STEP 4: PROFESSIONALISM IS KEY

When you go to Amazon.com or eBay.com or CNN.com, what do you see? Clean design, organized pages, and simple navigation, with an utterly professional look. None of the above sites are especially artistic in appearance, but they are all professional – extremely so. Your potential customer needs to take one look at your clean, stylish, corporate, secure website and think to themselves "I can trust these people with my credit card number." If your existing website simply isn't getting traffic and/or sales, there's a good chance it's failing this simple test.

A sophisticated appearance requires a lot of factors working together, but some of the simple traps many fall into include having text that doesn't stand out from the background color, content that makes things hard for a user to find what they want, and the design being SO funky that users can't figure out HOW to buy – in other words, don't cloud your sales pitch by showing the customer how cool you are!

Smart online sellers understand that the text on your website is the second indicator of professionalism behind graphic design, and that hiring a professional freelance writer to handle the text makes an abundance of sense. The better graphic designers have writers on staff whose job it is to research your industry, figure out the key words and phrases that your customers are searching for, and then work those phrases into the text in a way that sells without being obvious. Well written website copy improves your search engine ranking, and does the selling for you.

Ditch the page counters, get rid of the midi file that plays when someone comes to your site, and for crying out loud, abandon any ad service that makes you take pop-up ads. It's just not a good look if you want to be seen as professional.

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