A good web site is more than just a place for customers to place orders. It will promote your business and develops an enduring relationship with your customers. Remember, your web site is the only contact with your business that most customers will ever have so it must make an excellent first impression and encourage visitors to return. Ease of navigation and a look that doesn’t hurt the eyes are good rules to start with when planning a website.
If you don’t already have a website and are daunted by the technical aspect of making your own there are software templates that be purchased at most office supply stores or can be found online for around $20. There are even free templates available online. The creators usually only require that they be given credit on your web page. However, free and cookie cutter templates purchased out of the box are often inferior and unresponsive. They might do at first but most businesses find them unacceptable in the long run. It’s far better to have your site look and function right from the beginning and save yourself the trouble in the long run.

Unless you are really looking to keep costs down you should consider hiring someone to design a site for you. Web designers can make your site attractive to look at and apply their expertise to help your site with search engine rankings. Professionally made sites look… well, professional but the cost will be higher than doing it your self.

Having a website does not guarantee traffic. There are millions of websites out there and you will need to find ways to maximize the chance of a customer finding yours. Once they’ve found your site much of that traffic will be unproductive. There are many ways to help generate traffic and make sure that traffic generates sales, some are free and some you’ll have to pay for.

A few free things you can try are contributing to online discussion groups centering on your type of business, trading links with similar businesses, and collecting testimonials to post on your site. There are discussion groups out there for nearly every topic under the sun. Contributing to these groups will help establish you as an expert in your field and whenever you post include your link.

Trading links with websites similar to yours increases the chance of your site turning up on search engines and provides a valuable service to your customers. Testimonials from previous customers may not improve your chance of being found on the web but it does help drive sales and develop long term relationships with your customers.

The search engines love original text. One of the biggest factors that go into deciding how your site compares to other similar sites is the amount of content your site has. The more original content your site offers the better. This can be in the form of highly descriptive product entries, articles relating to your site’s topic, product reviews, and many other formats. Articles and other content provides increased opportunities for your key words to catch the “eyes” of web crawlers and provides a valuable service to your customers. It has been proven time and time again that sites with plenty of fresh, relevant content get more repeat visitors than those that do not.

Hiring a search engine optimizer can vastly improve the chance that the major search engines will rank your site higher and that means more traffic to your site. If you have the time and inclination you can learn to do this yourself by purchasing instruction books or attending seminars. However, getting a business started takes a lot of time and effort, at first it is better to trust a professional.

Another way to improve traffic is to enroll in a pay-per-click search engine. The most famous example being Google Adwords, a systems used by millions of online businesses. The engines will charge you a fee per click they generate for you. Usually you will bid against other customers for position on the site. The higher your bid the better position you will get.

You should expect to pay fees ranging from a few cents to around a dollar per click depending on the keywords you want to return results from. Pay-per-click ads are among the very best ways to increase traffic to your website.

It simply boils down to this, having a web site isn’t enough. It takes more to run a successful online business than a domain name, a good wholesale supplier, and business sense. If you want your online store to stand out from the millions of other ecommerce sites on the web you will need to invest time, creativity, and probably a little money.

Art Micklewraith is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Top Ten Wholesale. He can be reached at Content and Solutions or by email at artmicklewraith@gmail.com