Do you want to improve an existing online business?

If you already have an online business, it's important to keep improving it to boost revenue, pump up conversion rates, simplify navigation, and make it easy for your site visitors to find what they're looking for.

If you're looking for general, technical website development information, you'll find lots at other sites, such as: Builder.com and WebReference.com. But for improving marketing, conversion rates, and online sales, this is the right place.

I outline the basics pretty well in a pair of articles:

• 12 Website Design Decisions Your Business or Organization Will Need to Make Correctly (or you'll have to do it all over within a year)
  and
• The Web Marketing Checklist: 31 Ways to Promote Your Website

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let me tell you what I do -- provide information about Internet marketing in the form of articles, annotated links to key articles, newsletters, books, and seminars. Here's how the site is organized:

1. Web Marketing Today Free Edition is our free e-mail newsletter, published is our e-mail newsletter published to 108,000+ confirmed opt-in subscribers , which is designed, over time, to help you learn your way around Internet marketing. Each week I bring you a short article or two. Within a month or two you'll be getting your bearings. Why don't you subscribe right now, join nearly 100,000 subscribers, and browse the recent articles? You can also search my articles for keywords using the search form at the top left of every page in the site.

2. Web Marketing Today Premium Edition is my paid e-mail newsletter. This is the deeper content that marketers give their eye teeth for. When you subscribe you get a ton of key e-books about Internet marketing that are worth several hundred dollars. It's a tremendous deal for only $49.95 annually, but since you're just getting started, look at the free stuff first.

3. Books. I've written more than a dozen books on all facets of Internet marketing. John Wiley and Son published my Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy -- a good place to start. I've also written self-published books on shopping carts, e-mail marketing, landing pages, promoting a local business, and starting an e-business on a shoestring. You'll find lots of wisdom collected in these books. You can download most as e-books or order printed copies.

4. Annotated Links, called the Web Marketing Info Center, comprise more than 19,000 articles and resources on Internet marketing. Every month my team and I scour the Internet for new articles and resources on 105 topics. The database of annotated links includes the author, title, publication, date, URL, and a brief synopsis of what the article is about, saving you huge swatches of research time. Every month we add about 150-200 links and periodically purge the bad links. About half of these are free to all. But the topics about selling online are reserved for my paid subscribers. (I have to make a living, you understand.) You can search the annotated links database using the search form at the top left of every page in the site.

5. About Dr. Wilson. I'm a pretty known entity online, having been a pioneer in the field of Internet marketing since beginning Web Marketing Today in 1995. Tens of thousands of successful online businesses have gotten their start from articles, e-books, and information on my site. If you need more, you can find online a brief bio, press mentions, and various awards.

Now let's look at various kinds of improvements you may want to make.

• Improvement in Search Engine Ranking
• Improvement in Pay Per Click Advertising
• Improvement in Your Online Store

Improvement in Search Engine Ranking

If you need to understand this subject better, I recommend you read Dr. Wilson's Plain-Spoken Guide to Search Engine Optimization. Keep track of the recent articles in the Site Promotion section of Web Marketing Today. You'll find the minute details in the leading online forums mentioned under Search Engine Optimization Resources.

From the Web Marketing Info Center you should track the new articles in these sections:

• Search Engine Techniques
• Linking Strategies

You'll find literally hundreds of articles to instruct you, with new tidbits appearing all the time.

If you have a brick-and-mortar business, don't miss out on special techniques I outline in How to Promote Your Local Business on the Internet and the Web Marketing Info Center section on Local Advertising & Marketing.

Improvement in Pay Per Click Advertising

To drive enough business, you'll probably need to place PPC ads from Google and Overture to get people to your site. While I don't write very much on this, we track that topic in the Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising Techniques section of the Web Marketing Info Center.

The book I recommend in this area is written by a friend, Andrew Goodman, Google AdWords Handbook: 21 Ways to Maximize Results. It's the best book I've found to help you understand how to succeed with Pay Per Click advertising.

If you use PPC ads, you absolutely must develop landing pages designed to get the visitor to actually buy the product. For this purpose, I wrote How to Develop a Landing Page that Closes the Sale, which explains step-by-step how to do this. Without landing pages for your ad click-throughs you'll have a low conversion rate -- the percentage of click-throughs who actually make a purchase.

Improvement in Your Online Store

Improvement in an online store comes from studying a site's metrics and measures and incrementally improving the key performance indicators. See the Web Analytics, Metrics, and Traffic Analysis section of the Web Marketing Info Center.

Boosting that conversion rate is vital to success. Once you've got the traffic to your store catalog and/or landing pages, you'll want to continue to raise your conversion rate. You might begin with 0.5% to 1%, but with careful attention and testing, you may be able to raise this to 2%, 5%, 10%, and perhaps higher. Brand name online stores do this.

I give a lot of attention to online sales on my site. You'll find recent articles in the Conversion section of Web Marketing Today. In the Web Marketing Info Center, you'll find lots of details, reports, studies, and suggestions in the following sections. Note: Most of these require a paid subscription to Web Marketing Today Premium to see all the information.

• Shopper Demographics and Behaviors
• E-Commerce Store Design
• Customer Service Online
• Personalization and 1-to-1 Marketing

A couple of my books on the subject include:

• How to Optimize Your Landing Pages Scientifically. Using A/B Split Run Testing to improve conversion rates.
• 12 Ways to Give Your Webstore a Sales Boost. Proven techniques to increase the conversion rate in your online store

Okay, that gives you a pretty good idea of how you can improve your online business with information from my website. I haven't mentioned all the search engine optimization and site promotion information, but you'll find that, too. Enjoy! I wish you God's blessing as you improve your online business.