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Many entrepreneurs spend time and money increasing their website traffic or search engine ranking, yet pay little or no attention to how many of these visitors actually buy their product or service. Improving your website’s conversion rate is more time and cost effective than trying to bring in new traffic. In this article, I’ll show you the nine adjustments I make to help websites improve their conversion rates.

Before you begin, you must know your numbers. Tracking key metrics of your website’s performance will enable you to make educated marketing decisions. What is measured gets improved. Some benchmarks to start with include:

* Number of visitors
* Number of sales
* Average order amount
* Cost per visit
* Profit per visit
* Customer lifetime value

Once you begin tracking these numbers in Excel or a similar program, you can see the improvement caused by the changes you make.

Step #1: Add Rapport
Trying to sell a visitor on a first visit is like asking someone to marry you the first time you meet. Build relationships by sharing knowledge and giving away value before you try to close the sale.

Step #2: Remove Distractions
Anything that does not directly contribute to making a sale should be removed from your webpage. Reduce the number of clicks it takes to go from the landing page to the sale receipt page.
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Shopping for baby clothing can be a fun and enjoyable time, and shopping online has never been easier. There are more styles, colors, and bargains than ever before. As the fall season rapidly approaches, get ready for brand new styles and colors. Now, with just a click of your mouse, you can enter a world of exciting fashions to show off your little one in style!

As the weather starts to change, you will be looking at light jackets and heavier clothes. You want your little one to stay warm, but you do not want him to feel constrained. With this fall’s easy styles, you can effortlessly find just what you are looking for. Pastel shades are in this season, and you can set off their subtlety by mixing and matching colors and styles. You can coordinate for a dressier look or mix colors and get casual. There is something for everyone.

Here are some tips to choose the best baby clothing for your little one:

1. Make a list of what you need before you start to shop online. It is easy to get carried away when you see all those enticing styles and colors.

2. Decide how much you can spend before you shop. Do this for the same reason as above.

3. One important thing to remember is that infants will grow fast! Keep this fact in mind when you buy for them. Try to buy a size larger if you can. Allow for shrinkage on some fabrics, especially denim. You will get more wear out of the clothes this way.

4. Take advantage of sales and bargains whenever you can. Even if an item is a couple of sizes too big, your child will soon grow into it.
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You want to buy a new company, expand operations, acquire a business, or raise capital. You’ve decided to go for venture capital funding versus a bank loan for a multitude of reasons from the risks involved to the amount you need to carry out your plan.

Do you know as much as you’d like about gaining capital? Most people don’t. Their expertise is in their business, not in capital funding. Here are ways to protect yourself from vultures, deals you can’t afford, and the nightmares of both.

Some quick explanations:

A venture capitalist (VC) is a person, group of people, company, or group of companies with money to invest in your business.

A VC broker represents you (or possibly a VC) and arranges the parties to create a deal. This article is about working with the broker.

Since many brokers are ethical, why such a negative slant? Over two months, two of our consulting clients nearly lost their shirts dealing with brokers. One broker tried to quadruple dip on a VC deal by taking a commission, bringing in another broker (who needed a commission), taking excessive points on growth targets, and adding interest fees into a contract making the deal impossible. Had our Boston-based client signed with his current and (estimated) future numbers, his decade-old business would have perished.

Another broker wanted a client in Connecticut to sign a broker-exclusivity contract, forcing our client to pay commissions on any type of financing, regardless of whether the deal originated through the broker or not. If an SBA loan or unrelated VC came through, our client would pay $400,000 in unearned commissions.

(With each client, the broker used four or more of the nine strategies below that would be harmful to your fulfilling your capital needs.)

Every deal has its own merits and challenges. Regardless, nine general tips to consider are:

1. Don’t sign exclusivity contracts barring you from finding your own funding. A) On one hand, a broker has every right to protect his intellectual property by preventing you from bypassing him and striking a deal with one of the contacts he’s introduced you to. B) On the other hand, beware of anything preventing you from gaining funding from any other source without going through the broker.

2. Avoid long-term cancellation clauses that hold you hostage for a year or more. Sixty to ninety days is reasonable. You’ve got to be able to move on. A broker’s objective in creating a long cancellation clause is to prevent you from securing funding with the VC they’ve introduced you to while at the same time making it difficult for you to find any funding. Keep your options open and agree to 90 days giving you time to find new opportunities.

3. Prevent double dipping. A savvy broker has multiple compensation channels: initial commission, commission on additional funding you get during a 1 or 2-year term, compensation if the business is sold during specified time frame, percentage of interest on monies lent, etc. Read fine print, several deals that have passed over our desks in the past 6 months have had hidden compensation clauses that would have made any deal difficult to swallow had they had signed with the broker. (Have legal representation from an expert in VC funding.)

4. Know the type of funding you want before you start searching, and bind your broker to the specifics with a contract. Looking for a VC with an equity position who wants shares and is interested in growing the firm, or do you just want financing? Initially, the two can appear similar. In one VC deal, the company looking for funding thought they were getting an equity partner, but the VC only wanted to achieve 3.5 times their ROI in 5 years in monthly fees and interest. The final terms of the agreement: the “receiver” would get $2.9 million, but would pay back $6 million in 5 years. It was not the deal he expected.
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If you are in the early stages of starting up a business then you may be experiencing the internal ‘fear and doubt’ dialogue that can often take place in one’s mind. The following 9 Principles will help to release some of this tension…

1. Do What You Love

Ensure that you are in a business that interests you. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be in love with the product or service that you sell; however, you must enjoy aspects of the business otherwise you won’t be motivated to give it 100% of your focus. And it will need a lot of your focus and energy, especially in the early stages!

To help determine this point, you could ask yourself the following types of questions:

* What do you really like to do (in a business sense)?

* Are you an ideas or action type of person? Or a bit of both?

* In which 20% of your talents do 80% of your results come from?

* In other words, where do your key skills lie?

It really all boils down to one question though – what are you really passionate about?

2. Niche

Another critical point which goes a long way to determining business success is your Niche. Without exception, the majority of successful business owners I know can tell you in a couple of sentences exactly what it is they love to do and why it has made them wealthy.

Without a precise understanding of your Niche your chances for success are greatly diminished. After all, it’s very difficult to hit a target which doesn’t exist or to win a game when you don’t know what it (winning) is.

Ask yourself what you are trying to achieve in this business venture:

* Do you want to make quick cash?

* Do you want to develop and grow a sustainable business?

* Are you interested in high cash-flow or developing assets? Or both?

* Do you have BIG aspirations or are you just looking to develop a hobby for some part-time cash?

Keep in mind that your Niche can always be adapted down the track if your situation or the market changes.

3. Leverage

You need to become a master of Leverage. It is one of the most powerful principles in business. Everyone who is successful in business and life uses Leverage in some way.

To use the concept of Leverage you need to continually examine how you can access other people’s skill, resources and money more effectively. Furthermore, consider less obvious assets in business such as systems, marketing and time.

Leverage is about duplicating a high-value item or skill at a lower cost.

I will explore this topic in depth in future articles; however, at this point it is important to remember the following points:

* Focus on Money-Making activities

* Delegate to others as much as possible

By doing this you will see an immediate increase in your ability to work ‘on’ your business, rather than getting stuck ‘in’ the day to day running of it.
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