Some of those businesses were mom and pop outfits while others had multi-millions of venture capital dollars to make them strong yet they all failed miserably for one simple reason: they did not understand "Secret Key To The Internet"!

Perhaps it is because "Secret Key" is so simple that it manages to elude our scrutiny and understanding.

No, it is not about numbers as many would venture to guess.

"More than half of nation is now online. In September 2001, 143 million Americans (about 54 percent of population) were using Internet - an increase of 26 million in thirteen months..."

That startling fact, which I have quoted above, is revealed in a truly important report, recently released by Department of Commerce entitled, "A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of Internet."

This report contains an invaluable WEALTH of information regarding numbers of American households connected to Internet, details how, where and why people surf Internet, provides demographic details on income, employment status, age groups, gender, levels of education, urban or rural locations, race and a great deal more.

The report is available in both Adobe PDF format and also Word 2000, I download word report, which is a whopping 4263K in size. But it is worth its weight in gold for all information that it makes available; info, which you may well find essential in planning and executing your own business plan online.

In "Conclusion" section of report, they state that, "Approximately two million more people become Internet users every month!"

For those of us doing and wishing to do business online it is filled with nothing but encouraging good news.

Is your site selling your products?

If you answered no, why isnt it? Weak copy, poor design/organisation, poor customer focus, internal company issues, no site visitors ...?

If you answered yes - Are you being objective? The vast majority aren't and could be improved to sell more. You want to sell more right?

The difference between a failing business and a successful one is primarily quantity of product sales. If you make enough sales and therefore income to pay off your costs, you survive. To be successful you must go beyond this survival point and get higher sales and therefore higher income and profits. Whilst most offline businesses seem to see this situation clearly and work actively to increase sales, it seems a large proportion of businesses online don't or at least dont on their website.

For example, retail stores are intensely focused on their customers. They are constantly striving to improve and increase sales of their products to customer. They often work on an income per area of space basis. This puts emphasis firmly on maximizing their selling space and offering.

We could learn from this approach online and focus on making sales and improving our offering. Whilst introducing same income per area equation is probably too much for online world and small screens, greater emphasis on sales and sales income should be welcomed. That doesnt mean squeezing ads and text into every conceivable web space, it means maximizing your web space with compelling offers, good communication, a clear message, intuitive layout and navigation, focus on potential customers, etc. All things that encourage and nurture website usage and ultimately make sales.

So how do you make your website sell your products? Well, of course you need to be marketing your site and products effectively to get potential customers to your site. Once you have these visitors, you need to actively sell your products to them. Sales dont happen on their own, your site has to sell them. That means work has to be put into your site and for it to say what your potential customers want to hear.

With aid of a few questions, you can identify weak elements on your site that arent actively selling your products and do whatever is necessary to make them sell. Lets be clear about it, your objective is to sell as many of your products as possible in shortest time possible. (If you dont have a website yet, use questions and their results to build a website around).