Want To Increase Sales? There’s almost limitless methods for doing so. And all those methods boil down to one thing:

Be in front of your audience when they need you.

That’s it. That’s the key to increasing your sales. Think about it, when you’re at a restaurant, do you care with the bathroom is? Not til you need it, right? Or an ATM. You likely pass dozens of them every day and don’t notice them, right? But what happens when you’re out of cash? Every ATM comes into focus. What’s more, you might scurry to find one.

So many small business owners don’t consider this when they market their business. They work hard on their vision and business plan. Then they focus on their offer and how best to communicate that offer to a target market. Ideally, they’re wanting to position themselves as an expert in a select niche market.

But no one cares that you’re an expert until they need an expert. In other words, no one cares that you can solve a set a problems until they are faced with those set of problems. Then, they go out and look for a solution.

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If you have a small business website it should serve one purpose – generating sales.

Sure, it should inform your visitors of your offers and give them social proof of your abilities through testimonials. Without a doubt, your website should generate and capture leads. And most importantly your business website should move your visitors toward buying your offers.

While there’s nearly infinite ways to do generate sales, a few necessary pieces need to be in place on your business website in order to generate more sales effectively. Most of this is really common sense. Yet after the more than 20 Business Website Assessments I’ve done in the past month, these basic elements are consistently being missed on small business websites.

Yet, these basic elements are so fundamental that you want to be sure you’re not missing them on your website.

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With small businesses one fact is true today, your business website should be a central hub for your business.

Your business website should effectively represent your brand while providing ways for your leads to easily engage you. All roads in your business should lead back to your website, making it the pivot point for all your marketing. And you want to treat your website that way.

Furthermore, having a website opens the possibility to not just market to your leads, but to create a powerful touch point for engaging your audience in conversation and building relationships with your prospects and clients.

So if you want a successful business, and I believe you do, it only make sense to create a website that fuels the growth of your business.

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There are a number of questions I get asked often by my clients about developing and growing their business using their websites.

But I’d say one question is asked more than any other – “how do I get (more) traffic to my website?”

So last fall I began mindmapping all the ways I could come up with to get more website traffic. My first goal was to reach 100 ways to get more visitors. I quickly, however, crossed that boundary into 147 ways. Then I stopped listing them and taught a couple of teleclasses from my list.

Some time in January, I picked the list back up and started adding to it. Soon, I was past 200 ways to get more traffic. And I settled on more than 220 different ways to get more website traffic. I’m sure the list will continue to grow, and I’ll definitely continue updating the materials I have.

So now I had this list of all these ways to get more website traffic – the next thought, “what should I do with it?”

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Most of the the small business owners I work focus an abundant of time on their marketing. They put tons of effort into crafting their marketing message, polishing their marketing funnel and fine-tuning how they generate leads. And often, they do so before any of this produces new clients.

Marketing your business is a really good idea, don’t get me wrong. However you choose to do it, marketing is a vital part of your business. As a matter of fact, marketing your services is something I teach my clients to do more effectively every day.

Yet I find that there’s a hole in the thinking that “all you need to do is effectively market your business.”

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One thing you have to say about blogging is that it’s a great way of generating traffic to your website. You write a blog post and promote it a bit. Your posts goes out to your feed subscribers and can gets picked up by social services. With a little effort, your blog can generate gobs more traffic for your website than your old, static website ever could.

As a blogger, you learn pretty quick how to look at your traffic stats. You see that your traffic goes up the days you write and down the days you don’t. You look at your referring sites regularly to see where all the traffic is coming from and spend more time on the sites that are driving you the most traffic. And hitting the motherload of website traffic is getting to the front page of Digg, Reddit or del.icio.us.

But do your traffic stats mislead you? Is your goal just to get gobs and gobs of traffic to your website?

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Niche market is one of those buzz terms that gets thrown around a lot. Just about any marketing book, article or blog post worth its weight talks about niche marketing. It’s so prevalent that most small business owners would say they’ve heard the term.

But just knowing about the term niche marketing doesn’t mean you know what niche marketing really is. Or how it applies to your business.

Most service-based business professionals I work with and talk to have some idea of niche market. Often, they think of it as the group of people their business serves or the market they target their services for. And while it’s true that your market is who you sell your products and services too, it doesn’t mean you’re selling to a niche market.

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