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Harmony Major

The following article is from Harmony Major's SFHM. The contents do not necessarily represent the views of Company Web staff or management.

Straight from the Horse's Mouth A weekly column to help you drive more paying customers to your website or affiliate site, increase your traffic and targeted leads, and make your monthly e-biz paycheck more stable and predictable. -- By Harmony Major 4 Quick Tips to Boost Sales & Keep Your Site in Shape Does your site resemble an untended garden? Do your visitors fly the coop without checking out your offer? Not getting as many sales as you'd like? If so, this quick website workout could be just the makeover you need. 1) Make YOUR website your home page. It shouldn't be Yahoo.com, your horoscope, or your favorite Britney Spears fan club site. The first page you should see when you log onto the Internet should be your OWN website's home page. This way, you'll know when your site is down or having other technical difficulties as soon as you start working. For instance, I logged on one day only to find that one of my sites had reset to OLD versions of all of its pages from months before. :-/ Had I not set my site to my home page, I wouldn't have known. And if you have more than one website like I do, sign up with a monitoring service like the one at http://internetseer.com. HOWEVER, services like this will NOT pick up problems like the one I just mentioned to you above. So to be safe, check the home page of all your sites manually at least once a month, if not weekly or daily, for other odd issues. 2) Experiment with UNIQUE ways to offer visitors new content. Offering fresh content doesn't always have to create more work. For instance, you can use the random text generator that comes free with most Web hosting accounts to automatically update a featured or "spotlight" product on your home page. The random text generator basically pulls a new set of HTML from the code you've already preset it to search. For instance, if you create six special offers for your home page, the tool will randomly select one of those six every time your page is accessed or refreshed. (If you want to control what offers are seen and when, daily content rotators can do this, too.) Since your site's regular visitors are more likely to take notice of an offer they haven't seen before, this tool can be especially useful (read: profitable!) if you get a lot of repeat visitors. 3) Do a link check regularly. This is one I'm guilty of not following on a regular basis, but it IS important. I normally let visitors tell me about dead links, and am pretty lazy about it. But with a free tool like Xenu, there's no excuse for that kind of negligence. (Shame on me.) Dead links only take a few minutes to remove, and leaving them can harm your visitors' perceptions of you. Because I have a few directory-style websites, I kind of slack on checking the links on those as it's so hard to keep up without doing a daily check. On sales sites, however, you can't be as lax. Dead links on direct sales websites are an ABSOLUTE no-no, and *directly affect your sales*. These I DO keep up regularly, and you definitely should, too. This also includes making sure all your forms and everything else on your site works like it should. 4) If you're not a whiz at design, please ... use a template! It pains me to see the increasing number of sloppily-designed business websites sprinkled across the 'Net. I never buy anything from sites designed so shabbily, and my guess is, those site owners are losing would-be customers who feel the same way. Luckily, hiring a Web designer or giving up aren't your only options. There are quite a few directories and sites out there that offer nice design templates, and require only a basic knowledge of HTML to modify them to suit your own site. Here are two: Free Web Templates Basic Web Templates * VERY highly recommended. While these aren't free, they're only $5 each, and offer the best selection of templates I've seen. By the way, if you need help with HTML, this *excellent* free HTML tutorial helped me learn how to create and edit websites when I was starting out: http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/ It's the only reference I kept going back to. In Conclusion... Keeping your site professional and cutting down on work and effort for yourself are very important in boosting your sales, and making your website work for you. If you remember those key tips, making a profit from your site will become easier and easier for you -- almost like second nature. Remember ... work smarter, NOT harder. Article by Harmony Major. Join her ezine to learn exactly how to make your monthly e-biz income *more predictable*, and avoid wasteful spending, and discover ways to drive more traffic and PAYING customers to your site or affiliate site. Click here to join! * Syndicate these articles on YOUR site. It's free. Click here!

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