6 - Provide visitors with plenty of contact information.

Many online businesses are fly-by-night companies who are here today and gone tomorrow. People are especially scared of getting cheated by one of these companies or people. So, in order to assuage their fears, make your contact information readily available for viewing at all times. You should ALWAYS include your phone number, address, and e-mail addresses in an easily accessible section of your website.

7 - Let people get to know who you are.

A perfect way to go about doing this is to have an "About Us" page that gives a bit of background on all members of your company or business. This is effective because Internet is a very impersonal medium. Adding information about who you are often warms people up to your offer because they feel like they're dealing with a real person instead of a computer screen. When people feel like they "know you," they trust you as well.

8 - Take "honest" approach from time to time.

It's somewhat difficult to convey to you exactly what you should do to accomplish this. But concept is pretty simple.you don' t always have to try to "sell" your visitor on your product or service. Try being honest and up-front with your visitors and potential customers. For a good example what I'm talking about, just visit my site. (http://sybren.net) You'll see that in places, I'm very blunt about what we're trying to accomplish and how we can help you. By trying to avoid "hyping" visitor, I often gain their trust.

9 - Write articles for other websites and newsletters related to your field of expertise.

When someone reads your informative and enlightening article on a topic they need help with, they immediately regard you as an expert, and they feel as though they can trust you. When you've engendered their trust, and they are already interested in type of product or service you offer, it's VERY easy to make a sale. All you have to do is get them to your website!

10 - Make your site look like it was made by a pro!

If you visited a run-down, nasty store with dusty shelves and cluttered items, you'd never buy one thing from them, even if their prices were incredible and their product quite good. If your website is "virtually" run-down, same thing's going to happen - no one will buy from you. You've got to look good to sell well, because people *do* judge a book by its cover, and they'll your website by its "cover." So get your site designed by a pro or invest some time learning how to make it look good by yourself. If you don't, you'll never reap full potential of Internet.

Hopefully, these suggestions will help you on your way to becoming an online success (or more of one if you already are). Good luck!

And you didn't have a backup of your site.

I have even read report about one user who had over a gigabyte on his website of years of hard work with no backup of his own. His host decided he was getting too much traffic and simply deleted his site. The poor guy and to send a note to everyone on his email list begging people to check their browser cache's to see if they could send him graphics and pages ... it took six months but he rebuilt his site (and now he has a backup).

The moral of story ... backup your web site. I don't care whether you've got it on Homestead, AOL or Addr.com, if you don't make your own backup you are taking chance that you could loose all of your work ... forever.

How do you back up your site? What I do is make sure that I edit my site on my OWN hard drive, then upload it as I make changes. That way I always have my own copy (and, of course, I make a backup of that also). If you don't or can't do that, then just use FTP to copy files to your own hard drive once in a while.

If you have no other choice, you can use "Save As..." functions to save graphics and HTML pages. Note that if you do this you will capture your sites banners also so this is not preferred method.

So backup your site. You will be glad that you did.