When designing your website, it is important that you switch from your own profit-oriented perspective to prospective customers’ perspective. First place yourself in your customers’ shoes. After which, you should take some time to sit down and plan how your website should look like.

Below I will describe factors that contribute to a successful sales-optimized website for a Drop Ship business.

1) The critical components of your homepage.

- Your title tag. It should describe your website effectively and concisely. For search engine optimization purposes, it is necessary to include your main keywords in your title, without it being unnecessarily long. For example, a good title would be ‘Renaissance Oil Paintings ½ Abstract Oil Paintings’.

- Your headline. Being one of first few elements of your homepage that captures attention of visitor, it should clearly and concisely state what benefit your website can offer to visitor. For example, your headline can tell your visitors how to earn extra income, how to lead a healthier lifestyle or how to save them time or money. In short, it should offer a solution to their problems, or address their needs. The headline should be placed strategically right at top center of page. You can also use italics or bold functions to draw attention to your headline.

Internet surfers are not known for their patience. That is why it is crucial to capture their attention during first few seconds of their stay at your website. Your headline plays most important role, as it is usually first thing that visitors see. Research has shown that you have about ten seconds to fully capture attention of visitors and compel them to read on, before they leave your site.

- Your content body. In your main body of your homepage, you have to describe in further detail benefits your website or your products can offer to your visitors. Note that you provide benefits, and not features of products you are selling. This is basis of effective marketing: you tell customers what is in it for them. You must also give strong directions to action in your content body and tell them steps they need to take in order to benefit most from your website. For example, you can include links like ‘Click here now to discover why our oil paintings are among best in Europe’, or ‘Sign up for our free newsletter now to get latest tips and guides on good gardening practices.’ Note that you have to be concise in your content body so that you can include most attractive benefits near top of homepage, without visitor having to scroll down.

- Your opt-in offer. Ask for your visitors’ names and email addresses in your opt-in offer box. Email marketing is central to success of your Drop Ship business. First-time visitors who leave your website without buying anything have a chance of signing up for your free newsletter. This allows you to keep in contact with them and send them promotions in future, and your effort and money in attracting them to your website would not be wasted. This feature should be placed somewhere near top left or top right of your homepage because of its importance.

2) Professional look/atmosphere. Your website must not be full of graphics, banners or flashing advertisements. These only serve to distract your visitors from your main product offers. You should avoid flash animation as well. When formatting your text, use only a single type of font like Times New Roman, and two different colors at most. Page backgrounds should preferably be white or plain, and not be patterned or fanciful.

Another important factor to keep in mind is to minimize time that your webpage takes to load. Since visitors are normally very impatient, they are likely to leave if a page is slow to load, hence need to exclude large graphics or animation which slow down your loading speed.

Cold calling doesn’t work, it’s no fun and often you end up with leads, or worse yet, clients, that don’t really value what you do.

Having said that, leads are lifeblood of growth, without a lead, there is no client.

Set-up a 2 step lead machine and you can say goodbye to cold calling while generating all of qualified, permission based leads you can handle.

The basic idea behind 2 step approach is to create one or more valuable reports, workshops, evaluations, trial products, checklists, newsletters, courses or tip sheets. You know, something like, “How To Tell If Your Roofing Contractor Is Lying To You” or “What Every Senior Must Know About Bush’s Social Security Changes” or “101 More Things You Can Do With Your iPod.”

Now that you have your value packed written report or audio CD, every bit of your advertising – that’s Yellow Pages, direct mail, back of your business card, letterhead, email signature, web site – should focus on getting people to pick up, request or download that report. Don’t try to do anything else with your advertising, let report sell you. See, that’s step 1.

There are several reasons that this approach is so much more effective for small business owner than traditional “image” type advertising.

First off, if you only buy a 2 x 3 ad or send a 4 x 6 postcard, can you really tell your story very well?

Secondly, this approach allows you to demonstrate your expertise in a non-threatening, on prospect’s own terms, way. Nobody likes to be sold to, but if they take time to read your report, understand what you do that has value, have an 8-10 page conversation with you, relationship and trust has begun.