Making Your Ecommerce Business Work

By the time you've made it this far, you've put a lot of time, effort and perhaps money into your web business. Now comes the big challenge - actually getting your site to make sales.

Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come, and even if they do come there is no guarantee that they will buy. Getting sales on the web is a very difficult proposition on the web, and most small web businesses never get over this hump. But while getting your site to work is a major challenge, I really enjoy this aspect of a web business because it is such a creative exercise and requires so many different skills.

It will call not only on your skills in web design, but also in marketing, copy writing, analyzing data and trends, and your creative skills in coming up with different possible solutions to problems. To me, this is the really fun part of the whole thing - seeing if I can bring all these aspects together to get a business to come alive.

A Black Art Matures

When I started out in 1998, getting a site to work was sort of a black art. You would do a bunch of stuff - submit to search engines, put a counter on your page to see if you were getting traffic, tinker with the site in hopes of some increase in sell through - and hope for the best.

Now there are a lot of tools to both drive targeted traffic to your site and measure your results. It is now pretty easy to get a good idea of whether your site is working - both in providing the content your customers are looking for and the value necessary to convert users into buyers.

The Basic Steps to Making Your Site Work

There are a few basic steps to making your website work. The first is usability testing. The point of usability testing is to make sure your website is usable by your visitors and that they are able to achieve their goals easily - including buying your product. In order to figure this out, you will need to have some way of tracking users on your website; how many people visit, what pages do they go do, how long do they stay, which ones buy, etc.

This means you will need to have some sort of web analytics package that allows you to get this kind of detailed user information. In addition, though, you will also need to track Return On Investment (ROI) - that is, the amount of sales you generate per visitors. It used to be very difficult to track this kind of detailed ROI information (sales per keyword, etc), but now it is relatively easy to do with free ROI trackers from AdWords and Bing Ads and inexpensive third party programs.

Once you have these analytics in place, the next step is to get traffic. And while I do make sure my sites are optimized for my important keywords so that hopefully they will get good search engine search result placement, these days you just can't count on free traffic to your site. So the basic foundation to most of my sites is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programs.

AdWords and Bing Ads will be the basic ways you drive traffic to your site, at least in the beginning, and it is important that you learn as much as possible about how to maximize the traffic from these sources in the most cost effective way. Once I start PPC advertising, I keep close track of my ROI and web stats for the first few months and tweak the site to try to increase my ROI and tweak the advertising as well.

After a few months or working on the site and advertising, I will hopefully have a real good idea of whether I can get the site to work, and if not, I have a good idea of the problems remaining and whether they are surmountable. So far I've been fortunate - all my Ecommerce sites have been able to get good ROI within a few months. But things sometimes didn't look promising at the beginning, so it is vital not to get discouraged at the beginning.

I have seen that spending the time working on the site and advertising in this way over the first few months can make all the difference between success and failure for an Ecommerce business. So don't get discouraged if your site doesn't work initially - that is probably the norm. Make sure you are set up to do the type of testing and tweaking I talk about in the next sections and you will maximize your chances for making your site work.

Next: Usability and Usability Testing - making sure that your site is easy to use for your visitors.

Conclusion

Hopefully this overview of how to make your website work will give you an edge over your competition. The key is to work your site like a real business. Just putting it up on the web isn't likely to work. You will have to spend the time to really work on getting your site to both get traffic and convert. I find that this is the point when many small businesses just seem to give up - it all seems too difficult. So if you can just spend the time and really try to analyze how to make your site work more effectively, and draw traffic more efficiently as well, you will be giving your site a true shot at becoming profitable.

Next > Usability Testing -- Making Sure Your Site Is Easy To Use And Functional

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