The fundamentals of business are the same online as they are offline. Making income and profit is vital to the success of any business. How are income and profits generated? By SELLING products.

Is your site selling your products?

If you answered no, why isn’t it? Weak copy, poor design/organization, poor customer focus, internal company issues, and no site visitors?

If you answered yes - Are you being objective? The vast majority isn’t and could be improved to sell more. You want to sell more right?

The difference between a failing business and a successful one is primarily the quantity of product sales. If you make enough sales and therefore income to pay off your costs, you survive. To be successful you must go beyond this survival point and get higher sales and therefore higher income and profits. Whilst most offline businesses seem to see this situation clearly and work actively to increase sales, it seems a large proportion of businesses online don't or at least don’t on their Web site.

For example, retail stores are intensely focused on their customers. They are constantly striving to improve and increase sales of their products to the customer. They often work on an income per area of space basis. This puts the emphasis firmly on maximizing their selling space and offering.

Emphasize Income Per Area Of Space

We could learn from this approach online and focus on making sales and improving our offering. Whilst introducing the same income per area equation is probably too much for the online world and small screens, the greater emphasis on sales and sales income should be welcomed. That doesn’t mean squeezing ads and text into every conceivable web space, it means maximizing your web space with compelling offers, good communication, a clear message, intuitive layout and navigation, focus on potential customers, etc. All things that encourage and nurture Web site usage and ultimately make sales.

So how do you make your Web site sell your products? Well, of course you need to be marketing your site and products effectively to get potential customers to your site. Once you have these visitors, you need to actively sell your products to them. Sales don’t happen on its own; your site has to sell them. That means the work has to be put into your site and for it to say what your potential customers want to hear.

Identify Weak Elements

With the aid of a few questions, you can identify weak elements on your site that aren’t actively selling your products and do whatever is necessary to make them sell. Lets be clear about it, your objective is to sell as many of your products as possible in the shortest time possible. (If you don’t have a Web site yet, use the questions and their results to build a Web site around). Before we look at the questions themselves lets focus your mind a little. Try to think from your potential customers’ point of view. Think objectively to see what they see. They have probably never been to your site before and come with an open mind ready to discover what you have to offer them. What are they thinking? Well... consider what you see and think when you go to a Web site: