#3: Offer an area for Visitor Feedback & Interaction With You!

Just like Home Depot has customer comment cards, you should include an area for visitor feedback! The kind of information you can gather from your site visitors is vital to your success. They have looked over your site, looked over your products, read about your services, and now they can tell you what they think. They will be able to give you specific insight as to effectiveness of your web site, selection of your products, whether information you presented was enough, too much, etc. All of this and so much more can make or break your future business. Customize your comment area to ask about specific information. Specify a certain section to ask for comments about your web site set-up, or your customer service. Was it easy to find things, easy to read, confusing navigation, etc. With this simple addition to your web site, you will be able to IMPROVE YOUR SITES PROFITABILITY ALMOST IMMEDIATELY!

#4: Display Your Most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)!

An FAQ's page is very often used to offer instant assistance to those visitors who have specific questions. If you've been in business for a while, you will already know what majority of people ask about. Compile this information and let it be available to your visitors. These can be displayed on a separate page, or you can integrate them into an existing page with similar content. Displaying your FAQ's will save you BIG MONEY - by saving your valuable time! By not having to answer an email or phone call asking a common question, you have just saved 0.25 man-hours. Imagine how many of those hours could be saved every day, and how much money you DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY out for those hours. Best of all, your visitors will be experiencing superior, IMMEDIATE CUSTOMER SERVICE, while you are saving tones of time and loads of money!

Use these 4 essential elements in your web site and your online business will most certainly live to see another day. Remember that your exceptional customer service is what will set you apart from "other guys", and that can mean profit or plummet! Where will your site be tomorrow?

We can thank last major down cycle for taking stigma out of home enterprises. The early-to-mid 1980s saw corporations laying off while collar workers for first time. In earlier down cycles, while collar workers were immune to layoffs as companies trimmed blue-collar manufacturing jobs. The laid-off white collar workers became consultants and worked from home. Suddenly home enterprise was legitimate. Running a company from your spare bedroom no longer meant you spent your day holding Mary Kay and Tupperware parties.

The Internet increased allure of home-based start-up. Most shoestring e-biz companies begin in home, whether company trades in products or services. For a small Net-based business, there is little reason to rent offices. Besides, statistics from Small Business Administration (SBA) strongly suggest your odds for success are greater if you launch from home.

The SBA has found that 52 to 55 percent of all businesses are no longer active after five years. For those companies launched and grown in home, failure rate is 45 to 48 percent after five years. Placing your business in your home gives you a slightly better than even chance for survival. The improved odds most likely have to do with lower overhead of a home-based business.

With a soft economy and a growing number of laid-off workers who will naturally consider a business start-up when they discover their job prospects are dim, this is not best time to launch a new enterprise. But I can tell you from personal experience, decision to launch a business is not usually rational or logical. A home business start-up boom is likely in process right now. It's not because of opportunity; it's because of desire.