As an online merchant, there are many roads that can lead to increased sales but one of the most important and often overlooked is ensuring fast load time of your site’s pages. Although this is important for all of your site’s pages, it is paramount when it comes to your home page. This is your prospective buyer’s first impression of your company. In just about all aspects of life, first impressions count. As an online merchant, this is all too true.

Perhaps the single most important factor involved to ensure fast load time and guarantee a good first impression with that prospective buyer is to reduce your image file size and your overall home page size. Home pages (i.e.: your default or index page) that are anywhere from 15-30 Kb are often considered of optimum size but anything slightly larger is not likely to have that much more impact. It is more important that you limit the sizes of the image files that load with your file. Needless to say, you wouldn’t want your home page to be 1 Kb and have it pulling in 10 images of 1 Mb each.

Although such cases are rare and an overstatement, perhaps your home page is 15 Kb and has 10 thumbnail images that are 20 Kb each. That would be a total page “weight” of 215 Kb. That would load in approximately 67 seconds with a 28.8 modem or 29 seconds with a 56 K modem. That is just way too slow. Shoppers don’t have the patience to wait around all day for your products to load and then decide to buy. And, believe it or not, most web surfers these days still connect to the Internet by dial-up and modems.

As an e-merchant, you should test your site and be keenly aware of its fast load time, or lack thereof. If your site loads slowly, this likely would be a reason why a large percentage of your site’s visitors are showing up in your stats in the “gone in 30 seconds” column. More likely than not, they left long before your home page had a chance to load.

There are simple solutions that will help you to alleviate this problem. There are software programs that will shrink image file sizes with very little loss in image quality. This will do wonders for your page’s load time. The best way to do this is with Adobe’s Photoshop. If you use Photoshop, later versions of it allow you to use the “save for web” option and choose to save the images in a variety of image file formats, each conveniently shown with file size and load times for various internet connection speeds. If Photoshop isn’t your thing, definitely consider checking out Spinwave.com’s extremely inexpensive GIF and JPG compression program. You can use it for as little as $5. One way or the other, if you can shrink your image files enough to cut your home page load time, as well as other images and pages within your site, it will significantly increase the length of time people spend on your site. As a result, you’ll see sizeable increases in sales. That’s what its all about, isn’t it?

There are many great reasons to start a newsletter. The gains in terms of exposure, resultant visitors and ultimate sales are immeasurable. Here are some examples of what you should do and why you should do them.

1.) Be a Show Off

Show off your knowledge. You are surely more of an expert in the products you are selling than your clientele. Do them a favor and share with them the necessary information to help them make an informed decision about the products. If you are willing to share your expertise and experience with your products and/or services, buyers are more likely to return for additional purchases or come to your site as a first time visitor/buyer. Furthermore, buyers gain more confidence and are more likely to purchase from companies who have proven knowledge in specific subject matter and product information.

2.) Destination: me

Don’t just be a means to an end; become the end in itself. If you post your current and past newsletters on your website, before you know it, your site will contain a healthy amount of content and it will become an invaluable source of information about you, your site and your subject matter. People won’t just visit your site when they want to buy your widgets; they will visit your site when they want information about widgets, making it all the more of an attractive destination.

3.) Who’s your daddy?

Publishing an authoritative newsletter allows you to truly showcase all that you know. You now can hold yourself out be an authority and have the credentials to back it up. It’s similar to applying for a job with no experience vs. having experience. Day after day, those with experience are chosen over those without. Every time a shopper visits your site, you’re applying for a job. Show them the knowledge and let them hire you.

4.) Expand your horizons and get syndicated

After writing several newsletters, you will have developed content that is valuable to others in your industry. Other newsletters that have readers but are lacking in content will likely contact you to get permission to use your content. This allows you to expand your customer base immeasurably, especially if they let you use a tagline that lets you promote your site. Should you want to take a more aggressive approach, you don’t have to wait for others to ask you to use your content. You can Google search for other newsletters and ezines that are authoritative in your subject area and see if they could use a guest article written by you. Your Google search will also reveal several other sites that link publishers with writers, allowing you to post your contact information and your content. In this manner, publishers will be sending their subscribers to you for your content and, consequently, some of those subscribers will become customers of yours too.

5.) What’s behind doorway #1?

As you write more and more articles, it’s a good idea to post them somewhere on your site. You could have a main index file that tells a little about your newsletter and then links to each of the current and past editions. This is important for all of the reasons stated above but also because you will have more and more pages that will become doorways into your site. This is because each of these pages will have title tags and keywords that are indexed by search engines and, as a result, each page might be shown on the search engine results page following a query by a shopper. Thus, the shopper enters your site not from your home page but from a “back door.” It is for this reason that it is important that you have a navigational menu on your posted back issues pages so that shoppers can enter your site and your store directly from those pages. If you have those links in the newsletter itself, simply posting the newsletter as sent will serve that purpose. Now, you have a lot more visitors with additional inroads to your front door.

6.) Build your brand

As you build your subscriber base, it is important to keep in mind that you should not only consider those who have bought from your store to be subscribers (be sure that they opt in) for your newsletter, but you should also include those visitors who haven’t bought from you in the past and encourage them to sign up to get your newsletter. You’ll likely find that as your subscriber base grows the majority of your subscribers probably haven’t bought from you in the past. They are just signing up to get your newsletter because of the valuable information that it provides. This is a gold mine for you because it allows you to reinforce your company name to those who are at the very least interested in products in your industry and it allows you to communicate with them tastefully without spamming. It increases your brand awareness and, ultimately, the likelihood that those customers will return to your site when they are ready to buy your products. And, as you know, that is a good thing!

7.) Get subscribers & get customers

Now that you’re keenly aware of all the advantages of having an email newsletter, you’ll need to have subscribers. One way to get subscribers is to allow buyers to opt in to the newsletter when they make their purchase. It could be as simple as a check box (hint: default the check box to the “on” position). You may also consider posting a sign-up option on your website where you feature your newsletter (current and/or archives) or trigger a pop-up window that pops up right from your home page. This has proven to be very successful for several online merchants. Visit Paper.com for an example.

If you send a monthly newsletter and/or send promotion emails, it is important to make sure your intended recipients read those emails and don’t delete them or have them filtered in their “junk” folder. There are several keys to increasing the success rate for the emails, one of which was discussed in the Nexternal Nexus v.3.07. Another important factor to consider is the day of the week that you send out your newsletter. EMarketer.com reports that Wednesday seems to be the day with the highest percentage of click-throughs, followed by Tuesdays. So, it’s important to also keep that in mind when you send your newsletter as well.

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Copyright 2009 Nexternal Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be republished in whole, or in part, without the express written consent of the publisher.