Without the right planning, you can easily spend a lot of time and money creating a website that doesn't perform as well as you expected. So, whether you're just creating your website, or you want better performance from your current one, here's 8 Simple Strategies you must use to improve your website sales and profits.

No 1. Find The Way To Be Unique

Understand your unique selling points (USPs). Then you can make sure that you highlight them in your website copy. Many sites look very similar and the more unique you can make yours, the more people are likely to remember and buy from your site. Give your visitors what they are looking for and tell them why you are the person they need to provide it.

No 2. Have A Strategy To Drive Traffic to Your Website

People will not just arrive at your website and buy your products, You have to have a continuous strategy to drive traffic to your website. Some ways you can use to drive traffic to your website are:

• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Optimisation For Natural Search Engine Listings Mutual Linking With Other Relevant Sites
• Article Marketing and Ezine Advertising
• Having An Affiliate Program
• Advertising Offline

No 3. Always Get Your Visitors' Details

Always get your visitors' names and email addresses. Then you can send them relevant articles and information regularly. Providing you send them useful and interesting emails, you will build their relationship with you and your products and make future sales more likely. Typical ways you can collect visitors' names and email addresses are to:

• Use an opt-in box on each page, offering a free sign-up incentive.
• Use pop-ups, pop-unders or exit pop-ups, either in addition to the opt-in form or instead of it.
• Offer a trial or demonstration of your product. Free access to a short extract from an ebook or audio, or maybe a two week free trial of a software product.
• Offer something specially produced for the sign-up incentive, like an audio recording or a PDF report.

No 4. Use Compelling Headlines

Your readers will use your headline to determine whether, or not, they want to read the rest of the page. So, your headline must be dynamic and attention grabbing and express the benefits of the product. Internet users generally skim through sales copy and you need to make it easy for them to find key points. Keep paragraphs short and easy to read and identify main points with sub headlines.

No 5. Make Navigation Easy

Making navigation easy for visitors will improve your website sales and profits. If your site navigation is confusing, visitors will leave. Specific points to note are:

• Clearly guide visitors to the action you want them to take.
• Use text rather than graphics, or graphics with text instructions. Then what you want visitors to do will always be understood.
• Keep your links in the same place on pages. Be consistent throughout your site.
• Make sure your links show up easily against the background. Dark text on dark background is always difficult to read. Check the colour after the link is clicked as well.

No 6. Use Graphics With Caution

Flashing animations or graphics, irrelevant to your site, won't enhance your visitor's experience, they just make it harder for them to read your content. Although they are great at getting people's attention, limit graphics to uses where they enhance the content or clearly highlight an action to be taken.

No 7. Demonstrate Your Trustworthiness

Internet users are often cautious when buying anything online. Some good ways you can demonstrate why they should trust you are:

• Include testimonials from satisfied customers
• List your contact information, including telephone number.
• Display photographs of you and your products.
• Use well known payment facilities like Worldpay.
• Offer a guarantee and always honour it.

No 8. Set Up Visitor Statistic Tracking

Tracking website statistics is essential. Basic statistics you need to be monitoring are:

• Website daily traffic statistics.
• Opt-in or email sign up rates.
• Sales conversion rates
• Average visitor valueFrom these basic statistics you can monitor changes to your site and evaluate their cost effectiveness.

If you've already got a working site, use these 8 essential points as a check list. And if you're currently putting your site together, make sure that you incorporate these simple website strategies to improve your website sales and profits from the very start.

Shirley Crichton is a UK information marketer, sharing what she has learnt with people new to this often confusing world. Get your internet marketing business started and profitable, claim your free ' Online Marketing Made Easy' report at http://www.ShirleysOnlineMarketing.com and give yourself a head start.

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