How many clients or customers do you want or will you need to be working with each month? How many new clients do you want to add per month? In order to bring in new clients, you'll need to generate qualified prospects. How many prospects do you want to target each month? How will you find them?

Visualize Your Marketing Strategy - You need a plan. Most small businesses owners struggle with this part. Begin by asking yourself:

What can I do to attract attention and prompt interest by prospects? What can I do to increase number of qualified leads I generate each month? How can I build credibility of my firm so prospects trust that we deliver? How can I ensure that prospects remember my firm when they have a need and are ready to buy? What is sequence of decisions prospects need to make to become clients?

Visualize Your Marketing Tasks - Just having a marketing message, or an advertising campaign or a web site doesn't ensure you of anything. Each of these needs to achieve specific goals and objectives you have set. The best way to evaluate these efforts is from your prospects' perspective. Ask yourself:

What are my prospects' primary concerns? Are my marketing messages interesting to prospects? What would my response be to my own marketing calls? Without mentioning name of company, its credentials or products, is value of what I provide clear to prospects? What do I want prospects to do when they visit my web site?

Just visualizing success won't get you there, but it is an effective way to begin planning. Develop your marketing goals, strategy, objectives, and tasks from this big picture, and you'll create a plan that will lead you to become wildly successful.

When writing your web copy, it is also important to understand that there are four online personality types, and they look for information that specifically answers their questions. Note that sales conversion rate also highly depends on personality types:

1. Competitive/Assertive personality - answer "What can your solution do for me?" question. 2. Spontanious/Amiable - "Why is your solution best for me?" 3. Humanistic/Expressive - "Who has used your solution to solve my problem?" 4. Methodical/Analytical - "How can your solution solve my problem?"

So, try to answer all above questions (What? Why? How?) in your web copy or sales letter.

After your website is up and running, in order to further increase sales conversion rates of your online business, you should run a split-testing, or A/B test, on your web site.

Note that direct marketing professionals don't guess - they base their decisions on statistics.

What is a split run?

A split run is where you measure a new idea or way to sell a product against a control or default that you know works.

So, you might have two pages of sales copy - one that you know sells 2% to a targeted audience, and another that is selling same thing but at an unknown rate.

To do split-testing online, you should have a decent measurement system that accurately records number of people arriving at your web site and their actions (leads, sales).

You could test different headlines, graphics, background/text combinations, link colors, buttons (buy now, order now, buy, order), you can even test paragraphs of content. There is nothing on a website that cannot be split-tested.

Any of these changes affect your sales conversion.

After you have run a split-test, you should find out if your test results are statistically significant.

Use SplitTester. This free tool will tell how likely two ad copies are to have different long-term results:

http://www.splittester.com/

So, before thinking about how to drive more traffic to your web site, first make sure that your web site has a unique selling proposition (USP) and converts well.

Gerardas Norkus is a successful author and publisher of http://www.1st-in-rewards.com

Great tips on receiving free merchandise and money from top on-line rewards and incentives programs.