How Do I bring ECommerce to my Website?

Q:Having worked hard, and put up my first web commerce site, I'm now wondering how to bring business to it. I've done a lot of submitting, a lot of joining web rings, and a lot of free banner exchanges. The number of hits doesn't seem to increase, though. I continue to be the most popular user because I check it when I update it.

A:I took a look at it. Many of the pages loaded rather slowly, especially the graphics-heavy http://www.trigramhealth.com/catalog.htm and it took me a lot of clicking around to get any idea of what you sell and why someone might buy it. One piece of advice: Get direct!! Show your pages to someone who doesn't know what you do. Can they figure it out before they get bored/frustrated? Your front page offers very little beyond "Trigram Health & Meditation" -- that could be an online bookstore or book/tape/doodads store, counseling clinic, healthfoods store, religious cult. Your meta description is "Trigram offers products help you deal with the stress you build up every day. They will clear your mind, stretch the body, and free the spirit. Cultivate your stillness; you owe it to yourself." What products? How will they clear your mind? Are you selling videotapes, subliminal audiotapes, vitamins, aromatherapy candles, massage pillows? Are you scheduling clients for counseling or guided meditation? I can't tell from this description. People are impatient on the web. They want the key info right away, not after a softsell buildup. As a small business development consultant I try to get my clients to establish a site and then mine it for all it's worth. Few of them do. They are too busy juggling the day to day tasks and are frightened by the whole idea of Internet. So I suggest they contact people like you who are developing sites and marketing strategies for others. I saw in a recent poll that only 16% of small businesses are using the Internet, whereas 65% of companies with more than 50 employees actively use the system. So you have a whole world of small businesses - more than 2.5 million in this country alone. Show them how they can reach international customers, how to make it easy for people to buy from them, how to ease their purchasing by using digital commerce, etc.. Then sign them up for a monthly retainer for which you will perform a three times a day search and response, establish one new link per day (per week, per month) - and so on. Or, have them pay nothing and you collect a percentage of the business you help them get. If you are really good at mining for information and leads you cold make a bundle in commissions alone. I assume you joined Linkexchange. You may want to subscribe to their e-zine (digest) and look at their archives. This is the most difficult part of the business. Post your articles with signature on newsgroups. After that you may also try advertising in e-zines. Some of them are inexpensive.