Possibly the most misunderstood part of online marketing is improving conversion rates...

Improving conversion rates produces some of the greatest returns on investment of any activity you can engage in while trying to improve the sales of your web site.

Maximizing your web sites conversion rates can produce a tremendous competitive advantage.

Niche after niche and industry after industry have proven that once a marketer with an obsession for maximizing traffic conversion enters the niche, its game over for the existing websites in that market that dont adapt and begin improving their own conversion rates.

Customers and affiliates seem to almost magically gravitate towards the websites that have the highest conversion rates. And high converting websites can afford to far out spend the competition on marketing and advertising.

When it comes to increasing the sales of your online business, the basics are actually quite simple... There are only three things you need to focus on to improve your overall sales volume.

Those 3 things are:

1. Increasing the traffic to your website.
2. Increasing the average amount customers spend per visit.
3. Improving your visitor to sales conversion rates.

Thats it... Every revenue generating activity you can engage in to maximize your online profits falls under one of those three areas.

Unfortunately the vast majority of online businesses and internet marketers spend most of their time focusing on only one of those three critical areas. (And its often the least effective area.)

Increasing the average amount customers spend per visit and improving conversion rates have a far greater impact on your long term profitability than focusing exclusively on increasing the traffic to your web site.

Your web sites conversion rates are impacted by four main areas.

1. Usability.
2. Persuasion.
3. Trust.
4. Testing.

Usability is simply how easy it is for visitors to navigate your web site and how easy it is for them to accomplish whatever their particular goal is on your web site.

Persuasion is a measure of how effective your web sites copy, calls to action and other elements are at convincing visitors to purchase from you (or take the specific actions that you want them to take.)

Trust is an essential yet often overlooked element of the conversion process. Even if your web site is highly usable and persuasive, if your visitors do not trust you they will not buy from you.

Testing and tracking is where the big gains in conversion rate improvement come from. By focusing long-term on continually testing and improving your sales process on your web site you can increase conversion rates incrementally over time. These small improvements will compound to produce very large gains in conversion rates, sales and overall profitability.

The bottom line is this...

Developing a long term commitment to improving and maximizing your conversion rates will result in a devastating competitive advantage that will guarantee you dominance in any niche you decide to enter.

Because so few online businesses understand the tremendous power of maximizing conversion rates, even gaining a slight advantage will allow you to blast past your competition.