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A successful website does not happen overnight. It is the product of some fairly intense planning, attention to detail, constant and persistent marketing, hard work, and essentially shows the world your love for what you do. If you do not love what you do, this will reflect in the final product that the world sees.

You need to have a business plan. A business plan is the most important ingredient besides your actual products or services that you sell. The business plan needs to be firm, yet flexible, and you need to revise it or at the very least re-evaluate it every few months, just to be sure you are staying on track with your business goals and expectations. The business plan helps creating and maintaining the website that much easier.

The website itself needs to have a crisp, clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate style for your customers. Nothing is more irritating to an on-line shopper than getting "lost" on a website, or having so much *stuff* in your face you can't even focus on shopping. Today's website creation tasks are SO much easier than several years ago when all websites had to be hand coded. Today's template styles are generally so customizable it makes the process a breeze.

If selling retail goods on-line, your customers need to know they are shopping on a secure site. They also need to know they can contact you whenever they have a question about an item. It's important to have an SSL certificate, for security, and it's important to give the shopper as many ways as practical to contact you. Email, live chat, business phone, even cell phone information clearly posted sets the shopper at ease. What's also critical to success is to answer all inquiries in a timely manner. People don't like to feel "forgotten".

A successful website markets itself truthfully, and in as many places as possible. There are many mechanisms for marketing one's website today that are cost effective or free. Blogging, social networking sites, book-marking sites, participation in select forums ~ these are all very effective ways to "soft" sell. Do it right, and watch your website traffic stats carefully. You'll see the traffic go up.

Website success also hinges on how you present your product. Take, or learn to take, the best possible product photos that you can. Learn to edit the photos by cropping away the dead space around the item and then tweaking the photo to show the product off in it's absolute best light. Why? Often the dead space around the item is darker, and you

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