You finally did it. Your ecommerce store is up and running. It has all of the latest products in your niche. There is plenty of pricing info, pictures and descriptions for each product. However, there seems to be one slight problem. You aren’t making that many sales. According to the site’s stats, traffic does not seem to be a problem. Plenty of people visit your ecommerce store on a daily basis. However, you are not making sales based upon the amount of traffic that you are getting. What seems to be the real problem?Have you considered the fact that your website might not be user friendly? Unfortunately, this is a horrible truth that many ecommerce store owners learn the hard way. Sometimes they either do too much or too little when it comes to their site’s ecommerce design. Website usability is one of the main things that can make a great site go down very quickly. A site can have all the bells and whistles in terms of products and graphics. But, if it is too hard for users to navigate, there will be plenty of missed sales. Luckily, there are various ecommerce solutions that can help you with this problem. The following are just a few suggestions that you can utilize to make your ecommerce store more user friendly.Does your ecommerce store have adequate search functions?Potential buyers hate it when they can’t find what they are looking for. Do not make things hard for them to browse and find what they are looking for. They should not have to guess categories or prices when visiting your ecommerce store. Make your site as searchable as possible or you will risk losing potential customers to other sites.Does your ecommerce store take too long to load? Everyone wants to be creative and stand out from the competition. However, when this is done at the expense of possible sales, this is obviously a negative outcome instead of a positive one. Sometimes specific items such as graphics are a problem for some websites because they take longer to load. Either they are too big for the site or there are too many of them on the page. Unfortunately, if a site takes too long to load, the average web surfer is going to close the site and move on to another site. Ultimately, this does nothing for usability.Does your ecommerce site offer a help section for potential buyers?Most customers have the same questions when it comes to online shopping sites. They want to see contact information, shipping policies, refund policies and payment information. If you want to keep customers on your website longer, make sure that this information is prominently displayed on your site. Many sites have a page that is devoted to the frequently asked questions that customers may have. Do whatever it takes to make your site user friendly. The longer a potential buyer stays on your site, the more likely they will purchase products.In conclusion, in order for an ecommerce store to be profitable, it must be user friendly. This might be the main reason that your site is not making any sales. Just apply a few of the ecommerce solutions that were provided in this article. Many times it is just a matter of tweaking your ecommerce design to accommodate the many needs of your potential buyers. By doing these things, you will have a greater chance of attracting buyers and making more sales.

Blogging is hugely popular and blogs range in sophistication from humble online diaries to massive corporate promotion machines. For those who intend to make money from their blogs, there are a multitude of methods and techniques available in order to do that. One of the best ways to make money with your blog is by making it attractive to advertisers.So why are so many bloggers throwing away this opportunity?Well, the simple answer is they probably aren’t aware of it. So let’s look at the most successful ways of attracting advertisers to your blog so that you can make money from your hard work.Most bloggers wanting to make money with their blogs start by adding pay per click ads. These will earn you a few cents for every click they generate, but the downside is that once that visitor has clicked the ad, they are taken away from your blog, never to return.Some of the more enlightened bloggers are turning to more intelligent ways to make money from advertising. More importantly, they are looking at ways of ensuring their visitors stay at their blog.There are several ways to make money doing that, most notably by using advertising space to promote affiliate products. By coding the link so that the vendor’s site opens in a new window or tab (for those using the Firefox browser), they not only earn considerably more in commission for a sale, but the visitor stays with the blog because the window or tab is still open. This is something that cannot be done with pay per click advertising because the terms of service often forbid the company’s code being tampered with in any way.But the most lucrative way to make money from your blog is to attract advertisers.There are several companies already set up that act as go-betweens to put advertisers in contact with blog owners. The usually have set tariffs and pricings to suit a blog’s page rank and Alexa rating, by which they gauge a blog’s traffic potential. This is fine for most blog owners as all the hard work is done for them, they just have to make the space available for either text or banner ads and then sit back and watch the money roll in on a monthly basis.Fine, except that the middle man takes around half the revenue generated by the advertisement.While this represents a substantial loss in a blog owner’s potential advertising revenue, it’s not particularly great news for the advertiser either. Some of the bigger companies that have large advertising budgets may see this loss as a mere drop in the ocean. But there are plenty of smaller companies that would like to use blog advertising space to make money for themselves only to find that fifty percent wastage on their budget too much to lose. So they look to other, probably less viable but cheaper methods of spreading the word and the blogger loses out.There is a solution to this dilemma that suits both the blog owner and the advertiser.That is for the blog owner who really wants to make money to set up their own advertising page and deal directly with the advertiser. By doing this yourself, you can offer advertising space on your blog direct to smaller companies who can afford the lower cost per month by cutting out the middle-man.This is easier to do than a lot of blog owners realise. By missing this opportunity it could be costing them a small fortune in lost advertising revenue. Blogs are very easy to customise and one of their great strengths in this department is the ability to add new pages as easily as adding new posts.So it’s a simple affair to create a new page on your blog and label it “advertise here” or similar.On that page, you set out the advertising tariff that best suits the popularity and average monthly traffic stats for your blog. That work is done for you if you have already set up an account with one of the ad company go-betweens. They will have suggested a monthly rate for text and banner ad space.So to keep things simple, you just use their figures. Once this is done, you can then approach advertisers and offer your advertising space for half the price the middle men want to charge them for the exact same space.Think the advertisers won’t bite your hand off?You should offer a choice of text ads, banner ads and even one-off reviews of sites or other blogs including a link that will remain in your blog’s archives indefinitely.So now all you need to do is to attract advertisers to your blog.How is that done?Well, the usual traffic promotional methods still apply. Article marketing attracts visitors to a blog or website in great numbers. Amongst those visitors will be owners of sites who may want to place some low cost advertising but don’t know where to go to do it. By simply marketing you blog and mentioning that there is a policy for direct advertising for a reasonable cost, those potential advertisers will then know where to go. They’ll visit your blog and read the “advertise here” page.If they like your tariff, they will get in touch.Another solid method of spreading the news is to get busy social networking. This takes the form of registering with some of the top social networking sites and getting yourself and your blog known by the members. This also increases your traffic, making your blog an even more lucrative advertising medium. It won’t be long before certain members will seek out your blog to advertise on.Don’t forget the established mainstay of site promotion: The forums. Use your forum signature to direct members to your blog and post about the advantages of direct advertising. As long as you’ve established yourself with that forum, you’ll create interest amongst the members which will turn into more potential advertisers.Whatever methods you use to attract advertisers to your blog, be patient as it may take a while for the first tentative inquiries to find you. Remember, it only takes one very high profile site or company owner to take a shine to your blog and others will follow suit in droves.By ensuring that these advertisers are kept happy knowing that their advertising budget is being used economically, you’ll start to make money in your sleep from your blog as more and more advertisers find you. It’s one of the nicest win-win situations to be in!