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Web site tips and tricks

Here are some useful insights, software tools, and productivity advice that will help make — and keep — your site looking great and drawing customers.

1. Use photos

Photos are easy to insert in Generator and they really are an essential part of the web user experience. If you post a story to your News Archive, post a new Blog entry, or send an eCard, always try to insert a relevant photo that is about 50% of the width of your screen area.

Also, our Photo Gallery page part is very easy to use, looks great, and is a huge traffic starter. Get into the habit of inserting photos into everything you add to your site.

2. Do it and tell it

When you add new content, include a direct link to that content in your email. Remember your customers, even the hard core customers, have busy lives. They may care about what you are doing, but they may not know about it unless you tell them.

3. Link it

Make sure you link directly to the new content, not just to the Home page of your site. Give them the shortest possible path to what they are looking for. One click is better than two!

4. Facebook ShareIt

If you have a Facebook, and you should, use their Post Link tool to link back to your site. In other words, don't just copy and paste your news, announce it on FaceBook and link to the content. Facebook will scroll through the resulting page and let you pick the most relevent photo they find on that page. It's a very cool tool that really drives traffic.

5. When in doubt, lower your prices

If you think a product may be too expensive, it probably is. It's better to sell two items with a $3.00 profit margin than one with a $4.00 profit margin. Tinker and test, but remember the web is brutally efficient at helping customers find what they want at the lowest possible price.

6. Give them something unique

It's your site, for heaven's sake. You should have the best of your product out there. Autograph all your stuff. Advertise it as clean, unopened, brand new, etc. If you have stuff no one else has — like songbooks that are out of print — remember to say so in your product description. Always look for ways to sweeten the deal with stuff that doesn't cost you anything but could be a big deal to customers.

7. Ship it fast

It's crazy simple, but true. People expect to get their stuff within 24 hours of ordering it. If you are waiting around for days or God forbid weeks before shipping your orders, you are shipping the last items you'll ever sell to that customer.

8. Promote

When we ship orders we stuff the envelope with beautiful ads for other products on sale in our clients' stores.