Focus on your Business

One of the simplest sounding 'tricks' of successful eCommerce and online eBusiness is to retain focus on your actual core business.

It is far too easy and too common to get so tied up in the details, in additions and side-issues that you lose focus on the aspects of your site that are really its reason for being.

If your primary business is sales then you need to keep that focus in mind, and in your content, throughout your website and online campaigns. Don't try to become a portal, or anything else that doesn't actually fit your business plan.

Your eCommerce success is not based on coming up top in every search, nor in having affiliates, etc. Those things are only a means to your business success, not a goal in themselves.

For an example, consider the case of one of my clients who had a sales oriented site. He had a fair conversion rate of visitors to customers, but was getting far too few visitors to sustain his business.

He submitted his site to the search engines and waited for a while, and started to get more visitors. Seeing this success, he then decided to seek higher rankings in the search engines for searches relating to the products he sold.

What happened was that as he 'tweaked' the code and text on his pages, he did indeed get higher ranking and more visitors. Unfortunately however, those pages were effectively his 'sales pitch' and having tweaked them for the search engines, he'd made them inneffectual in convincing his visitors to buy.

The end result was that with 5 times the visitors of before, he was making less than half the total number of sales that he had done before changing the text around so much.

His business 'focus' was sales, but he'd weakened his entire sales pitch in the pursuit of higher traffic, at the expense of what truly counted.

In the end, with my help, he was able to reaffirm his sales focus, while still getting plenty of potential buyers at his site each day. However, he had lost a lot of potential profit during the months that traffic was high but sales were poor.

Look to your core eCommerce activities, and maintain your focus for your true business. In this way, you save more time and attention for what truly counts and can develop your true strengths.