If you own a web site or if you are going to build a new one, the most important thing about your site is to achieve as high as possible visitors to sales conversion rate.

Although they say that "the traffic is king online", if your website converts poorly, your online business will fail, unless you receive tons of free traffic which I doubt.

On the Internet today every website has competitors. So, in order to have a high conversion rate your online business should have a unique selling proposition, sometimes also called "unique value proposition" (USP or UVP).

What is this unique selling proposition? Your USP is the biggest unique benefit to your prospects. A benefit is an answer to your customer's question of "What's in it for me?" You should tell your prospects what makes doing business with your company better than doing business with your competitor.

Here are some guidelines for creating a compelling unique selling proposition - USP:

Write down every possible reason you can think of why someone would want to do business with you. Review the list and eliminate everything that is also true of your competitors. If a competitor can make the same claim, it's not a "unique" proposition.

Some quick guidelines:

1. What is unique about your service compared to your direct competitors?
   

2. Which of these factors are most important to your prospects?
   

3. Which of these factors are most difficult for your competitors to imitate?
   

4. Which of these factors can be understood most easily by your prospects?
   

Rework your USP until you have it simple and clearly defined that your customers can instantly identify with. USPs work best when they are a sentence or two for the most.

Lowestfare.com is an example of a company whose unique selling proposition is clearly defined in their domain name. This company provides the lowest air fares in the air travel industry.

If your business doesn't have a unique selling proposition, you must create one in order to be successfull on the Internet!

When you have your USP, you should present it in your web site's headline, web copy, in every ad, do so year after year, and... remember that you must deliver what you promise.

When writing your web copy, it is also important to understand that there are four online personality types, and they look for information that specifically answers their questions. Note that sales conversion rate also highly depends on personality types:

1. Competitive/Assertive personality - answer "What can your solution do for me?" question.
   

2. Spontanious/Amiable - "Why is your solution the best for me?"
   

3. Humanistic/Expressive - "Who has used your solution to solve my problem?"
   

4. Methodical/Analytical - "How can your solution solve my problem?"
   

So, try to answer all above questions (What? Why? How?) in your web copy or sales letter.

After your website is up and running, in order to further increase sales conversion rates of your online business, you should run a split-testing, or A/B test, on your web site.

Note that direct marketing professionals don't guess - they base their decisions on statistics.

What is a split run?

A split run is where you measure a new idea or way to sell a product against a control or default that you know works.

So, you might have two pages of sales copy - one that you know sells 2% to a targeted audience, and another that is selling the same thing but at an unknown rate.

To do the split-testing online, you should have a decent measurement system that accurately records the number of people arriving at your web site and their actions (leads, sales).

You could test different headlines, graphics, background/text combinations, link colors, buttons (buy now, order now, buy, order), you can even test paragraphs of content. There is nothing on a website that cannot be split-tested.

Any of these changes affect your sales conversion.

After you have run a split-test, you should find out if your test results are statistically significant.

Use SplitTester. This free tool will tell how likely two ad copies are to have different long-term results:

http://www.splittester.com/

So, before thinking about how to drive more traffic to your web site, first make sure that your web site has a unique selling proposition (USP) and converts well.

Gerardas Norkus is a successful author and publisher of http://www.1st-in-rewards.com

Great tips on receiving free merchandise and money from top on-line rewards and incentives programs.

(c) Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Publishing Guidelines: You may freely distribute or publish this article provided you publish the whole article and include the copyright notice and links in full. A courtesy copy is requested upon publication.

More Reading: