what_should_ido.htm

The beauty of the Web is that it's easy to experiment and collect feedback. Try making small adjustments to your prices, copy, and layout, and use your analytics software to see what pays off. If prospective customers seem to balk when you ask for their credit card number, you could try a popular new service designed to encourage impulse buying. Bill Me Later, a company based in Timonium, Maryland, offers instant financing to customers. Bill Me Later typically collects 15 cents and a 1.5 percent transaction fee on every sale and, as you might guess, bills the customer later. Finance charges range from 9.9 percent to 19.9 percent. The company claims that customers who use the service spend 75 percent more per transaction than a website's typical buyer.

How important is my Google ranking?

Search engine rankings are important, but they're not the be-all and end-all of online marketing. That's because search engine users are often more interested in browsing than buying. Companies may find that a well-placed ad converts more sales than a high ranking on Google. Nevertheless, there are boatloads of search engine optimization consultants, or SEOs, who promise to boost your rankings. Caveat emptor: For every specialist who can help you reorganize your site, there's a firm that employs questionable practices that could actually cause Google to demote you, while others perform only basic Web design services that you could probably do yourself.

How can I use my site for customer retention?

Setting up a forum for your customers on your site is a great way to cultivate customer loyalty. TopCoder, a Glastonbury, Connecticut, company that organizes software coding competitions, started a forum on the day it opened for business, in 2001. The site's forum pages now draw tens of millions of page views a year. TopCoder treats the forum as both a customer service channel and a never-ending focus group. Every announcement, product, or contest the company offers has its own forum page, and TopCoder's employees often respond to forum posts, some of which are blistering. To set up a forum on your site, look at popular free software packages like YaBB, Vanilla, and phpBB. Forum-Software.org provides a technical rundown of these products.

Beyond technology, how can I improve my site?

Make sure your website is easy to figure out and loads fast, says Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, which remains one of the world's most popular websites despite a lack of splashy graphics and video. "Someone at the Los Angeles Times once said that Craigslist has 'the visual appeal of a pipe wrench,'" says Newmark. "I took that as a compliment. To me, simple and functional is beautiful."

To Dan Heath, clear and vivid language is beautiful. Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, says many sites serve up lame mission statements with hollow words like vision and solution. "People try to sound profound, but they end up sounding unremarkable,"he says.