You have some ideas, but you don't want to waste money. How can you avoid mistakes other smart website owners make?

By reading this article, of course.

I'm going to outline several tactics that DON'T work. By end of this article, you'll save time and money (not to mention avoiding throat-clinching disappointment and frustration) by skipping these Bad Ideas.

Bad Idea #1 - Let's get more traffic to get more sales.

Seems reasonable at first glance. But it's not always best course to take. How well does your site sell now? What's sales conversion rate of your website? If your website is inefficient at converting 100 visitors into customers, it will be inefficient at converting 20000 visitors into customers.

For instance, I may find a client's website converts 1 percent of their visitors to customers. If we can boost that number to 2 percent, they have doubled their sales without spending more money marketing. When they DO spend money on marketing, they still convert higher percentage of their visitors to customers.

Bottomline: Take a look at your conversion rate before you increase traffic. What can you do to boost it?

by Phil Chandler

With over 30 million web pages competing for attention, what chance does small business promoter have to get their share of visitors and - more important - paying customers?

The answer lies not in trying to be everything to everyone, but in carving for yourself a neatly-defined niche in this huge marketplace.

As a small player, it is a waste of your precious time and energy to attempt to compete with Big Names on web. Don't bother setting up a site selling books and going head-to-head with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you really want to sell books, choose a specialist subject area that nobody else has covered - that way you stand a chance of pulling in some traffic when surfers search on your subject.

The more specialised your product or service, more important it is to target your message carefully and accurately to potential customers.

Whatever you sell, it will appeal most to that percentage of web population who stand to gain clear and direct benefits from their purchase. They are your target market and time invested in finding out everything you can about these people is well spent.

So think about what you are selling. What benefits are you really offering? So your Stop Snoring Spray works on 90% of people tested - great! But who benefits from using your spray? Maybe snorer - but more likely whoever is sleeping with them! Your customers may not be snorers themselves, but their partners. Here is your niche - find ways of reaching people whose partners keep them awake at night with their snoring.