of sales you make.

Please add your comments to the post or my Facebook Fan Page and I will do my best to respond. And get to work on your website traffic!