By Tina Valiedi

A business needs more sales if it is going to survive and there are four ways it can go about this:

1. Increased web site traffic

2. Increasing conversion from hits to sales

3. Repeat sales to existing customers

4. Increase the price of your products

All four of these methods are ways to increase the profits of a business. If you take the time to focus on even one of those ideas then it will help you to unlock the opportunity to increase sales within your business without having to actually do any additional work.

Can you guess which one?
I'm not going to give you the answer just yet... but will give you some hints if you keep reading.

Step 1: The 99 Customers That Escaped

As an example - you sell a product for $50 a unit and have a goal to generate $2000 profit this month.

Internet marketing studies suggest that the average ecommerce website converts 1-2% of their visitors into customers.

1 website visitor out of a possible 100 = 1% conversion. By using promotional campaigns, you pay $30 to obtain those 100 website visitors. So suddenly your $50 sale less $30 marketing costs = a $20 profit.

Therefore in order to achieve your overall goal of $2000 profit, you will need to generate 100 sales and because 1 out of 100 visitors to the site represents a sale it means that you will need t generate 10,000 visitors to make this sale. Now that's a whole lotta hard work!

But what about those 99 that didn't buy? What if you put more focus on those 99 visitors that got away?

Remember you're spending $30 to drive 100 visitors to your site. If you acquire two customers from those visitors. $100 in sales -$30 = $70 in profits. That's a 350% increase in profits without spending more money or working harder.

Now you can meet your profit objective with only 2450 visitors, far less than 10,000 with 1% conversion that we discussed earlier.

If you haven't worked out the number one way to increase your sales yet the answer is number 2 - increase conversion from hits to sales.

What about the other 3 ways to increase sales?

Of course you need to generate website traffic but at the end of the day, if your visitors don't convert into customers, you won't get any sales. Sales from repeat customers is the perfect way to also increase sales, but this will require you to build your client base in the first place. Be careful with the concept of increasing your price, as the market will only withstand so much of a price on a given product.

Increasing your conversion rate becomes the best way to increase sales and profits. Imagine if you continue to increase your conversion rate to 3% or 5%? Why not 10%? How do you increase your conversion rate?

Tina Valiedi is the Chief Editor and contributing author of MP Strategies Firm, a company whose breakthrough service unleashes the power of the internet to drive hidden potential clients to your site. For more marketing how to information visit: http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com