d) Testing- try different ways to introduce your testimonials. Sprinkle them throughout your web site content as shown on http://www.isitebuild.com then link to rest of them on another page. You may also want to strategically place them in your sales letters (http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion), emails or promotional materials associated with your business.

4. Be courteous – often customers can’t communicate exactly what they have in mind because they don’t have your expertise. Try to clarify what your product or service will do for them to make their life easier. If you put their fears at ease you will have a happy customer.

5. Use secure transactions - someone sending you his or her credit card number, home address, or other personal information should be able to do so through a secure link from his or her browser to your server. Make sure you use Secure Socket Links or 3rd Party Verification in all information transactions that involve sensitive data.

6. Accept refunds - always accept reasonable return and refund requests. Deal with them promptly and professionally, no matter how customer acts towards you during process. It may be a hassle, but this instills a lot of trust. A customer’s biggest fear is that he/she may not receive what he wants or may not be able to return it.

7. Provide a guarantee – if you provide a guarantee for your product or service it will place your customer’s mind at ease. The longer guarantee better. If you have a service oriented business, you might include a statement such as:

”We will work with you until you are satisfied”

If selling a product you may say something like:

”If for any reason you are not satisfied with this product, I will offer you a 90 day money-back guarantee”.

Conclusion: Online transactions and communication can be impersonal because you don’t meet your customers face to face. If you follow points mentioned above, it will quell their fears and allow you to make more sales based on credibility and trust you have established from your web site.

SEO is achieved by careful research of your keywords (which you may already have if you did this for your PPC campaign), careful placement of keywords in your content, proper web design structure, submitting your site to search engines and directories, and building a good linking strategy.

Get Valuable Links Pointing to your Site!

This method can both be free and cost you money. There are numerous directories and search engines that you can submit to that do not cost a dime. THE most important directory to submit to still doesn't cost a dime! It is DMOZ found at www.dmoz.org. Although it is free it is slow in getting listed there. It can take months to get listed there. The 2nd most popular (and most valuable) directory to submit to is Yahoo! It's cost is currently $299 per year. These two directories help your search engine rankings best and are also helpful to getting your web site known. Do a search on internet for more directories to submit to. Especially directories that are specific to your web site theme. For example if you sell shoes you could type in 'shoe directory' into search engine.

You can also write articles like this one and put your web site address on bottom, do reciprocal linking (but there are dangers with this if you do it with wrong people), and many other ways to get links pointing to your site. For more information on how to do this visit http://www.theinternetpresence.com/business-article-30.htm. It has an article there entitled, "How and Why to Build a Linking Strategy."

Offline Promotion!

Have your web site address printed on your invoices, receipts, business cards, flyers, newspaper ads, radio ads, and television ads. The possibilities are endless. Let all of your customers know that you have a web site now. Set up a press release pointing out conveniences for your customers if they use your web site. Word of mouth goes a long way. Another idea is to have your web site address plastered on bill boards or on side of company vehicles. Giving away promotional items such as pens that have your web site address on it can help too. Just be sure that pens work well or else they can end up giving you a bad name. I've thrown away quite a few crappy pens in my day and thought that businesses had same quality.

On Site Promotion!

While people are at your site you can set up a 'Refer a Friend' link, 'Email this Page to a Friend' link, or a 'Print This Page' link to help gain popularity. Also you could offer discount coupons that are only available from your web site. This will help you track where your customers are coming from.

If you do a little hunting and searching you'll find many ways to promote your web site, and soon your web site will become so popular that it will be promoting your business very well. If you would like more informational articles on how to promote your business and web site read our archive of articles at www.theinternetpresence.com and coming soon www.highwebrankings.com.

Highwebrankings.com is going to be a division of Internet Presence that will show you how to optimize your site, provide you with reports you need to SEO your site, offer services such as keyword research, etc. And if you don't want to attempt to do it yourself we can do it for you. So be looking for this site to show up in coming months.

Until next article, have a great day!

Copyright © Michael Rock

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

(You have permission to copy this article as long as it remains intact with author's byline)

Web development contractor (Web Design and Hosting)

Internet Presence

www.TheInternetPresence.com