Don't worry too much about how, or why punters didn't buy your product. You will probably never work this out... I never can!

The greatest mail-order gurus in world often find themselves scratching their heads in disbelief at what works, and what fails. They are continually amazed that their 'dead-cert' product flops completely, and their rank outsider, no-hoper product which they whacked-in for a quick test, results in bulging mail-sacks. There is often no rhyme or reason to this. Who knows why punters will go for a product, or leave it alone? It could be one word in copy, a 'feel', picture, price, their perception of your ability to deliver.... ANYTHING. You'll never find out.

Now big difference between a winner, and a loser is that winner will listen to punters no matter what he thinks. If punters tell him that his red-hot favorite product is a lame dog, then he'll drop it immediately. Losers will back their hunches right down line until they go broke.

They just know that this product is a winner.... If marketing fails, then they attribute it to media, or day of week, or price, or delivery time. They don't believe that punters could ever reject such a super product. So they promote it again, and again and again until they have lost a very great deal of money. Then they believe. But even after all this, they still harbor a sneaking suspicion that if they'd just altered coupon shape, or increased money-back guarantee to 30 days, or........ you get idea....

To Become A Mail-Order Winner, You MUST believe punters. They KNOW, you only BELIEVE. This principle can be summarised in this vital concept:

MILK YOUR WINNING PRODUCTS, DROP YOUR LOSERS.

More on this in my next article.

If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new website in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that you use pay-per-click on one of main search engines. If you don't, then growth of your traffic levels will be painfully slow and inconsistent at best.

When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in pay-per-click advertising. At one point, I was spending over $6000 a month on Google Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was spending that much money. It was a constant battle to tweak website sales copy and continue to test advertisement text just to make sure that my sales were covering advertising payments each month. At time I was probably just about breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I was able to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a list of mailing list subscribers.

Once you have got to stage where you know your sales pages are converting visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear up with other methods of getting traffic to your site - writing articles, linking strategies, viral methods (ebooks etc), using your eBay 'About Me' page, using your link as a signature when you post on forums etc. All of these methods will win you traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it will take time for traffic to build to a worthwhile level. If you rely solely on free traffic, you really will be building your business one hit at a time.

Of course, once free methods of gaining traffic start to pay off, you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you may not want to - after all, if you are earning more in sales than you are paying for your pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?

As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to share traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and of course, if you are capturing your visitors email addresses, you will be building a mailing list of people interested in products you are offering.

Like I say, I appreciate that above may not be ground-breaking secret that you were hoping for but as with so many things online, there really is no secret. Achieving success is simply about taking action and whilst you can succeed online by spending very little money, chances are that you will succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment. You don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was but any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars a month in order to get things off ground....